The Weekly Top Five features the five biggest HPC stories of the week, condensed for your reading pleasure. This week, we cover Bull's third petascale computing contract; IBM's new POWER7 servers, the first hybrid spintronics computer chips, Bull and Whamcloud's beefed-up Lustre support; and Tilera's latest manycore development tools.

Watson's decisive win over two of Jeopardy's top champions on national television earlier this year could turn out to be the most effective infomercial in the history of IT. Capitalizing on that accomplishment, IBM is working hard to highlight the supercomputing technology at every opportunity, including this week's rollout of new and improved Power7-based servers.

In his third column on programming for exascale systems, Michael Wolfe shares his views on what programming at the exascale level is likely to require, and how we can get there from where we are today. He explains that it will take some work, but it's not a wholesale rewrite of 50 years of high performance expertise.

DataDirect Networks, king of petascale HPC storage, has decided to expand into the realm of NAS appliances. On Monday, the company launched NAS Scaler, its first network attached storage solution. The new offering is intended to fill a gap in a product lineup that, until now, consisted almost exclusively of ultra-scale, ultra-performance block-level storage.

Companies across all industries are facing many challenges. Emerging from the rough economy of the last few years, and facing increased global competition, virtually all organizations are in a position where they need to quickly react to market conditions and pounce on new business opportunities as they arise.

The Weekly Top Five features the five biggest HPC stories of the week, condensed for your reading pleasure. This week, we cover Intel's "Westmere EX" launch party; the Albert Einstein Institute's new cluster; TACC's Lonestar 4 inauguration; Penguin Computing's financial markets server; and NextIO's partnership with Bright Computing.

This week Intel launched its new Westmere EX lineup, the latest Xeons aimed at large-memory, multi-socketed servers. The new chips come in 6-, 8- and 10-core flavors and will be sold under the name Xeon E7. According to Intel, these latest CPUs deliver 40 percent greater performance than the previous generation Nehalem EX processors while maintaining the same power draw.

SGI has been getting a lot of mileage out of its SGI UV shared memory platform, having delivered close to 500 systems since it started shipping them in June 2010. Now, with the recent addition of support for Microsoft's Windows Server, the company is looking to expand its customer base in a big way.

Companies and institutions in the bioscience, energy, government, finance, manufacturing, and other research and development sectors are increasingly realizing the significant benefits of scalable clustered computing. As cluster sizes continue to grow, scaling storage I/O performance from large numbers of clients to the same file system—or even the same file—requires deploying high performance parallel storage designed specifically to address this need.

Culling together massive data has provided some profound opportunities for a wide array of analytics projects but has created a number of complications for those who want to gain actionable intelligence from it. While the "big data" movement is still unfolding, a number of companies have emerged to help simplify access and use, especially of unstructured information. HPC stalwart Platform Computing entered the race to refine handling of vast datasets -- not to mention the management behind such operations to stake their claim in this emerging space.

The Weekly Top Five features the five biggest HPC stories of the week, condensed for your reading pleasure. This week, we cover the UK-based Atomic Weapons Establishment's selection of two SGI Altix systems; Platform Computing's new solution for managing "big data"; the effect of rising sea levels on the North Carolina coastal region; SDSC's new portal for conducting phylogenetic research; and the selection of Ian Foster for this year's IEEE Tsutomu Kanai Award.

In Michael Wolfe's second column on programming for exascale systems, he underscores the importance of exposing parallelism at all levels of design, either explicitly in the program, or implicitly within the compiler. Wolfe calls on developers to express this parallelism, in a language and in the generated code, and to exploit the parallelism, efficiently and effectively, at runtime on the target machine. He reminds the community that the only reason to pursue parallelism is for higher performance.

HPC Wales has selected Fujitsu to deliver a 190-teraflop high performance computing grid that will be deployed at a number of sites across the Welsh countryside. Fujitsu will be paid £15m ($24 million) over the next four years to construct the computing infrastructure for the project, as well as provide application and computing expertise.

Storage vendor Spectra Logic has added a series of data verification features to its tape library solution. The idea is to simplify archive administration and bring a new level of reliability into petascale tape storage. The capability will be built into the company's next iteration of its BlueScale management software that will be released at the end of March.

The horrendous aftermath of last Friday's 9.0 earthquake off the east coast of Japan is still unfolding and the ensuing destruction from tsunamis, infrastructure collapse, fires and now nuclear plant radiation is being tracked and analyzed, some with the help of computer technology designed for just such an event.

Since the dawn of high performance computing, climate modeling has been one of its most demanding domains. The hunger for computational capability is unending, as researchers work to incorporate more of nature's complexity into their models at higher resolutions. HPCwire talked with NOAA/GFDL Deputy Director Brian Gross and Venkatramani Balaji, head of the lab's Modeling Systems Group.

The Weekly Top Five features the five biggest HPC stories of the week, condensed for your reading pleasure. This week, we cover Durham University's newest "Cosmology Machine"; NetApp's Engenio acquisition; the 2010 ACM Turing Award winner; SGI's ArcFiniti storage archive; and an MRAM data storage advance worthy of patenting.

Acceleration technology is all the rage these days in high performance computing. With the emergence of GPGPUs into the mainstream, a whole new sub-industry has coalesced around acceleration solutions based the latest GPUs. Maxeler Technologies, however, has made a nice living delivering FPGA acceleration to a rather elite customer base.

There are at least two ways exascale computing can go, as exemplified by the top two systems on the latest TOP500 list: Tianhe-1A and Jaguar. The Chinese Tianhe-1A uses 14,000 Intel multicore processors with 7,000 NVIDIA Fermi GPUs as compute accelerators, whereas the American Jaguar Cray XT-5 uses 35,000 AMD 6-core processors.

Xtreme Compute Technologies, (XCT), a growing provider of hybrid GPU-based solutions across academia, government, and commercial markets, has been working closely with its trusted partners in the HPC arena in migrating these GPU-based HPC solutions from the laboratory research setting into the real world application arena.