11•16•2006 - The Supercomputing '07 website for next year's show in Reno is up and running! If you're planning to be an exhibitor, get your registration in early, as the space selection process is underway...

11•15•2006 - The morning award ceremony presentations were simply outstanding. Dr. Tadashi Watanabe, winner of the 2006 Seymour Cray award summarized his involvement in the development of Japanese supercomputing, and provided interesting insights into the new Petascale supercomputer project he's leading for RIKEN.

Edward Seidel from Louisiana State University, winner of the 2006 Sid Fernbach award, followed up with a dazzling presentation that highlighted the use of supercomputers for research into numerical relativity, and the ongoing effort to solve Einstein's equations that describe the universe. It was interesting to see Dr. Seidel's presentation make good use of Apple's Keynote software to render artistic transitions from slide to slide.

11•14•2006 - Take a look at the NCAR booth, the presentations being made there are terrific. One that we saw included dramatic evidence of climate change, and highlights the increasing fidelity that computer models are beginning to display. If you have any doubt that climate change is occurring, stop by and look over the research at NCAR's booth.

The new NCAR booth looks terrific, take a look in booth #1815.

11•13•2006 - Pictures of the bigger massively parallel systems these days are beginning to look those taken of the giant mainframes in the earliest days of computing! At dinner last night, there was quite a bit of discussion about the increasing number of vendors like Intel and SiCortex making announcements this year regarding energy efficiency. The amount of power required to run the bigger MPP systems is absolutely staggering; improvements in this area will be greatly appreciated by users.

See Intel at booth 1523 at the conference, Quad-core announcement after the jump.

11•12•2006 - We've arrived in Tampa after a red-eye from Seattle and managed to get a sneak peek at the exhibits hall as setup was occurring. The show floor is really coming together nicely, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory booth (ORNL) looks absolutely terrific, be sure to stop by and take a look.

11•10•2006 - SiCortex will be at SC '06 to introduce their family of ultra low power high performance Linux systems that are designed from "the silicon up". Among the founders are former alumni of Thinking Machines, BBN, and a key designer of the Alpha chip architecture. SiCortex recently closed another round of venture capital, led by Chevron Technology Ventures.

Booth 629 at SC '06, press release after the jump: SiCortex Press Release

11•09•2006 - NEC High Performance Computing announced today that Dr. Tadashi Watanabe, who left NEC at the end of 2005 to become the project leader of the Japanese MEXT "Kei(10Peta)-speed" supercomputing development project will be presented the 2006 Seymour Cray Award at Supercomputing '06 in Tampa. Dr. Watanabe will become the first Japanese to receive the Seymour Cray award. In 1998 Dr. Watanabe became the first Japanese to win the "Eckert-Mauchly Award" from the ACM/IEEE for his contributions to the field of Supercomputing.

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Watanabe on this most deserved recognition and award.

More information after the jump: 2006 Seymour Cray Award

11•08•2006 - NEC HPCE has also announced the model SX-8R, an enhanced version of SX-8, claimed to be the world's most powerful vector supercomputer with a peak vector performance of 144 TFLOPS. The SX-8R contains twice as many pipelines for addition and multiplication as the SX-8 in its vector unit, and features a 10% faster clock, doubling the performance of the SX-8 at 35.2GFLOPS per processor.

Booth 604 at SC '06, more information after the jump: NEC SX-8R

11•07•2006 - For those of your who may have missed it, NEC High Performance Computing announced back in January that Dr. Tadashi Watanabe, the father of the NEC SX-series of supercomputers, has left NEC at the end of 2005 to become the project leader of the "Kei(10Peta)-speed" supercomputing development project of the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). Dr. Watanabe, also played a central role in the design of the "Earth Simulator".

More information after the jump: NEC Announcement

10•31•2006 - DataDirect Networks will showcase a variety of Cluster Storage Solutions at this year's SC2006, including the industry's highest performing and most dense storage solutions, the S2A9550 Cluster Solutions. In addition, they will debut a Petabyte storage system, called the Petascale Storage Solution and an Energy Efficient 48VDC Storage Technology showing.

DataDirect Networks will be in booth 1424 in the Exhibit Hall, more info after the jump:

http://www.datadirectnet.com/

10•30•2006 - Verari Systems announced the Verari Systems BladeRack™ 2 VB5150 Storage Subsystem, a new storage solution designed to address a broad set of network-attached storage (NAS) requirements in both HPC and Enterprise markets. Twelve VB5150 Storage Subsystems can be deployed in a single rack, providing a total capacity of 360TB in only 7.6 square feet of floor space.

Press Release from Verari after the jump, they're in Booth 814 at SC '06:

http://www.verari.com/news/archive/PR103006_A.asp

Computer legend Ray Kurzweil is scheduled to give the Keynote address at SC '06. Kurzweil's keynote will open the SC06 Technical Program on Tuesday, November 14, in the Tampa Convention Center. In it he will explain how the paradigm shift rate is doubling every decade, positing that the twenty-first century will see 20,000 years of progress at today's rate of change. Computation, communication, biological technologies such as DNA sequencing, brain scanning, knowledge of the human brain, and human knowledge in general are all accelerating at an even faster pace, generally doubling price-performance, capacity, and bandwidth every year.

More details after the jump: http://sc06.supercomputing.org/news/press_release