Archive for April, 2010

Mike Patterson: Be consequent in Addressing Energy Issues in Your Datacenter

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010

More than 17 persons attended the presentation and open discussion with Mike Patterson, Senior Power and Thermal Architect at Intel Corporation.

Mike has been welcomed at ETH Zurich by Vittoria Rezzonico (hpc-ch and EPF Lausanne). An important message of Mike has been to be consequent in addressing energy issues in the data center. So it is important not only to plan, but also to measure and then manage the energy being used in a data center.

If you could not addend the presentation, then you can have a look to the slides of Mike Patterson .

The following  links and documents on airflow calculations and best temperature have been referenced during the presentation:

Green Grid:
http://www.thegreengrid.org/en/Global/Content/white-papers/Proxy-Proposals-for-Measuring-Data-Center-Efficiency
http://www.thegreengrid.org/en/Global/Content/Tools/EuropeanFreeCoolingTool

ASHRAE:
http://tc99.ashraetcs.org/documents/ASHRAE_Extended_Environmental_Envelope_Final_Aug_1_2008.pdf

Intel Energy Checker:
http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-energy-checker-sdk/

Mike in front of his first slide…

From left to right: Anne Koessler (Intel Switzerland), Mike Patterson (Intel), Vittoria Rezzonico (hpc-ch / EPF Lausanne)

Call for presentations and partecipants: Forum on OS for HPC and Installation Methods

Monday, April 26th, 2010

Dear members and guests of the hpc-ch community,

We are pleased to invite you to the upcoming hpc-ch forum on

Operating Systems for HPC and Installation Methods

to be held on Thursday, May 20, 2010 from 10:00 until 17:00, kindly hosted by EPF Lausanne.

The hpc-ch meeting will already start on Wednesday, May 19th with a common dinner starting at 19:00 at the Café de Grancy in Lausanne.

The hpc-ch delegation will be welcomed at EPF Lausanne by Jean-Claude Berney and Didier Rey . The keynote presentations will be given by Jacques Menu on Installation of central services clusters and by Maxime Augier (both EPF Lausanne) on Installation of a cluster of PS3s. For the pleasure of our geek members, both presentations have been announced to be very technical.

Vittoria Rezzonico organized for us a very appealing agenda, so we will have the chance to have site visits of the central services data center, of the FSB data center and of the I+C computing infrastructures with its PlayStations. So do not forget to take with you your camera!

Additional information is published here »

To register send please an e-mail to delorenzi(at)cscs.ch until May 7, 2010 with the following information:

  • The names of the representatives of your organization who will participate at the Topic Forum, and if they will participate to the common dinner
  • (Optional) The title and speakers’ names for a short presentations (20 minutes including Q&A)

We are looking forward to meet you all in May.

Swiss Engineering STZ Reports on Weather Forecasts on Supercomputer at CSCS

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

The last issue of the Swiss Engineering STZ journal reports on how metereologists use modern supercomputer for weather forecasts. One article in particular reports on the collaboration between MeteoSwiss and CSCS to provide more accurate weather forecasts for Switzerland.

Link to the whole journal »
Link to the article on MeteoSwiss and CSSC »

The supercomputer used by MeteoSwiss for weather forecasts at CSCS is called Buin:

Swiss Grid School 2010

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

SwiNG (the Swiss National Grid Association) is organising the 2nd Swiss Grid School 2010 (SGS’10) – Lugano, 22-24 June 2010.

SGS’10 (http://sgs2010.inf.usi.ch/) aims at transferring Grid knowledge to academia, research and industry. This time, the school is particularly targeted also to system administrators.

The registration is open, and the following audience is particularly addressed:

  • Graduate students (master, Ph.D. level)
  • IT department/services (incl. system administrators
  • Practitioners and researchers from industry, academia and government organizations interested in further advancing the use or the development of Grid technologies.

For further information, please contact Prof. Nabil Abdennadher (nabil.abdennadher@hesge.ch)

Joint Call for Proposals in the area of SW for HPC

Friday, April 9th, 2010

Workshops in preparation of the joint Call for Proposals in the area of software for High Performance Computing

In preparation for an upcoming FP7 ICT 2010 EU-Russia Joint Call on Software for HPC (HPC programming models and runtime support, performance analysis tools for HPC, and optimisation, scalability and porting of HPC codes), and to bring in contact EU and Russian researchers to reply jointly to this call, two technical workshops are planned. The first workshop has taken place in Brussels on March the 25th, 2010 and the second workshop will take place on June the 9th, 2010 in Moscow.

To register or receive more information about these two workshops please send an email to Panagiotis.Tsarchopoulos@ec.europa.eu