Saturday, March 29, 2014

Supercomputer Aids in Alzheimer's Breakthrough

Researchers using the Gordon supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) have reportedly made gains in elucidating the creation of toxic oligomers that are associated with Alzheimer’s disease–a finding that could lead to new drug designs.

(Read my complete article at Go Parallel)

Harvard Supercomputer Abused for Dogecoin Mining

Harvard University recently discovered that its 14,000-core Odyssey supercomputer cluster was being used to mine for the virtual currency “Dogecoin,” and stripped the unidentified individual involved from all access to the university’s research and computing labs.

(Read my complete article at Go Parallel)

Retirement Readiness Crisis Still Looms Despite Some Improvement

The retirement outlook for many Americans is slightly brighter this year according to recent research studies, though the majority of workers age 60 or older still plan to put it off.

Three separate retirement studies were released in the past month, which collectively paint a disappointing—though slightly improved—retirement readiness picture. The reason for the slight improvement is a return of value to retirement programs that took a beating in the recent recession.

(Read my complete article at Think Advisor)

Saturday, March 15, 2014

Taming the Thirst of Supercomputers

It’s no secret that supercomputers consume a lot of energy. Less widely publicized is the fact that they also consume a lot of water in order to cool down servers through cooling towers that are typically located on the roof of supercomputer facilities.

(Read my complete article at Go Parallel)

HPC Market to Be Worth $33.43B by 2018

The increased number of complex applications and sizeable investment by governments are playing a major role in shaping the future of the High-Performance Computing (HPC) market, which is expected to grow to $33.43 billion by 2018, according to a recently released report by U.S.-based global market research and consulting company MarketsandMarkets.

(Read my complete article at Go Parallel)

2014: The Year SMEs Meet Supercomputers?

Go Parallel recently reported on small and mid-sized businesses in the United States increasingly gaining access to supercomputing time, and it appears the same trend is also happening in Europe. Andrew Carr, CEO at Bull Information Systems in the UK and Ireland, predicts that 2014 will be the year that SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises) will meet the supercomputer.

(Read my complete article at Go Parallel)

Supercomputer Reveals Hundreds of Undetected Arctic Cyclones

The top of the world is a cold, harsh place, with cyclones carving a path of destruction, leaving warm water and air in their wakes—melting sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. Now new data analysis reveals that from 2000 to 2010, about 1,900 cyclones churned across the Arctic each year—40 percent more than previously thought.

(Read my complete article at Go Parallel)

How Multicore Makes Simulation More Real

(as by Intel)

Simulation technology today is being asked to deliver near-perfect images and more complex physical behaviors, including multiphysics, and is being used where it has not been used in the past. While improved simulation leads to better engineering, it comes at a cost of increased compute resources.

(Read my complete article at Go Parallel)

Smoothing Developers' Path Toward Multicore Apps

(as by Intel)

How do you move from Linux to Windows to maximize the benefit of all the cluster processor cores and develop applications based on a proper parallelization strategy, while addressing the many complex issues related to porting and parallelization?

(Read my complete article at Go Parallel)

Intel MIC Opens New Frontiers of Performance

(as by Intel)

The techniques used in CloverLeaf, a small benchmark that solves two-dimensional, compressible Euler equations on a staggered Cartesian grid, are similar to what might be used to simulate the effect of a meteor impacting the Earth’s atmosphere, says the author of the free software. And recreating the application using Intel’s Many Integrated Core (MIC) technology has resulted in an out-of-this world performance boost.

(Read my complete article at Go Parallel)

Weeding out unwanted employee candidates

Hospitals and healthcare centers are in strong competition for skilled physicians and nurses. That puts added pressure on the credentialing process. Fortunately, the process has been made easier thanks to electronic access to data.

As director of credentialing at the University of North Carolina (UNC) School of Medicine and UNC Health Care, Linda Waldorf knows personally the importance of onboarding a new hire as quickly as possible. Waldorf is a new employee herself. She joined UNC only five months ago, from John Hopkins Health System.

(Read my complete article at Healthcare Finance News)

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Addressing the Needs of Female Clients

By the time female clients find themselves sitting in Carol Idone’s office, they are usually very willing to listen to advice on retirement planning. Just the very fact they are there typically indicates a major life-changing event has happened, Idone says. That usually means divorce or death of a spouse.

“Even before a client gets here, it is more likely that a man rather than a woman would walk through the door,” said Idone, a financial advisor with Strategic Benefit Services in Rensselaer, NY. “It is especially less likely that women would walk in by themselves.”

(Read my complete article at Think Advisor)

Helping Clients Time Their Social Security Benefits

If your client is like most, they have no doubt been looking forward to retirement, and to collecting on the Social Security benefits due them. After all, they’ve put a lot of money into the Social Security kitty over the years, and its time there was a little payback.

But is it really? Is your client wise to start collecting on Social Security at the first opportunity? How early is too early? Should they wait to full retirement age? Or should they delay those benefits a few years into retirement? The correct answer depends on a lot of factors, including whether your client or a spouse are currently employed, whether they have a pressing financial hardship, what their health profile and medical history looks like, and what tax bracket they fall into.

(Read my complete article at Think Advisor)

U.S. Faces Severe Racial Divide with Regards to Retirement

Financial planners already know that this country is facing a “retirement crisis,” with a majority of Americans having insufficient assets to provide for the comfortable retirement they dreamed of. Indeed, the current generation of older workers heads into retirement less financially prepared then the generation before them.

Now we have word from a major new research study that the typical household of color in the U.S. has no retirement savings at all.

(Read my complete article at Think Advisor)

Future Supercomputer Scientists Flock to Global Challenge

Considered one of the top three international supercomputing challenges, along with the SC in the United States and the ISC in Germany, the ASC14 Student Supercomputer Challenge  in Asia has drawn nearly twice as many teams than last year’s competition.

The ASC14 Challenge provides an opportunity for supercomputing experts from around the world to share their expertise with undergraduate students in order to cultivate more scientists in the future. The preliminary contest of the ASC14 challenge was held on January 2, and the final will be held in Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China in April.

(Read my complete article at Go Parallel)

BlueCrystal Supercomputer Shines Among UK's Elice HPCs

The BlueCrystal High Performance Computer housed at the University of Bristol in Bristol, England recently received a major performance boost and is now capable of over 200 trillion calculations per second—propelling it to the ranks of the fastest supercomputers in the United Kingdom. The upgrade also gives BlueCrystal five times the computing power of its predecessor.

(Read my complete article at Go Parallel)


Japan Promises Exascale Supercomputer in 2020

Several countries have set 2020 as the target year to launch an exascale supercomputer. And one of those countries engaged in the heated race just got one step closer.

Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology recently tapped RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (AICS) to develop a new exascale supercomputer by 2020 thereby tasking the research institution with keeping the country “at the leading edge of computing science and technology,” according to an announcement.

(Read my complete article at Go Parallel)

Big Data Supercomputer, First Virtualized HPC Cluster Get NSF Funding

The National Science Foundation is funding two powerful new supercomputer systems at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin and at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California.

Known as “Wrangler,” the supercomputer being designed and built at TACC, is “groundbreaking data analysis and management system for the national open science community,” according to the TACC news release. Wrangler is being supported by a $6 million grant from the National Science Foundation and is scheduled for production in January 2015.

(Read my complete article at Go Parallel)

Supercomputing Milestones and Breakthroughs in 2013

The size and speed of the world’s supercomputers tend to capture the public’s attention. But bigger and faster is not always better. It’s what the massive machines do with their compute power that really matters. HPCwire recently assembled a reflection of significant discoveries and opportunities made possible by high-powered computers and the people who run them.

(Read my complete article at Go Parallel)

Buying Major Supercomputer Power in Bulk

With an aim to deploy their first 100-plus petaflop systems within the next few years, three premier U.S. national labs – Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Argonne (ANL) and Lawrence Livermore (LLNL) – combined forces last year to give them greater purchasing power when buying their next major supercomputing installations, according to a report on HPC Wire.

(Read my complete article at Go Parallel)

TARDIS Supercomputer Cluster to Launch

While supercomputer clusters cannot yet solve time travel, they can increase brute force compute power. That’s exactly what Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology, which are five miles apart, are aiming to do with a new high performance computing cluster named TARDIS.

The name TARDIS is after the time travel and spacecraft machine in the popular Doctor Who British science-fiction TV series. The TARDIS has an exterior that resembled a London police box, and an inside that is larger than the outside, notes an article in Campus Technology.

(Read my complete article at Go Parallel)

Massively Parallel Supercomputing Tech Simulates 3,000-Atom Nano Device

Advanced supercomputer techniques have been used to simulate the properties of a 3,000-atom nano device, which scientists say will pave the way for faster nano devices in the future.

According to a report on HPC Wire, a 3,000 atom simulation is a threefold increase over previous efforts. The research division at Fujitsu was able to accomplish the feat using a new technique based on massively parallel supercomputing technology developed by the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) and the Computational Material Science Initiative (CMSI).

(Read my complete article at Go Parallel)

New DNA-Crunching Supercomputer Launches $1,000 Human Genome

The world’s first DNA analysis supercomputer designed to process 20,000 genomes per year at a cost of $1,000 each – which could make full genome sequencing much more mainstream – was recently announced, according to a BusinessWeek report.

Leading seller of gene-sequencing machines Illumina unveiled its high-speed, low-cost sequencing system HiSeq X (pronounced “High Seek 10″) at an investors conference in San Francisco at a crucial time for clinical breakthroughs, notes the report.

(Read my complete article at Go Parallel)

Supercomputer Uncovers Possible Secret to Cost-Effective Alternative Fuel

Powerful supercomputers often make radical discoveries not even scientists running the data could anticipate – which recently happened at the Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

Researchers running a simulation of an enzyme from the fungus Trichoderma reesei (Cel7A) discovered that a part of the enzyme – the linker – can have a quite unexpected benefit, in breaking down biomass into the sugars used to make alternative transportation fuels.

(Read my complete article at Go Parallel)

Breakthrough Brings Quantum Computer Closer

An international team of researchers has succeeded in generating and manipulating single particles of light (photons) on a silicon microchip – a major step forward in the race to build a quantum computer.

“Our device removes the need for external photon sources, provides a path to increasing the complexity of quantum photonic circuits and is a first step toward fully integrated quantum technologies,” said project leader Dr. Mark Thompson from the University of Bristol in the announcement. The breakthrough is featured on the cover of the peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature Photonics.

(Read my complete article at Go Parallel)

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

How Can We Keep Social Security Solvent?

Calling it an “important first step” on the long road to addressing this country’s retirement crisis, the U.S. Senate Finance Committee recently held a special hearing on needed reforms for Social Security, defined benefits and private retirement accounts.

The December hearing was called by the Subcommittee on Social Security, Pensions and Family Policy, which includes member Senator Patrick J. Toomey (R-PA) and Chairman Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH).  Featured speakers at the hearing included Robert G. Romasco, president of AARP, in Washington DC; Andrew G. Biggs, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC; Dean Baker, co-director for the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington DC; and John F. Sweeney, executive vice president at Fidelity Investments in Boston.

(Read my complete article at Think Advisor)

The Best Time to Start Collecting Social Security: Ask the Advisor

The typical American views Social Security as an entitlement – there for the taking at the first opportunity. But retirement planners know that isn’t often the best move. Financial advisor Karla McAvoy, of HC Financial Advisors, discusses the best ways to educate a client on when the time is right for Social Security, no matter what their circumstances.

(Read my complete article at Think Advisor)

Obama's MyRA Plan Still Irks Some Retirement Planners

In the midst of what many economists call a “retirement crisis,” President Barack Obama took the occasion of his State of the Union address to propose a new retirement savings program involving employer payroll deductions and government-sponsored savings accounts.

The program would be known as MyRA (My Retirement Account), and it would enable workers who don’t have access to a 401(k) plan to set aside their own retirement dollars at work. It would be up to employers to manage such a program for their employees, and to the Treasury Department at the national level.

(Read my complete article at Think Advisor)

Congressional Hearing Tackles Long-Term Care Funding Woes

Perhaps more than any other item, the thing that many Americans neglect when it comes to retirement planning is long-term care. And yet, for an estimated 12 million Americans and rising, that is the thing they most need as they journey through their retirement years.

(Read my complete article at Think Advisor)

Do CFOs still need a CPA?

As healthcare providers grapple with more complex issues, the CFO is being asked to take on a leadership role that in many cases extends beyond the realm of accounting.

(Read my complete article at Healthcare Finance News)

Healthcare's hiring dilemma: PA or NP?

The growing shortage of physicians is causing many healthcare organizations to rethink the roles of nurse practitioners and physician assistants. More than any other, these are the professionals that are filling the gap left by physicians that are retiring, reducing their patient load or deciding to leave the field.

To figure out which role is the better to invest in, organizations have a lot to consider.

(Read my complete article at Healthcare Finance News)