Author Archives: Konstantin S. Solnushkin

Lustre and Panasas Are Not So Different

Posted on August 21, 2012 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

As vendors try to showcase their products, there is often confusion regarding the difference between two similar products, such as PanFS from Panasas, Inc. and Lustre (from Sun, then Oracle, then Whamcloud, then Intel). But in this particular case, the … Continue reading →

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Intel MIC, aka Xeon Phi, aka Doubtful Creativity

Posted on August 20, 2012 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

They created a monster. It contains enough cores to be a computer on its own — yet it needs to be plugged into a “real” computer, and acts only as an accelerator. It’s cores are based on P54C architecture, introduced … Continue reading →

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Marrying NVIDIA Tesla and InfiniBand?

Posted on July 18, 2012 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

My friend is working on a research project dedicated to many-core architectures, such as NVIDIA’s GPUs or Intel’s Xeon Phi, that have lots of simple cores best suited to straightforward computations. Sometimes those cores need to communicate with their neighbours … Continue reading →

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Electrochemical Power Supply and Water Cooling, In One Go

Posted on June 29, 2012 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

I was searching the IBM website to find info on their cooling system, Aquasar, in the hope to find a better way to learn about it rather than just looking at their hardware. And indeed, I found something new and … Continue reading →

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T-Platforms and Water Cooling

Posted on June 28, 2012 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

For ISC’11 in Hamburg, T-Platforms brought to their exhibition booth a prototype of a water-cooled system. I think I remember those thick black rubber tubes (and hope that was not a dream). (UPD: A Google search reveals that they were, … Continue reading →

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Poster on “Computer Cluster Design Automation Using Web Services”

Posted on June 19, 2012 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

I have just presented my new poster, “Computer Cluster Design Automation Using Web Services“, at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC’12) in Hamburg. The poster session moved this year to the exhibition hall. If you were there but missed it, use … Continue reading →

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Lustre Strives to Go Mainstream

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

Do you remember Chroma, the software from Whamcloud that allows to deploy and manage Lustre installations with a web interface? In April 2012, DataDirect Networks (DDN) announced they have successfully integrated Chroma into their EXAScaler storage system. I believe it … Continue reading →

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Open Hardware Paves the Way to Commodity Water Cooled Servers

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

Google is making its own custom servers, but they don’t disclose many important details. On the contrary, Facebook is trying to provide as much information as possible about their own custom servers — in the hope it will benefit the … Continue reading →

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The Giants That Slowed Down

Posted on May 5, 2012 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

During the recent decades, the US was able to attract the best scientists from all over the world in every field, including computing, by providing them with competitive salaries and benefits. But now research budgets are being cut, and the … Continue reading →

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Three Fat-tree Alternatives for the SuperMUC Cluster

Posted on April 22, 2012 by Konstantin S. Solnushkin

SuperMUC is a cluster supercomputer currently being deployed at Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Germany. As of today, 8,200 cores of 110,000 have been put into operation — it is a so-called migration system for early user access. (UPD: Deployment … Continue reading →

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