Cray Supercomputer is Hiring!

Henry Neeman, friend of the Blog, sent us a job announcement from the folks at Cray.  Back in the day, Cray was the supercomputer company.  They built dedicated, stand alone supercomputers which could double as a couch:

The Cray X-MP 48 from the mid ’80s. It cost about $15 million and had a whopping 64 megs of memory!

Of course now they’re still an industry leader in the world of supercomputers.

Greetings from Cray,

We have several positions at all levels (BS, MS, or Ph.D.) in the Programming Environments group at Cray, in particular in the areas of compilers and communication libraries. I was wondering if you have any student (current or former) that would be interested in applying, or if you would be willing to broadcast this note in your department or in any other forum that you believe would be appropriate.

If you know of anyone interested, could you please ask him or her to send me a resume or apply directly at the Cray page at:

http://www.cray.com/About/Careers.aspx

Thanks,

Luiz DeRose
Programming Environment Director
Cray Inc.
Work:+1-651-605-8925
Cell:+1-651-428-0901
ldr@<companyname>.com

Would you like to play a game?

The OU Supercomputing Center for Education & Research (OSCER) has started assembling a brand new high speed supercomputer.  For those of you who were here in 2008, we toured OSCER and walked inside OU’s current supercomputer (called Sooner).

Sooner is capable of a 34,450.24 GFLOPs theoretical peak and 28,030 GFLOPs sustained performance in its calculations (GFLOPS = gigaflops).  When it was built it appeared on the world ranking of supercomputers at #90 worldwide, #47 in the US, #14 among US academic supercomputers, #10 among US academic excluding national centers, and #2 in the Big 12.

You can look at the current list of top ranked supercomputers here.

Just like smartphones and everything else, supercomputers are eventually replaced with faster models.  Sadly, Sooner doesn’t even make the top 500 supercomputers anymore!

The good news is that OU has started constructing Sooner’s faster sibling, Boomer.  Here’s some of the details about Boomer:

* Theoretical Peak Speed: 104.4 TFLOPs (3x Sooner)
* Total RAM: 13.7 TB (1.6x Sooner)

That would put Boomer at around 100 on the list of supercomputers.  We’ll have to take a tour this fall once it’s up and running!

Hawaiian Supercomputers

Henry Neeman, the director of the OU supercomputer facility, has passed along the following great opportunity for those of you with a background in engineering:

Please see the announcement below for an exciting opportunity
for undergraduate engineering students.

Please reply directly to Susan Brown (stbrown@hawaii.edu).

Henry

>———- Forwarded message ———-
>Date: Sun, 15 Nov 2009 14:12:47 -0800
>From: Susan T Brown <stbrown@hawaii.edu>
>To: cascmem@casc.org
>Subject: [Cascmem] HARP – HPC Applications in engineering REU Program,
>    fluid dynamics
>
>We are looking for undergraduate engineering students with an
>interest in CFD that would like to spend the summer in Hawai’i,
>learning to model cutting edge problems with Fluent on High
>Performance Computing Clusters.  Apply at
>
>  http://www.eng.hawaii.edu/reu
>
>now for this competitive program — generous stipend, lodging,
>and travel provided.  Must be a U.S. citizen or permanent resident.
>You can duplicate the trifold at that website freely.
>
>Thanks.
>
>Susan Brown, Ph.D.
>Adjunct Professor, College of Engineering
>University of Hawai‘i, M�noa
>Email: stbrown@hawaii.edu
>Ph: 808-375-6821
>Fax: 808-236-7116

You might want to skip the three hour tour.

Supercomputers in New Orleans

Are you interested in supercomputers, cluster computers, and/or New Orleans?  We received this announcement for a conference this fall on cluster computing and they have funds to cover the costs of students who would like to attend.  Check it out below:

We’re Number 91!

Henry Neeman, the Director of the Supercomputer Center, sent out the following email:

OSCER users,

I’m delighted to report that OU’s new cluster supercomputer,
Sooner, is ranked:

* #91 worldwide among all supercomputers;

* #14 among all supercomputers at US academic institutions;

* #10 among supercomputers at US academic institutions other than
national supercomputing centers — the important number (8-).

http://top500.org/list/2008/11/100

Congratulations to all of us!

People who’ve earned our gratitude include (but aren’t limited to):

* OSCER’s amazing operations team — Brandon, Dave, Brett and Josh
– who went so far above and beyond;

* the OU IT cabling team;

* the OU IT facilities team, especially Fred and Stan;

* the OU external relations team, especially Matt S and David G;

* OU Purchasing;

* our vendors, especially the teams at Dell, QLogic, Panasas,
Platform, Force10 and Platform;

* the Intel benchmarking crew, especially Andrey and Sergei, for
staying up with us late into the night many nights in a row to
help with this;

* everyone within OU IT who worked so hard to make this happen;

* OU’s Board of Regents;

* Loretta, for facilitating at every step.

And, last but definitely not least, heartfelt thanks to our boss,
Dennis, for seeing the possibilities and making them come true.

I should add that, looking through the Top 500 list, it seems
that only 24 US universities (other than big national centers)
are even on the list:

U New Mexico, SUNY Stony Brook, RPI, Clemson, U Southern Cal,
LONI/LSU, Harvard, Arizona State, U North Carolina, OU, Purdue,
U Alaska, Columbia, Caltech, Indiana, U Nebraska/PKI,
U Minnesota, Ohio Supercomputer Center, Virginia Tech,
Colorado School of Mines, Texas Tech, Stanford, U Arizona,
U Kentucky

And here are the universities associated with the big national
center:

U Texas Austin, U Tennessee, U Illinois, CMU/U Pitt, UCSD

A nice data point: on the new (Nov 2008) Top 500 list, we’re
ranked better than two of the major national centers: Pittsburgh
Supercomputing Center and San Diego Supercomputer Center.

Of course, PSC will beat us shortly when they debut their new
Track2C machine (~$30M hardware); I’m not sure what SDSC has up
their sleeve.

Oh, and we’re also #2 in the Big 12, after U Texas (national
center).

Field Trip!

Look Dave, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.

The next Math Club event is a field trip on Wednesday, October 22nd to the OU Supercomputer Center for Education and Research. The director Henry Neeman has graciously agreed to give us a behind the scenes tour.

Particularly exciting is that they are in the process of starting up a brand new supercomputer called Sooner. You can see the specs of Sooner here. To give you an idea of what we’re talking about, Sooner has 8,720 GB of memory! If you look at the latest list of the 500 fastest computers in the world, Sooner would come in around 50th on the list with most of the ones higher owned by the US and other governments around the world. For university computers it’s right near the top. Fortunately, Sooner is not HAL nor WOPR.

It should be a lot of fun. We’ll meet at 5pm in PHSC 1105 as usual and then carpool over to the supercomputer center. If you’d like to meet us over there, please email Jon Kujawa for the details. As usual, we’ll have free pizza!

If you’d like a copy of the flyer, you can find it here.

Shall we play a game?