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Do Supercomputers Lead To Downtime?
As supercomputers grow more powerful, they’ll also become more susceptible to failure, thanks to the increased amount of built-in componentry. A few researchers at the recent SC12 conference, held last week in Salt Lake City, offered possible solutions to this growing problem.
Today’s high-performance computing (HPC) systems can have 100,000 nodes or more — with each node built from multiple components of memory, processors, buses and other circuitry. Statistically speaking, all these components will fail at some point, and they halt operations when they do so, said David Fiala, a Ph.D student at the North Carolina State University, during a talk at SC12.
The problem is not a new one, of course. When Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s 600-node ASCI (Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative) White supercomputer went online in 2001, it had a mean time between failures (MTBF) of only five hours, thanks in part to component failures. Later tuning efforts had improved ASCI White’s MTBF to 55 hours, Fiala said.
But as the number of supercomputer nodes grows, so will the problem. “Something has to be done about this. It will get worse as we move to exascale,” Fiala said, referring to how supercomputers of the next decade are expected to have 10 times the computational power that today’s models do.
Today’s techniques for dealing with system failure may not scale very well, Fiala said. He cited checkpointing, in which a running program is temporarily halted and its state is saved to disk. Should the program then crash, the system is able to restart the job from the last checkpoint.
The problem with checkpointing, according to Fiala, is that as the number of nodes grows, the amount of system overhead needed to do checkpointing grows as well — and grows at an exponential rate. On a 100,000-node supercomputer, for example, only about 35 percent of the activity will be involved in conducting work. The rest will be taken up by checkpointing and — should a system fail — recovery operations, Fiala estimated.
Because of all the additional hardware needed for exascale systems, which could be built from a million or more components, system reliability will have to be improved by 100 times in order to keep to the same MTBF that today’s supercomputers enjoy, Fiala said.
Fiala presented technology that he and fellow researchers developed that may help improve reliability. The technology addresses the problem of silent data corruption, when systems make undetected errors writing data to disk.
Samsung Goes Eight Cores
It was only a matter of time before someone got the cunning idea to build an eight-core ARM chip and Samsung seems to have taken up the challenge.
The Korean giant will detail its first eight-core SoC at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in February. The 28nm part features two stitched quad-core clusters, based on A7 and A15 cores, hence the name – big.little.
The A7 cluster runs at up to 1.2GHz, while the A15 cluster can hit 1.8GHz, and it packs 2MB of L2 cache. It sounds like an intriguing concept, a bit like Nvidia’s companion core taken to the next level. The “little” cluster is tuned for energy efficiency, while the beefy A15 cluster should deliver unparalleled performance.
But what about real life applications? Eight cores sound like overkill for smartphones and even high end tablets, so it is unclear whether the big.little chip will find its way into actual products anytime soon.
Yahoo Going Up
November 29, 2012 by admin
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Yahoo Inc shares climbed to their highest level in a year and a half, as investor confidence seems to be increasing that new Chief Executive Marissa Mayer can orchestrate a comeback that eluded three of her predecessors.
The Internet pioneer has yet to actually provide Wall Street with any hard evidence that its business is turning a corner – and she has warned that it will be a lengthy job – but investor faith in the ex-Google executive is running high.
Hedge funds Tiger Global Management and Greenlight Capital Management recently disclosed large stakes in Yahoo, accumulated during the third quarter.
“Money managers are staring to want to own this name again,” said Colin Gillis, an analyst with BGC Partners.
“For the amount of traffic they have, and the assets they have, they should be able to squeeze some value out of that,” Gillis said, referring to Yahoo. With Mayer at the helm, he said, Yahoo has “finally got somebody who the market believes can do that.”
Gravity Capital Management’s Adam Seessel said that Mayer’s recruitment of various Google Inc employees, including recently hired Yahoo Chief Operating Officer Henrique de Castro, has also helped burnish Yahoo’s image.
“What the market is seeing is not (financial) numbers so much as they’re seeing people voting with their feet, people moving from Google to Yahoo,” said Seessel, whose firm owns Yahoo shares.
“All these people from Google wouldn’t be following her if they didn’t think that she didn’t have some good cards to play,” he said.
Baidu Heads To The Cloud
China’s largest search engine Baidu said on Monday that they would provide 30GB of free cloud storage to Android devices built with certain Qualcomm chips, in what’s the latest move by the company to build a presence in the country’s mobile services sector.
Baidu’s limited-time offer applies in China to two of Qualcomm’s latest chips, the Snapdragon S4 MSM 8×25 processor, and the Snapdragon S4 MSM 8x25Q processor. Users activating Baidu’s cloud service will receive 15GB of free cloud storage over the device’s lifetime, and an additional 15GB of storage free for one year.
As of Monday phones containing the chips, from Chinese manufacturers including Lenovo and Huawei, will ship with the free Baidu cloud storage enabled as a result of the partnership with Qualcomm.
Baidu is offering the free storage after the company in September declared China’s mobile Internet space as its next major focus, and announced a $1.6 billion investment to build a new cloud computing center.
GreenPeace Still After Apple
November 27, 2012 by admin
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A Greenpeace study has revealed that Indian outsourcing firm Wipro made the biggest strides to becoming a greener company this year, while Apple continued to lag behind.
Greenpeace’s “Guide to Greener Electronics” is a 16 company ranking that sets out to discover what leading electronics firms are doing to reduce their impacts on the environment.
This year’s study found that Indian firm Wipro, which has a consumer electronics division, was making important progress toward becoming greener.
“There is not a single reason why companies like HP, Nokia and Apple can’t do what Wipro is doing,” Greenpeace’s IT analyst Casey Harrell said.
Wipro was ranked number one in Greenpeace’s survey because of its efforts to increase its use of renewable energy, bring energy efficient products to market, nail down an effective product take back strategy and advocate for better governmental energy standards.
Harrell said that advocacy is an important step companies should take to becoming more environmentally aware. However, he believes that many companies are not doing enough to get the government involved in green initiatives.
“These companies invest a lot of money in advocacy, just not for energy,” continued Harrell.
“They invest in advocacy for things like IP reform and tax reform, just not for energy policy reform.”
Greenpeace’s study criticized Apple for its lack of advocacy efforts. The environmental agency gave the Iphone maker a ranking of zero when it came to environmental protection advocacy.
Apple has previously been slammed by Greenpeace for its decision to use glued-in batteries in its latest Macbook devices.
While many US companies rated poorly on environmental advocacy, Harrell still held out hope that some firms will try to do more going forward. As an example for his optimism, Greenpeace’s IT analyst said that in 2010 HP came out against the controversial California Proposition 23.
Another key area that Greenpeace thinks electronic firms need to improve upon is the lack of proper warranties on devices. Harrell said that companies can make the most energy efficient products in the world but if consumers have to buy a new product each year it won’t matter.
“It is a huge problem,” said Harrell.
nVidia Soars
Nvidia has published its third quarter earnings and the results are impressive to say the least. With record revenue of $1.2 billion, Nvidia’s net income in Q3 was $209.1 million (GAAP).
Quarterly revenue is up 12.9 percent year-over-year and represents a 15.3 percent sequential bump, beating analyst expectations. However, Nvidia expects its revenue to dip to between $1.02 and $1.17 billion in the fourth quarter.
The company blames the projected slump on a declining PC market. It seems Nvidia does not expect Windows 8 will have a very positive impact on the PC market.
IBM Sued Over Disaster
IBM has been hit with a multimillion-dollar lawsuit by chemical products manufacturer Avantor Performance Materials, which alleges that IBM lied about the suitability of an SAP-based software package it sells in order to win Avantor’s business.
In 2010, Avantor decided to upgrade its ERP (enterprise resource planning) platform to SAP software, according to the lawsuit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.
“Seizing upon Avantor’s decision — and fully aware that, given the competitive pressures of Avantor’s industry, and the specialized demands of its customers, Avantor could not tolerate any disruptions in customer service — IBM represented that IBM’s ‘Express Life Sciences Solution’ … was uniquely suited to Avantor’s business,” the lawsuit states. “The Express Solution is a proprietary IBM pre-packaged software solution that runs on an SAP platform.”
But Avantor discovered a different truth after signing on with IBM, finding that Express Life was “woefully unsuited” to its business and the implementation brought its operations to “a near standstill,” according to the suit.
IBM also violated its contract by staffing the project with “incompetent and reckless consultants” who made “numerous design, configuration and programming errors,” it states.
In addition, IBM “intentionally or recklessly failed” to tell Avantor about risks to the project and hurried towards a go-live date, the suit alleges.
“To conceal the System’s defects and functional gaps, IBM ignored the results of its own pre-go-live tests, conducted inadequate and truncated testing and instead recommended that Avantor proceed with the go-live as scheduled — even though Avantor had repeatedly emphasized to IBM that meeting a projected go-live date was far less important than having a fully functional System that would not disrupt Avantor’s ability to service its customers,” the suit states.
The resulting go-live, which occurred in May, “was a disaster,” with the system failing to process orders properly, losing some orders altogether, failing to generate need paperwork for U.S. Customs officials and directing “that dangerous chemicals be stored in inappropriate locations,” the suit states.
Avantor has suffered tens of millions of dollars in monetary damages, as well as taken a hit to its reputation among partners and customers, the suit states.
AMD’s Roadmap Leaked
According to the latest AMD desktop roadmap, published by DonanimHaber, the Steamroller architecture could be delayed, which means Piledriver cores will power AMD’s third-generation APUs.
So what does this mean for consumers? Well, Richland APUs might not be quite as good as expected. AMD could optimize the x86 cores and go for more powerful graphics, but it’s hard to get excited about the next generation.
Vishera parts will also stick to Piledriver cores, backed by discreet Radeon 7xxx and 8xxx series graphics. However, we will see a new architecture in the low end. Kabini is apparently on track to launch next year, with Jaguar cores, refreshed graphics and an all new system-on-chip version, with an integrated on-chip Fusion controller hub (FCH).
What’s more, AMD will also offer quad-core Kabini parts, and who could say no to a dirt cheap E-series APU with four cores, good graphics and a ridiculous TDP?
Lenovo On The Rise
Lenovo has topped off a great 2012 with record sales figures and revenues, and claimed it took 15.6 percent of the PC market.
Lenovo is the PC maker that has bucked the industry trend of a shrinking PC market, posting faster than average industry growth for 14 consecutive quarters. All of that has left the firm announcing an 11 percent increase in second fiscal quarter sales to $8.7bn with profits of $162m, an increase of 13 percent over the same period last year.
Lenovo has managed to maintain the legendary status held by IBM’s Thinkpads and introduce its own low-cost models aimed at consumers. The firm has also been pushing smartphones in China and close to half of its revenues in its second fiscal quarter came from its home market.
Yang Yuanqing, chairman and CEO of Lenovo said, “Our global PC market share reached another historic high, moving us closer to our dream of becoming the worldwide PC leader. With four years’ effort, our consumer PC business has become the world’s number one in this segment for the first time. Our smartphone business in China, which we started only two years ago, has again strengthened its number two position,”
AMD Makes More Cuts
There have been some rumors that AMD plans to drop prices on its older generation APUs as well as some AM3 Athlon II CPUs and as of yesterday, the new price list confirmed those cuts. Unfortunately the price cuts are not that impressive on the FM1 side but some AM3 Athlon II CPUs have seen a price reduction of over 30 percent.
The full list includes a total of six A-Series APUs and twelve AM3 Athlon II CPUs. The most impressive price cut in the A-Series was on the A4-3300 APU for 21.7 percent, or from US $46 down to US $36. The flagship A8-3870K got cut down by 9.9 percent while A6-3670K was cut down by far less impressive 3.7 percent.
The most impressive price cuts on the AM3 Athlon II side is on the Athlon II X4 640 and the Athlon II X2 265. The Athlon II X4 640 got cut down from US $98 to US $67, or 31.6 percent, while Athlon II X2 265 got cut down from US $69 to US $48, or 30.4 percent.
Two Athlon II CPUs, the X3 445 and the X4 638, were removed from the price list as they were most likely discontinued.
You can check out the full list and price cuts over at CPU-World.com.