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According to this story, Internet grandfather DARPA (U.S.-based Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) is throwing open its doors and wallet in an attempt to solicit unconventional security solutions.

They’re reaching out past the usual huge, multinational technology consulting firms and egghead think tanks, and trying to engage with small start-ups – and even hackers – in order to get some new ideas into the mix. Looks like they’re willing to throw some cash at them, too. So far, so good – and a reasonable strategy to pursue.

But what brought me up short was a brief mention of their asking ‘hobbyists’ for input… what the hell are they thinking? Do they have any idea what they’re getting themselves into?

This story by The Register’s Chris Mellor perfectly illustrates the problem with using clouds for anything important. Briefly, a photographer was using Flickr to store his pictures online – eventually amassing more than 4,000 photos over five years. Being the helpful sort, he alerted Flickr to another user who was stealing content. Flickr mistakenly deleted HIS account, and all of those pictures now look to be gone forever. So what recourse does this unfortunate user have?

X-ISS is continuing to push into turnkey HPC with the recent introduction of their VizHPC visualization offering. It’s a combo deal of hardware and services that will cover the wall(s) of your choice with monitors showing highly detailed representations of data coming off your clusters in real time. They have flavors to suit a variety of tastes, including Linux, Windows HPC Server 2008, and standard Windows.

X-ISS is an interesting company in other ways as well. Based out of Houston, they’ve been around for almost 20 years, offering a full slate of HPC systems and services.

Most HPC vendors focus primarily on the business of providing highly optimized, cutting-edge systems and HPC solutions; they’ll configure the right boxes and get them running well enough to hit the required performance metrics. X-ISS does that stuff, but they also do quite a bit more.

In The Register’s first HPC channel webcast of 2011, Dan Olds of GCG talks to Rich Brueckner of InsideHPC to take the measure of current HPC performance and talk about the factors that got us to this point.

Some interesting data in the slides, including performance metrics of the #1, #100 and #500 systems on the Top500 list over the past ten years. When you chart out the results, you see a pattern where we just sort of plodded along until somewhere around 2006 – and then performance ramps up in hockey-stick fashion.

At this point, every server vendor+dog has some sort of integrated CPU-GPU system that they’re offering to their high performance computing (HPC) and other number-crunching customers.

The recently introduced Tetra from Appro has upped the ante by offering more GPUs than any other manufacturer in a small 1U package.

This solution is super-dense with up to 40 server units per rack, each with dual CPUs and quad NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs. Appro offers this server in both Intel and AMD flavors – giving customers a choice between the 4- or 6-core Intel Xeon or the 8- or 12-core AMD Magny Cours processors.

In the video below, John Lee explains how customers decide between AMD and Intel: it comes down to the characteristics of the workload. The AMD procs can be configured with more memory and, of course, have more cores to address it.

Bring up the topic of overclocking to the major system manufacturers and you’ll hear a variety of responses ranging from, ‘We’re plenty fast enough now – take a look at our _____ (insert benchmark here) that’s enabled by our use of ___________ (insert techno feature here)” to “It’s just not safe, son, and our customers need to be protected from this kind of thing.”

Even with their liquid-cooled systems, the big vendors they still push back against any notion of using that greatly enhanced cooling capability to wring more performance out of the system.

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