HPC

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

Especially with the advent of cloud computing, virtualisation and the increasing popularity of GPUs, what a physical computing system looks like is very fluid. Paul Schreier looks into how vendors of cluster management software address the provisioning and workload management needs
resulting from this major trend

Visualisation is a vital component of many HPC applications, but rendering huge datasets is no easy task, as Stephen Mounsey discovers

Lee Ward, principal member of technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories, tackles HPC-related IO improvements to multiple supercomputing projects

Stephen Mounsey discovers how high performance computing contributes to atmospheric science and improves the accuracy of weather forecasts

General-purpose graphical processing units (GPGPUs) have been making inroads into HPC applications, but with the release of chips optimised for scientific computations rather than just graphics processing, this branch is poised to make major market inroads. Paul Schreier examines what's behind this upcoming jump in performance, and its implications