By Joab Jackson, IDG News Service
Open-source enterprise software company Red Hat has updated its flagship operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), to take full advantage of the latest spoils from the heated microprocessor battle between Advanced Micro Devices and Intel.
RHEL version 5.5, released Wednesday, has been reconfigured for Intel’s just-released eight-core Nehalem-EX and AMD’s [...]

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by Arthur Cole
Every time a new generation of multicore technology is released, there is a mixture of anticipation and concern among enterprise professionals. The anticipation arises from the heightened capabilities and reduced operating expenses that the new chips represent, while the concern centers on the challenges of integrating them into existing software and hardware environments.
AMD’s [...]

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Intel launched the Xeon 7500 and 6500 series processors, a set of multicore processors that are aimed at IT organizations that want to consolidate servers by scaling up rather than out. Based on the 32-nanomenter Nehalem microarchitecture, the new Xeon 7500 series processor is 20 times faster than a Potomac series processor that Intel rolled [...]

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By Mark Fontecchio
VMware’s licensing policy for multicore chips could throw up a brick wall for end users who might otherwise upgrade to recently announced Intel- and AMD-based x86 servers.
According to VMware Inc.’s multicore licensing policy, vSphere Standard and Enterprise licenses support only those servers with chips up to six cores. New chips from Intel Corp. [...]

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By Rob Farber
In CUDA, Supercomputing for the Masses: Part 15 of this article series, I discussed mixing CUDA and OpenGL within the same application by utilizing a PBO (Pixel Buffer Object) to create images with CUDA on a pixel-by-pixel basis and display them using OpenGL. In this article and the next, I discuss the CUDA [...]

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by Chris Angelini, Fedy Abi-Chahla and Florian Charpentier
As hardware enthusiasts, it’s only natural to follow the news about upcoming launches. Power users begin formulating their opinions as soon as the first specs get tossed around, regardless of whether they’re official or not. Some of the longest forum threads I’ve ever read were rumor mill postings [...]

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Nvidia Corp. has officially rolled out adapter cards using its latest high-end graphics processor, code-named Fermi, to a cool reception from analysts and reviewers. They say the chip does not have a dramatic performance advantage over graphics processors rolled out last fall from archrival Advanced Micro Devices, although Fermi could make deeper in-roads into supercomputers [...]

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By Ian Foster
VLSI is a process used to build electronic components such as microprocessors and memory chips comprising millions of transistors. The design of VLSI components is a computationally demanding process. Computers are used extensively to verify the correctness of a circuit design, to lay out a circuit in a two-dimensional area, and to generate [...]

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Edited by Lambert M. Surhone, Miriam T. Timpledon, and Susan F. Marseken
X10 is a programming language being developed by IBM at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center as part of the PERCS project funded by DARPA’s High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program. Its primary authors are Kemal Ebcioglu, Vijay Saraswat, and Vivek Sarkar. X10 is [...]

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by Michael Feldman, HPCwire Editor
AMD has officially launched its Opteron 6100 series processors, code-named “Magny-Cours.” Available in 8-core and 12-core flavors, the new 6100 parts are targeted for 2P and 4P server duty and are being pitched against Intel’s latest high-end Xeon silicon: the 6-core Westmere EP processor for 2P servers and the upcoming [...]

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AMD announces availability of a new server platform featuring the world’s first 8- and 12-core x86 processor for the high-volume 2P and value 4P server market. The AMD Opteron 6000 Series platform addresses the unmistakable needs of server customers today — workload-specific performance, power efficiency, and overall value — while delivering more cores and more [...]

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TotalView Technologies, a Rogue Wave Software company and provider of interactive analysis and debugging tools for serial and parallel codes, announced the simultaneous release of TotalView® 8.8, ReplayEngine 1.7, and MemoryScape 3.1. These interoperable products are designed around the troubleshooting needs of scientists and developers working in HPC, Technical Computing and commercial software development. They [...]

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Hot off the heels of PAX East, the consumer gaming show held this past weekend in Boston, NVIDIA today officially launched its new flagship graphics processors, the NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 480 and GeForce GTX 470.
The top-of-the line in a new family of enthusiast-class GPUs, the GeForce GTX 480 was designed from the ground up [...]

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by John Gillooly
Opinion: NVIDIA is set to launch its first piece of DirectX 11 hardware, but game developers are still heavily focused on the five year old DirectX 9 API.
Over the past decade some of the most exciting developments in processors have come not from the CPU makers but the graphics guys. Graphics hardware [...]

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by Steven Leibson
ISQED, the International Symposium for Quality Electronic Design, is currently underway here in San Jose at the Doubletree Hotel. I listened to three keynotes yesterday and will summarize them in three blog entries. The first keynote, by Ramanan Thiagarajah of Inphi Corp discussed the effect that the adoption of multicore CPUs is having [...]

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By Michel Laurence, Octasic Inc.
Energy conservation has become a key social objective in all aspects of our lives. Due to the pervasiveness of electronics and computing, the processor industry accounts for an ever increasing share of world power consumption; be it for processors used in personal computers, domestic and industrial appliances, in massive server farms, [...]

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By Aljosa Vrancic and Jeff Meisel
Complex math is at the heart of many of the biggest technical challenges. With multicore processors, the type of calculations that would have required a supercomputer can now be performed in real-time, embedded environments.
Because tasks that require acceleration are so computationally intensive, your typical time high-performance computing (HPC) problem could [...]

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By Derrick Harris
I remember attending the inaugural GridWorld conference in 2006 and hearing Argonne National Laboratory’s Ian Foster discuss the possible implications of the newly announced Amazon EC2 on the world of grid computing that he helped create. Well, 2010 is upon us, and some of the implications Foster pondered at GridWorld have become clear, [...]

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Researchers have taken several small steps on a long and complex journey toward creating new parallel programming models to harness tomorrow’s many-core processors. The work entails crafting an entirely new set of architectures ranging from parallel applications and data structures to the processors that will run them.
That was the picture that emerged from more than [...]

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Release Highlights
* Support for the new Fermi architecture, with:
o Native 64-bit GPU support
o Multiple Copy Engine support
o ECC reporting
[...]

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