Games That Matter

One such popular defense tool is a virtual world game called Boarders Ahoy!. Developed by NATO's Allied Command Transformation, the training simulator prepares sailors for boarding a ship as part of a military inspection process. Users can practice interviewing the crew of the virtual ship, checking identification and locating the game's 250 searchable objects.

The United States Secret Service is also leveraging the training power of virtual worlds to prepare for national threats. "Tiny Town" is a small-scale model in use for the last four decades, which helps officials plan for such emergencies as chemical threats and enemy attacks. The model now has a 3D computer-generated counterpart, called Virtual Tiny Town. The software's advanced modeling cabilities can realistically simulate a variety of possible real-life threats, such as chemical, biological or radiological attacks, armed assaults, or suicide bombers. Planned upgrades will enhance the program's life-saving measures by adding health impacts and crowd behaviors to the model.

Academic institutions are also contributing to the arsenal of public safety measures. The recently-launched Center for Advanced Modeling in the Social, Behavioral and Health Sciences at Johns Hopkins University specializes in agent-based simulation, which predicts how individuals will react in emergency situations. The center draws from diverse disciplines, such as public safety, sociology, economics and supercomputing, to fine-tune its virtual model.

Read full story at Game Forward

JRT Offering the Tesla Workstation

JRT's new Tesla Workstation delivers the accelerated multi-core processing power. Designed to deliver groundbreaking performance, and power efficiency for compute and graphics intensive environments, the new JRT Tesla Workstation lets you create, design, render, and analyze, without compromise.

The new JRT Tesla Workstation offers outstanding performance and incredible graphics and memory up to 64 GB for technical and graphic intensive computing. The Tesla Workstation supports up to two 64-bit Dual/Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5200/5400 series processors and supports the full NVIDIA Quadro graphics and Tesla accelerator product lines. Designed with all new performance architecture for the research - critical, compute-intensive and graphically demanding workstation environments.

The JRT Tesla Workstation offers the latest high-end graphics cards that gives high level graphics performance for the most demanding visual applications in industries such as oil and gas, CAD, animation and 3D modeling.


Key Features

• Dual / Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processors
• Up to 64 GB of Memory
• Dual PCI Express x16 Slot
• High Performance NVIDIA Quadro Graphics Card
• Up to 8 TB of Hot-Swap Storage
• Whisper Quiet Workstation (28 dB)
• NVIDIA Tesla C1060 Computing Processor

(For more information visit the product pages)

A Strategic Application Collaboration for Molecular Dynamics

Over the last two decades, an increasing number of chemists have turned to the computer to predict the results of experiments beforehand or to help interpret the results of experiments. Skepticism on the part of laboratory chemists has gradually evaporated as the computational results have made contact with, and even anticipated, experimental findings. When the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded recently to two scientists, Walter Kohn and John Pople, who originated some of the first successful methods in computational chemistry, the award was seen as an affirmation of the value of computational chemistry to the field of chemistry.

"We've come a long way," said Peter Kollman of the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at UC San Francisco (UCSF). "But while we've come a long way, we can see that we've still got a long way to go."

Now, as part of an NPACI Strategic Application Collaboration, AMBER's performance is being improved by 50 percent to 65 percent.

AMBER stands for Assisted Model Building with Energy Refinement. The code's successes include its use to study protein folding, to study the relative free energies of binding of two ligands to a given host (or two hosts to a given ligand), to investigate the sequence-dependent stability of proteins and nucleic acids, and to find the relative solvation free energies of different molecules in various liquids. Hundreds of contributions to the scientific literature reflect the use of AMBER.

(This news summarized from the San Diego Super Computing Center and original full text can be reached their web site)

Appro HyperPower™ Cluster - Featuring Intel Xeon CPU and NVIDIA® Tesla™ GPU computing technologies

The amount of raw data needed to process research analysis in drug discoveries, oil and gas exploration, and computational finance create a huge demand for computing power. In addition, the 3D visualization analysis data has grown a lot in recent years moving visualization centers from the desktop to GPU clusters. With the need of performance and memory capacities, Appro clusters and supercomputers are ideal architectures combined with the latest CPUs and GPU's based on NVIDIA® Tesla™ computing technologies. It delivers best performance at lower cost and fewer systems than standard CPU-only clusters. With 240-processor computing core per GPU, C-language development environment for the GPU, a suite of developer tools as well as the world’s largest GPU computing ISV development community, the Appro HyperPower GPU clusters allow scientific and technical professionals the opportunity to test and experiment their ability to develop applications faster and to deploy them across multiple generations of processors.

The Appro HyperPower cluster features high density 1U servers based on Intel® Xeon® processors and NVIDIA® Tesla™ GPU cards onboard. It also includes interconnect switches for node-to-node communication, master node, and clustering software all integrated in a 42U standard rack configuration. It supports up to 304 CPU cores and 18,240 GPU cores with up to 78TF single/6.56 TF double precision GPU performance. By using fewer systems than standard CPU-only clusters, the HyperPower delivers more computing power in an ultra dense architecture at a lower cost.

In addition, the Appro HyperPower cluster gives customers a choice of configurations with open-source commercially supported cluster management solutions that can easily be tested and pre-integrated as a part of a complete package to include HPC professional services and support.

Ideal Environment:
Ideal solution for small and medium size HPC Deployments. The target markets are Government, Research Labs, Universities and vertical industries such as Oil and Gas, Financial and Bioinformatics where the most computationally-intensive applications are needed.

Installed Software
The Appro HyperPower is preconfigured with the following software:
- Redhat Enterprise Linux 5.x, 64-bit
- CUDA 2.2 Toolkit and SDK
- Clustering software (Rocks Roll)

CUDA Applications
The CUDA-based Tesla GPUs give speed-ups of up to 250x on applications ranging from MATLAB to computational fluid dynamics, molecular dynamics, quantum chemistry, imaging, signal processing, bioinformatics, and so on. Click here to learn more about these speedups with links to application downloads.,


(This news sourced from Appro Ltd. and can be reached their web site)