High Performance Computing [HPC] aka Super Computing
Interesting Google Videos on Cluster Computing, click here.
Operating Systems/Distributions l use towards HPC include:
Useful links include:
- Linux Links
- Einstein@Home
- TACC – Texas University Advanced Computing Center
- Thaigrid
- SPEC – Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation
- Sony Cell PS3 Cluster
- IBM PetaFlop Supercomputer
- Super Computing 2007 Website
- HPC Using Nvidia Graphics Card Engine
- Cray Supercomputer’s History
Super Computers
High performance computers leads to advances in application areas such as medical research and surgery simulations, aircraft design, modelling, visualizations or maps/stores etc.
I attended SC2005 – Super Computing Conference in Seattle, WA last year (2005) and had a chance to see companies including Intel, HP, SGI, IBM, Boeing demonstrate applied super computing. Pictures taken at SC2005 can be found using the Pictures link above. This trip was sponsored by the MSI Network – Minorities Serving Institutes, PSU – Portland State University and Prof. Bryant York.
Click here for SC2005 related pictures
An interesting company l visited at SC2005 called Pico Computing built a DES cracking super computer using Xilinx Virtex 2 Pro chips – matchbox/compact flash circuit board sized units with PCI interfaces combined in a 1U Rack Server case. It was amazing to see FPGA chips crack passwords in real time right in front of you, also – FPGA’s really are optimized for parallel computing since they can run commands concurrently. Their website url is http://www.picocomputing.com
Below is a picture of my small work-in-progress cluster – running Linux – CentOS – Rocks – more details later!
More Useful links
- World Community Grid Team Project
Help solve world health probems using your PC and the internet. For more information, visit the link above. - Distributed.net
distributed.net was the Internet’s first general-purpose distributed computing project - Seti
SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). - Our Seti Link
- Top 500 Computers
Information on the fastest computers and benchmarks - Xbox clusters
- Link1 – llama
- Link2
- Link3
- Link 4 – Anandtech xbox cluster
- PS2 Clusters
- Link1 – Beowulf
- Link2 – MIT student proposal
- Link3 – NCSA
- Link4
- Supercomputer Guru Out of Africa – “Bill Gates of Africa”
In 1989, Philip Emeagwali from Nigeria programmed a Cray Connection Machine to arrive at the world’s fastest computer computation, a record 3.1 billion calculations per second using 65,536 processors. - Portland State University High-Performance Cluster
- Supercomputing Conference 2005
- Texas AM Super Computers
Current contribution parallel computing project web site for BOINC/World Community Grid can be found here. Currently l’m researching how to use GPU’s – Graphical Processor Units – as in high end PC video game graphics cards as well as Xilinx FPGA’s such as the Virtex-2 Pro’s l have at my disposal to help do number crunching for projects mentioned here.Interesting links:
This is also the homepage for our RC5-72 Cracking Team Arete Team #26595.We will try to be the first to crack the RC5-72 RSA 72bit secret key challenge using the massive parallel computing power of all the computers our members own or have access to.For team statistics/progress go to distributed.net and do a search for the team ‘arete’.
Update: This team now concentrates its computing resources towards the BOINC World Community Grid project found here.
