Eye on Blades Blog: Trends in Infrastructure : performance

Harnessing Horsepower: Cores, Capacity, and Code

Daniel Bowers — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 23:33:00 GMT

Last week at IDF , two Intel technologists spoke about different fixes to the problem of compute capacity outpacing the typical server's ability to handle it. For the past 5 years, x86 CPU makers have boosted performance by adding more cores within...(read more)

Tips to Reduce Processor Latency

Daniel Bowers — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 14:30:00 GMT

For some of financial and data-acquisition applications, it's more important to finish one calculation super-fast than a bunch of calculations slightly slower. There's a group of HPC apps with a similar requirement: two identical instructions...(read more)

Nehalem and Windows 2003: Why 6 x 1GB = 4GB

Daniel Bowers — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:21:00 GMT

On Ed Groden's post in the Intel Server Room , Mario Valetti asks about memory configurations for an Intel Xeon 5500-based server running a 32-bit OS. Ed gives a couple good rules of thumb for what memory to use, including his rule #4, the ultra-important...(read more)

TOP500 Supercomputer list for June 2009

Daniel Bowers — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 02:53:00 GMT

Since last November, another five spots on this biennial list are taken by systems based on HP server blades. On the latest list , I count 206 of the 500 fastest computer systems in the world -- over 41% -- as being powered by HP BladeSystem. Some of...(read more)