Here’s another “How HPC saves your worthless hide” type of story that comes along every once in a while. Our pals at InsideHPC publicized a collaboration between the Federal Aviation Administration and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) that should increase air safety for people riding on planes and for the people standing around underneath them.

GCG staff were summarily kicked out of the VMworld press and analyst area this morning. Our crime? Trying to have a short meeting with an industry contact while sitting inside the cordoned-off analyst/press corral. Last year, and in years past, we routinely took briefings in this area with no trouble.

The problem was that our contact didn’t have a press/analyst badge, and he was sitting on the forbidden side of the divide. I proposed a workable solution – moving the table a couple of feet so that his chair would be on the other side of the rope barrier, while we sat legally inside the designated area. That wasn’t acceptable. I guess it violated the spirit and sanctity of the press/analyst area.

ScaleMP made some HPC news lately by announcing that the Bielefeld University Physics Department has selected ScaleMP’s vSMP Foundation software. This comes on the heels of another announcement, a few days earlier, that the University of Florida’s Interdisciplinary Center for Biotechnology Research made the same decision. Both of these organizations will be using ScaleMP’s software to aggregate large amounts of memory that sit on distributed systems into a single, very large, memory space.

The Large Hadron Collider has been operating for a few months now, and it hasn’t ripped apart the space/time continuum – not where I live, anyway, and that’s mostly all I care about. Of course, it could be that it’s still early, and that the cumulative effects of accelerating particles really fast could still spell the end of – well – everything. Until that happens, the LHC is generating enough data to keep scientists busy from now ‘till doomsday (unless doomsday is in the next couple of years).

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).