Category Archives: Computing

Second Irish Supercomputer List Released

Computing

The June 2014 Irish Supercomputer List was released on June 30, increasing the number of installations by over 50%. That’s 8 new machines in 6 months!

Some quick facts about the machines currently on the list:

  • Total CPU cores: almost 70,000
  • Total Accelerator cores: over 100,000
  • Total RAM (15 reporting): 73TB
  • Total Storage (10 reporting): 1172TB
  • Most machines (6/23): Trinity College Dublin
  • Top Vendor: Dell 29% (6/21 reporting)
  • Most popular chip: Intel (20/23)
  • Number of machines per sector: Academia(12), Industry(7), Other(4)
  • Total performance: 676TFlop
  • Average performance: 30TFlop

Fortran, still going strong at 60+?

Programming

Here is a great article discussing three challengers to Fortran’s dominance of scientific and high-performance programming. (Note that most things scientific are desired to be done with high-performance, and most things worth being done with high-performance are scinetific.) The article puts forth Haskell “as the elder statesman”, Clojure and julia as posisble successors to Fortran’s throne, but in reality most of the article is spent very justifiably defending Fortran’s place and almost ruling out the three contenders.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/05/scientific-computings-future-can-any-coding-language-top-a-1950s-behemoth/