HPD: just what we need in the computing industry – another acronym. But this is the term that Michael Norman, interim director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), is using to discuss how HPD (High Performance Data) goes hand in hand with HPC.

If you have both HPC and HPD, then you’ve got something that can be an order of magnitude faster on some apps. Then you’re cooking with gas… or then you’re in the cat bird seat… or then (insert your own lame phrase here).

The proof of concept will be a 245 TFlop supercomputer that goes by the slightly eccentric name “Gordon.” When completed, the system should rank somewhere in the top 30. Gordo will sport 64TB of DRAM and a massive 256TB of flash memory, utilizing the incredible speed of SSDs (basic press release here).

I meant to write about these guys earlier, but a vacation (and general laziness) kept it from happening in a timely manner. I recently had a briefing with Convirture, a startup that is striving to bring the full slate of virtualization bells, whistles, and management tools to the Xen and KVM hypervisors. Our pal TPM wrote a nice piece here that gives you the lowdown on who they are and what they’re bringing to the table.

In their biggest acquisition ever, Intel has pledged to spend $7.6 billion for security firm McAfee in a bid to add security to their portfolio of mostly chippy stuff. There are lots of stories all over webdom covering this, including the take from The Register’s John Leyden here. A CRN think piece discusses more background and talks about how Intel and McAfee have been working together for nearly two years on more closely integrating security and hardware.

Most of the reader comments to the John Leyden story were along the lines of, “WTF?” “Why?” and my favorite, “First of all, why? Secondly, seriously, why?” Here’s my quick cut at answering both the “WTF” and “Why” questions.

Quietly – very quietly – Oracle has been dropping out of the HPC market. We’re finally seeing some outward reaction to their internal moves with these news stories (TPM here and HPCwire here) discussing Oracle’s retreat from HPC. No comments from Oracle either confirming or denying the move, of course.

I’ve been hearing rumblings along these lines for months; their absence from SC10 and the scads of HPC sales, engineering, and support people getting pink slips all but confirms their HPC disengagement to me. When pressed for an explanation, our contacts started talking about how the company is focused on mission-critical enterprise and, well, they’re maintaining that focus.

Oracle doesn’t seem to understand that HPC is the birthplace of IT innovation. Many of the technologies used in enterprise computing today got their start in HPC, including clustering for scale, the use of Linux for computationally complex tasks, and high-speed storage and networking gear.

How the hell does a virus-infected set of motherboards find their way into the supply chain of a major system vendor? The vendor delivering the bad boards was Dell, and they’re blaming a slipshod supplier and ‘human error’. Yeah – human error. You can read all about it here and here.

The virus in question was a variant of an easily disinfected worm that was festering in the flash memory on the boards. Dell has removed all of the motherboards from their supply chain and rushed replacements to affected customers. That’s good, but it doesn’t make the fact that this happened in the first place any less deplorable.

In a lot of ways, NVIDIA is the belle of the GPU/accelerator ball these days. (Make your reservations early for the upcoming “GPU Fancy Dress Cotillion” later on this year; tuxedo t-shirts encouraged.) Intel withdrew Larrabee, IBM isn’t pushing Cell, FPGAs aren’t gaining a lot of traction yet, and AMD is late to the party with Fusion.

This leaves NVIDIA in a position where they are the only major vendor offering accelerator gear that has enough of a developed ecosystem to make it reasonably easy for HPC types to take advantage of it. But this isn’t going to last forever.

NVIDIA announced some new CUDA stuff today: a new developer kit (3.1) and their Parallel Nsight Visual Studio plug-in, both designed to make it easier for ISVs and other coding types to support NVIDIA GPUs in their apps. Our pal TPM has a typically detailed story here.

One thing that jumped out at me in the introductory materials is the penetration that CUDA is achieving in the industry as a whole. According to NVIDIA, there are 100,000 active CUDA developers, and there have been more than 600,000 CUDA development kit downloads.

Here’s a great blog (“Elite HPC and the Cloud Culture Clash”) discussing how much – well, actually, how little – the current hype behind cloud computing is swaying folks at large supercomputing sites.

In the article, Nicole Hemsoth correctly identifies cloud computing as more of a business model than radical new technology. She also hits on the fact that the major concern of HPC is the “P”, meaning performance – something that the cloud model doesn’t offer at this point… not when compared with owning your own gear.

Aquasar, a new water-cooled IBM supercomputer, was just fired up at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. It’s a 6-Tflop system that uses 33 two-way blades with Cell processors and an additional nine blades with dual Nehalem processors, all contained in three of their BladeCenter H Chassis. Two of the three chassis are water-cooled, covering 22 of the Cell boards and six of the Nehalem-based blades. What’s kind of cool (so to speak) is that they are using the waste heat to feed an estimated 9 kW of thermal power into the building’s heating system. This is pretty innovative stuff.

I’m increasingly convinced that we’re entering into a new phase of computing: one where competitive advantage is going to be gained or lost based on the quality of your data and your ability to analyze it. (Well, maybe not you…