The provision of HPC resources requires more than system administration. It takes a team of skilled analysts able to work with user codes and make them run more efficiently with large numbers of processors. These analysts must work closely with both the administrators and clients to ensure that jobs run smoothly and costly resources are used effectively. [...]
The picture of how data gets analysed on a single computer is very simple: a program is written to read the data, do some manipulation and write out the results. This is something that every student of programming learns to do. The figure below shows a whimsical interpretation of software processing a data file. The [...]
There is new interconnect technology under development based on the PCI Express bus which promises another jump in communication speed inside a cluster. Versions of the technology are being developed independently by the companies PLX Technologies and A3Cube. Interconnect technology has continued to evolve since the first cluster appeared on the Top500 list. The interconnect allows the machines [...]
