June/July 2010

According to the legendary physicist Richard Feynman, turbulence is the last great unsolved problem of classical physics. Even so, computers allow us to study it in great detail, but you must apply such tools with great care. Paul Schreier tries to bring some order to the world of software
intended for these studies of chaos

Greg Blackman looks at some of the trends taking place in the pharmaceutical industry and how data management software is being used

Felix Grant looks at the application of data analysis software to social networks

GPUs are established in both the visualisation and the processing of seismic data. Stephen Mounsey looks at how the technology is used, and at alternative hardware types available to geophysical analysts in the oil and gas industry

The transition from applications written for sequential execution to those that can take advantage of multicore architectures has taken on enormous importance and brought with it some challenging problems. Paul Schreier examines some of the tools that are available to help programmers parallelise their code

If you believe the hype, then 'The Cloud' will be the next big thing across all strata of computing. Stephen Mounsey asks what it can bring to the HPC party

Dr Oz Parchment, IT infrastructure services manager, University of Southampton, describes his role and discusses the university's latest supercomputer, Iridis 3

Jill Matzke, senior manager of advanced platforms at SGI, says changing needs of scientists mean new methods of accessing data and memory are needed