The DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) Program and HPCWire are pleased to announce the second annual HPC Challenge Award Competition (www.hpcchallenge.org).
The goal of the competition is to focus the HPC community's attention on a broad set of HPC hardware and HPC software capabilities that are necessary to effectively use HPC systems.

With each release of the Top500 list, more attention is directed at the relevancy of the ranking and the associated Linpack benchmark. As the HPC community expands, many vendors and users are openly questioning the significance of Linpack as a useful metric for determining supercomputer performance. In a recent HPCwire article, Stephen Wheat, Senior Director of Intel's High Performance Computing Platform Office, offered some of his ideas on this topic.

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A new series of measurements -- the next step in evolution of criteria to determine more accurately the efficiency of supercomputers -- has rated Sandia National Laboratories' Red Storm computer the best in the world in two of six new categories, and very high in two other important categories.
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When the Energy Department's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center went shopping for a new mid-sized supercomputer, processor speed was a critical factor, as expected. But it also carefully scrutinized the interconnect speeds of the proposed systems.
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Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. today announced that the "Red Storm" supercomputer installed at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico is the first computer to surpass the 1 terabyte-per-second (1 TB/sec) performance mark on a widely used test that measures communications among processors in high-performance computing (HPC) systems and provides a key indication of the total communication capacity of the network.