Cray announces first multi-cabinet XE6 shipment; and SIGGRAPH brings raft of visualization-related announcements. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.

The world's largest public GPGPU computing on-demand service was launched this week at the Siggraph International Conference in Los Angeles. PEER 1 Hosting, a provider of IT infrastructure, has constructed a 128-GPU compute cloud that incorporates NVIDIA Tesla gear and mental image's RealityServer 3D Web platform.

Lustre, the much-beloved open-source file system technology used by many of the top supercomputers in the world, has a new friend. Actually a whole new company. Whamcloud, a venture-funded startup based in upscale Danville, California, came out of hiding on Wednesday and announced its intentions to help carry the Lustre torch forward on Linux.

A year ago, NOAA and DOE signed an agreement calling for closer cooperation between NOAA and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Jim Rogers, director of operations for the National Center for Computational Sciences at ORNL, discusses the agreement and the goals for the Climate Modeling and Research System (CMRS), the initial supercomputer chosen for the collaborative work.

Dell partners with the University of Cambridge to launch an HPC Solution Center; a Dutch university supercomputer runs Bright Cluster Manager; and Fixstars Releases Yellow Dog Linux for CUDA. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.

Nimbus Data Systems has unveiled its new high-density enterprise flash memory system, delivering 10 terabytes of solid state capacity per 2U shelf. The S1000 can scale up to 250 TB per system and is being priced to challenge spinning disk appliances head on. For HPC and other enterprise users looking to turbo-charge performance of terascale-sized data sets, Nimbus offers a compelling case for making the switch to flash technology.

Russian HPC cluster vendor T-Platforms says it will be adding NVIDIA's Tesla 20-series (Fermi-class) GPUs into its latest blade offering. According to the company, the GPGPU blade will feature a "very high computing density design along with aggressive power-saving schemes for heterogeneous environments."

NASA Center for Climate Simulation doubles computational power with new Dell PowerEdge servers; Amazon introduces HPC-level computing on demand; and Carnegie Mellon announces $7 million initiative aimed at boosting computer science enrollment. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.

Amazon's cloud platform got a high performance boost this week with the announcement of its Cluster Compute Instances (CCI). CCI specifically targets HPC workloads, incorporating high-end CPU horsepower and a low-latency interconnect fabric into the company's popular EC2 computing on-demand offering. The new capability welcomes HPC into the most well-recognized public cloud in the world.

The Universe might be expanding, but at least it's getting easier to see. On Monday, at the annual Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, the software maker unveiled the largest and clearest image of the night sky ever assembled. This so-called "TeraPixel" sky map was generated with the help of some of Microsoft's latest HPC and parallel software assets.

OCF doubles computing power for University of Edinburg researchers; and Aquasar system with innovative water-cooling technology deploys at ETH Zurich. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.

Yet another software toolmaker has offered up its solution to the parallel programming crisis. This week, French software vendor Ateji released a Java solution for multicore CPUs and multiprocessor server environments. Ateji PX for Java is aimed at developers who want to take advantage of current and future computer architectures by moving their legacy codes into the parallel realm.

It's been almost three years since GPU computing broke into the mainstream of HPC with the introduction of NVIDIA's CUDA API in September 2007. Adoption of the technology since then has proceeded at a surprisingly strong and steady pace. The relatively-rapid adoption of CUDA by a community not known for the rapid adoption of much of anything is a noteworthy signal.

Green500 sees increased energy efficiency from accelerator-based supercomputers; EGEE passes Europe's grid torch to the new European Grid Infrastructure, EGI, before saying so long. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.

Grid computing vendor Digipede is something of an enigma in the HPC world. The company has built its distributed computing offering, Digipede Network, atop the highly popular Windows/.NET platform, and in the process has become an unrepentant Microsoft booster. For traditional HPC users, anything not Linux plus MPI or OpenMP is mostly looked upon as an eccentricity, and in some corners, partnering up with Microsoft is seen as treason.

The civil engineer Konrad Zuse was born in Berlin exactly 100 years ago. In 1941, he built the world's first computer. And thanks to his pioneering work, the scientists at the Jülich Supercomputing Center have now succeeded in setting a world record by simulating the largest quantum computer system with 42 qubits.

Tokyo Tech releases more details on Tsumabe 2.0 in anticipation of fall startup; and several Web-centric servers make their debut. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.

HPC compiler maker PathScale has unveiled ENZO, a new GPU software development suite aimed at the high performance computing space. The solution includes a home-grown compiler, runtime system, and device driver. ENZO is being built for performance from top to bottom and will initially target NVIDIA's high-end GPUs.

AMD today announced its next-generation FireStream GPU accelerator boards for HPC and other technical computing applications. The FireStream 9350 and 9370 represent the company's attempt to match the pace NVIDIA has set with its "Fermi" Tesla-20 GPU offerings launched this spring.

Ultimately supercomputing is a visual endeavor. Turning the so-called "data deluge" into pretty pictures and animations has always been the most straightforward way to extract insight from HPC simulations. But with the size of simulation datasets growing in tandem with the size of supercomputers, visualization has never been more challenging.