Great opportunity to get a special academic discount on Windows HPC Server 2008.  

Windows® HPC Server 2008 Experience Counts Academic Program

You know the value of high-performance computing (HPC). No matter the topic - the inner workings of the universe or the economy; the spawning of a hurricane or urban development - HPC has become a key driver of the type of research that leads to groundbreaking insights.

Microsoft Higher Education - Experience Counts

It’s great to run across professors that try ideas out – especially outside of their field.  Last week I was at Purdue University attending the Dept of Computing and Information Technology Industrial Advisory Board meeting – and found out about Mike Kane's (heads up the Bioinformatics Lab) conversion of a ‘73 Bug to Electric for $4500.  It’s perfect for commuting to/from campus :-)

First EV Conversion: 1973 VW Bug (Summer, 2008)

The first project was funded/completed by Professor Michael Kane and involves a 1973 VW Bug. The VW cost was $1,500 (without the engine) and had already been renovated (interior and exterior, looks great!). The conversion involved adding a 12-hp* DC motor to the existing VW transmission, as well as a dedicated potentiometer (i.e. throttle box), controller, contactor, shunt, and batteries (deep-cycle marine/RV batteries). The batteries cost $600, and the motor and controlling electronics cost $2,400. Note that the design of this EV was aimed at a "low cost" conversion rather than "high performance", and there are many different components and configurations that allow you to best balance cost-to-performance.

Total cost: $4,500

Video - WLFI television coverage

http://evw.tech.purdue.edu/

It’s been a rainy Friday – so for fun I wanted to see how my WorldMap is doing.  I have hits from all 50 states, except North Dakota – so my challenge is how do I get one of the just over 640K residents to hit my blog….if you have any thoughts on it or have relatives in ND send them my link…

btw – I found the state facts of North Dakota quite  interesting – Nicknames: Peace Garden State, Flickertail State, and Roughrider State – Motto: Liberty and Union Now and Forever, One and Inseparable – Beverage: Milk – Fossil: Teredo Petrified Wood (Teredo was a worm-shaped mollusk) – and the State Fruit: Chokecherry (I never would have guessed it is part of the rose family).

Once I get that North Dakotan – the next goal – how to get hits from all the Canadian provinces – looks like I still need Yukon, Northwest Territories and Saskatchewan. :-)

Congratulations to Alex Szalay and his amazing team at JHU for winning the SC’08 Storage Challenge – with the entry GrayWulf:Scalable Clustered Architecture for Data Intensive Computing. GrayWulf – is implemented with SQL Server 2008

Abstract:

Data intensive computing presents a significant challenge for traditional supercomputing architectures that maximize FLOPS since CPU speed has surpassed IO capabilities of HPC systems and BeoWulf clusters. We present the architecture for a three tier commodity component cluster designed for a range of data intensive computations operating on petascale data sets. The design goal is a balanced system in terms of IO performance and memory size, according to Amdahl’s Laws. GrayWulf pays tribute to Jim Gray who stimulated the system and its design. The hardware currently installed at JHU exceeds one petabyte of storage and has 0.5 bytes/sec of I/O and 1 byte of memory for each CPU cycle. The GrayWulf provides almost an order of magnitude better balance than existing systems. Our benchmarks are based on date from the petascale Pan-STARRS project, building the largest sky survey to date. The benchmarks involve sequential searches over hundreds of terabytes.

Now this is fun science - Microsoft Research and Disney•Pixar team up to offer guided tours of the universe with WorldWide Telescope – how better to get our children interested in science and the universe – for most of us it was the Apollo Missions that interested in science and space, now WALL•E is a good ambassador.

WALL•E's Universe 

Explore the Universe with WALL•E and Andrew Stanton. Zoom, pan, spin and learn about planets, constellations, stars and galaxies.

© Disney/Pixar

WorldWide Telescope

The latest Top 500 list was released at Supercomputing Conference (SC08) in Austin, Texas today and Windows HPC Server 2008 was part of the #10 placed machine [Dawning 5000A] from Shanghai Supercomputer Center.  This is the top machine outside of US – amazing job by the Windows HPC team.

Yesterday afternoon I had the pleasure to participate and present at the UW eScience Institute kickoff event.  I really enjoyed the event and and the vision laid out by Ed Lazowska.  The talks by David Baker, Martin Savage and Andy Connolly really highlighted the need for resources to help in the eScience space.  While the effort is still spinning up, it will be a great resource for scientists at UW to utilize in their efficient adoption of computing technologies.  I look forward in continuing to work with UW as we’ve been doing with the Dynameomics project and with the Trident Workbench.

University of Washington eScience Institute Rollout Event

Presentations by:

Phyllis Wise, Provost

Ed Lazowska, Computer Science & Engineering
    (Interim Director, eScience Institute)

Dan Fay, Microsoft Research

David Baker, Biochemistry

Martin Savage, Physics

Andy Connolly, Astronomy

Rollout Event for the University of Washington eScience Institute

So here I am in Austin attending SuperComputing’08 posting about WALL•E and WWT and then noticed that my post about needing someone from North Dakota to visit the blog has been fulfilled :-) - Thanks to Fargo – all 50 states are checked off :-)

Some interesting facts about Fargo:

• The city's average high temperature is 16 degrees in January and 82 degrees in July.
• Fargo has two sister cities: Hamar, Norway and Vimmerby, Sweden.

Now onto Canada – just need Yukon and Saskatchewan.  Northwest Territories is checked off thanks to Yellowknife :-)