Product Review: PGI Workstation

PGI Workstation™ is PGI's single-user scientific and engineering compilers and tools product. PGI Workstation is available in three language versions;

• PGI Fortran Workstation—Fortran only 
• PGI C/C++ Workstation—C and C++ only 
• PGI Fortran/C/C++ Workstation—combined Fortran and C/C++ 

PGI Fortran Workstation includes The Portland Group's native parallelizing/optimizing FORTRAN 77, Fortran 90/95/03 and HPF compilers for 64-bit x64 and 32-bit x86 processor-based Linux, Apple Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows workstations. PGI Fortran Workstation provides the features, quality, and reliability necessary for developing and maintaining advanced scientific and technical applications.

PGI parallel compilers and tools harness the full power of x64+GPU systems for science and engineering applications. PGI’s industry-leading performance, reliability, native multi-core and OpenMP support, GPGPU programming, and parallel-capable graphical debugging and profiling tools provide a complete state-of-the art programming environment for scientists and engineers. PGI’s support for legacy language and programming features ensures that existing applications will port easily and quickly to the latest-generation multi-core x64+GPU processor-based systems.

PGI C/C++ Workstation includes The Portland Group's native parallelizing/optimizing OpenMP C++ and ANSI C compilers. The C++ compiler closely tracks the proposed ANSI standard and is compatible with cfront versions 2 and 3. All C++ functions are compatible with Fortran and C functions, so you can compose programs from components written in all three languages.

PGI Workstation includes the OpenMP and MPI enabled PGDBG parallel debugger and PGPROF performance profiler that can debug and profile up to eight local MPI processes. PGI Workstation also includes several versions of precompiled MPICH message passing libraries.

PGI Workstation includes a single user node-locked license for Linux, Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows. Volume packs of five or more single user node-locked licenses are also available.

Volume packs are multi-platform; licenses may be mixed by operating system up to the maximum count. PGI Server offers the same features as PGI Workstation but includes a multi-user network floating license.

PGI Workstation for both Mac OS X and Windows consists of command-level versions of the PGI compilers and both command-level and graphical versions of the PGDBG debugger and PGPROF performance profiler. An integrated development environment (IDE) is neither provided nor supported. As a separate product, PGI Visual Fortran fully integrates PGI Fortran compilers and tools into Microsoft Windows using Microsoft Visual Studio.

This product targets 64-bit x64 and 32-bit x86 workstations with one or more single core or multi-core microprocessors.

(Detailed product info can be obtained from manufacturers web pages)

How Supercomputing is Revolutionizing Nuclear Power

Out of all the carbon-free power options, nuclear power faces some of the highest hurdles to commercial-scale deployment. The upfront costs for reactors are in the billions, the projects take years to site and build, and nuclear materials and designs have to undergo testing for decades to make sure they can be used in the field. That’s one reason why nuclear research costs a whole lot of money and the pace of innovation seems incredibly slow. But that’s also the reason why supercomputing has started to truly revolutionize the world of nuclear power innovation.

Supercomputing, or “extreme computing” as the Department of Energy described it during a workshop on computing and nuclear power last year, involves computers at the petaflop scale. It will eventually reach even exaflop scale. A computer running at a petaflop can do 1 million billion calculations in a second, and an exaflop of performance can deliver a billion billion calculations per second.

That massive amount of number crunching can help developers of nuclear power technology simulate next-generation designs of nuclear reactors, show how advanced fuels in a reactor could be consumed over time, and model more efficient waste disposal and refueling efforts. It’s all about being able to go through very complex and lengthy research and development processes much more quickly and with far less cost compared to both physical testing and using less powerful computers.

(This article sourced from the earth2tech.com and original version can be reached their web pages.)

XtreemOS 2.1 Release Announced

The XtreemOS consortium is pleased to announce the release of XtreemOS 2.1.
This update release will include:

• Improved installer with a new xosautoconfig tool to greatly simply and automate installation of XtreemOS instances.
   
• A number of high impact bug fixes, along with work on stability and correctness.XtreemFS 1.2, which has a number of new features along with enhanced performance and stability.
   
• XtreemOS MD (Mobile Device) -- This new version integrates XtreemOS on Internet Tablets, beginning with the Nokia N8xx models.

This makes it possible to launch jobs and interact with XtreemOS resources via a special client with a simple single signon.

• Virtual Nodes -- a framework to provide fault tolerance for grid applications by replicating them over multiple nodes.
   
• XOSSAGA -- a set of technologies to allow you to run SAGA compliant applications on top of XtreemOS unmodified.

Downloading
An updated list of Mandriva Mirrors can be found at http://api.mandriva.com/mirrors/list.php and http://twiki.mdklinuxfaq.org/en/Mandriva_mirrors.
The ISO files for XtreemOS releases are in the folder /devel/xtreemos/iso/2.1
Changes
This release has concentrated strictly on bug-fixes and polishing. You can find the change log at http://sourceforge.net/apps/mantisbt/xtreemos/roadmap_page.php.
All users are encouraged to test the new ISO and report any issues to our bug tracker at http://sourceforge.net/apps/mantisbt/xtreemos/main_page.php.

About XtreemOS
 XtreemOS 2.1 is the result of an ongoing project with 18 academic and industrial partners into the design and implementation of an open source grid operating system including native support for virtual organizations (VO) ease of use. XtreemOS is running on a wide range of hardware ranging from smartphones, PCs and Linux clusters.

A set of system services, extending those found in traditional Linux, provides users with all the grid capabilities associated with current grid middleware, but fully integrated into the OS. Based on Linux, XtreemOS provides distributed support for VOs spanning across many machines and sites along with appropriate interfaces for grid OS services.

When installed on a participating machine, the XtreemOS system provides for the grid what an operating system offers for a single computer: abstraction from the hardware and secure resource sharing between different users. XtreemOS provides for users, the vision of a large powerful single workstation environment, but removing the complex resource management issues of a grid environment.