SC'14, the US supercomputing conference in New Orleans, is taking place this week which means a string of announcements concerning new products and technology.
Nvidia has released its most powerful GPU card to date, the Tesla K80, essentially two GPUs on one card; CoolIT is demonstrating a ‘Quick Disconnect Auto Ejection system’ for server isolation; and Rogue Wave Software has released ThreadSpotter, a memory optimisation tool.
The Tesla K80 dual-GPU is the new flagship offering of the Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform. It combines the world’s fastest GPU accelerators, the widely used CUDA parallel computing model, and a comprehensive ecosystem of software developers, software vendors, and data centre system OEMs.
The dual-GPU accelerator delivers nearly two times higher performance and double the memory bandwidth of its predecessor, the Tesla K40 GPU accelerator, and ten times higher performance than today’s fastest CPU. It outperforms competing accelerators on hundreds of complex analytics and large, computationally intensive scientific computing applications.
The Tesla K80 has been quoted as delivering up to 8.74 teraflops single-precision and up to 2.91 teraflops double-precision peak floating point performance.
The new solution includes Nvidia GPU Boost technology, which dynamically converts power headroom into the optimal performance boost for each individual application.
CoolIT is demonstrating its entire line of Rack DCLC liquid and air heat exchangers including the data centre ready CHx650 coolant heat exchange system, with a capacity to manage cooling for more than 650kW of computing per network.
Geoff Lyon, CEO/CTO of CoolIT Systems, said: ‘The momentum at supercomputing from vendors and end users for liquid cooling grows annually with the increase in rack density and efficiency requirements. We are responding to this demand with our largest display ever of enterprise level liquid cooling solutions.’
CoolIT Systems is also partnering with Boston Limited to demonstrate a CPU and GPU liquid cooled cluster featuring the CoolIT AHx20 liquid-to-air system that delivers 20kW of cooling without any requirement for facility water.
Rogue Wave Software will be highlighting the release of ThreadSpotter, which has been released in conjunction with ParaTools along with the accompanying source code. The company is also highlighting the recent releases of both IMSL Fortran Numerical Library 7.1 and Visualization for C++ 5.8.
Rogue Wave will also share the accompaniments made to the Visualisation product set; adding JViews and Elixir expands the Visualisation toolset for C++, Java, and Adobe Flex.
ThreadSpotter is a memory optimisation tool that analyses cache memory and thread communication in single and multicore systems. It pinpoints performance issues and provides specific guidance on how to correct them, increasing program performance and improving developer productivity.
Rogue Wave is offering demos of its leading TotalView debugger and IMSL Numerical Libraries throughout the conference which, the company states, are specifically optimised for HPC.
Chris Gottbrath, principal product manager, said: ‘We keep our products up-to-date with support for the latest and greatest compilers, operating systems, and parallel runtimes. Our tools enhance application performance, reliability, portability, scalability, and maintainability as well as developer productivity.’
