A woman passes outside of the a Russian commercial bank in capital Nicosia, Cyprus, Tuesday, March 19, 2013. A high proportion of deposits in Cypriot banks are believed to be held by Russians and Cypriot Finance Minister Michalis Sarris is flying to Moscow Tuesday to meet with his Russian counterpart. Financial markets are reported to be tense Tuesday as investors await a vote in Cyprus on a contentious plan to help fund the country's bailout by a one off charge on bank deposits although there may be a change to the proposed levy to spare small account holders. (AP Photo/Petros Karadjias)
A woman passes outside of the a Russian commercial bank in capital Nicosia, Cyprus, Tuesday, March 19, 2013. A high proportion of deposits in Cypriot banks are believed to be held by Russians and Cypriot Finance Minister Michalis Sarris is flying to Moscow Tuesday to meet with his Russian counterpart. Financial markets are reported to be tense Tuesday as investors await a vote in Cyprus on a contentious plan to help fund the country's bailout by a one off charge on bank deposits although there may be a change to the proposed levy to spare small account holders. (AP Photo/Petros Karadjias)
A couple pass outside of the a Russian commercial bank in capital Nicosia, Cyprus, Tuesday, March 19, 2013. A high proportion of deposits in Cypriot banks are believed to be held by Russians and Cypriot Finance Minister Michalis Sarris is flying to Moscow Tuesday to meet with his Russian counterpart. Financial markets are reported to be tense Tuesday as investors await a vote in Cyprus on a contentious plan to help fund the country's bailout by a one off charge on bank deposits although there may be a change to the proposed levy to spare small account holders. (AP Photo/Petros Karadjias)
Pedestrians pass outside the headquarters of Bank of Cyprus as the bank will remain closed for two days in Athens, Tuesday, March 19, 2013. Banks stocks were sharply lower on the Athens Stock Exchange, as trading resumed for the first time in Greece since the details of a bailout in Cyprus and a shock levy on bank deposits were announced. Following a public holiday Monday, Greek branches of the Cypriot lenders the Bank of Cyprus, Laiki Bank and Hellenic will remain closed Tuesday and Wednesday. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis)
A customer of Bank of Cyprus uses the ATM at the headquarters offices as the bank will remain closed for two days in Athens, Tuesday, March 19, 2013. Banks stocks were sharply lower on the Athens Stock Exchange, as trading resumed for the first time in Greece since the details of a bailout in Cyprus and a shock levy on bank deposits were announced. Following a public holiday Monday, Greek branches of the Cypriot lenders the Bank of Cyprus, Laiki Bank and Hellenic will remain closed Tuesday and Wednesday. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis)
Customers of Bank of Cyprus use the ATMs at the headquarter offices as the bank will remain closed for two days in Athens, Tuesday, March 19, 2013. Banks stocks were sharply lower on the Athens Stock Exchange, as trading resumed for the first time in Greece since the details of a bailout in Cyprus and a shock levy on bank deposits were announced. Following a public holiday Monday, Greek branches of the Cypriot lenders the Bank of Cyprus, Laiki Bank and Hellenic remained closed Tuesday and Wednesday. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis)
NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) ? Cypriot government officials sought Tuesday to alleviate the pain on small savers from a plan to raid bank deposits that has caused outrage in the country and sent jitters through European financial markets.
Just hours ahead of an expected vote in the country's 56-member Parliament on the seizure of a percentage of deposits, officials sought to limit the impact on small savers. They even hinted that the country was looking to limit the amount it is to raise from the measure's imposition ? a move that could cover any shortfall from freeing smaller deposits from the charge.
A new draft bill discussed in Parliament's finance committee proposed to spare all deposits below ?20,000 ($25,900) from a levy. Those between ?20,000 and ?100,000 ($129,290) would still have a 6.75 percent charge imposed, and those above ?100,000 would be hit for 9.9 percent, in line with the original plan put forward at the weekend.
A vote in favor of the bank account confiscation is needed if Cyprus is to get ?10 billion in rescue loans from its euro partners and the International Monetary Fund. The seizure of deposits is meant to raise ?5.8 billion, which is part of the country's rescue.
If the vote fails to get through Parliament, Cyprus faces potential bankruptcy and a possible from the euro, which could reignite concerns in financial markets over the future of the single currency.
Although Cyprus is the smallest eurozone country to be bailed out, the details of the plan sent shockwaves through the single currency area as it was the first time European authorities have targeted people's bank accounts. Other bailed out countries such as Greece, Ireland and Portugal have raised funds through imposing new taxes.
Proponents of the Cypriot account levy argue that this way gets foreigners who have taken advantage of Cyprus's low-tax regime to share the cost of the bailout of the country's banks, which have been hit hard by their over-exposure to bad Greek debt.
About a third of all deposits in Cypriot banks are believed to be held by Russians. As lawmakers wrangled, Finance Minister Michalis Sarris was to fly to Moscow Tuesday afternoon to meet with his Russian counterpart.
Opponents point out that a blanket charge on people's bank accounts will hurt ordinary Cypriots more, and could shake the confidence of all in the country's banking sector. And by going after deposits, European policymakers have set a precedent that could be repeated in the future. The worry of bank runs across Europe lies at the heart of the concerns in markets at the moment.
In a sign of the scale of disagreement over the deposit charge, the country's central bank governor, Panicos Demetriades, recommended that no accounts below ?100,000 be touched. That level represents the amount of savings that are supposed to be insured if a bank collapses.
"We believe that deposits up to ?100,000 should not be levied," said Demetriades. "The credibility of and trust in the banking sector depends on this."
Banks have been shut until Thursday to prevent a bank run. Demetriades said he expects at least 10 percent of deposits to be withdrawn when the banks re-open.
"We expect outflows, but the European Central Bank has assured us that it will provide adequate liquidity to the banks because it will consider them viable," he said.
Eurozone finance ministers held a telephone conference Monday night, and concluded that small depositors should not be hit as hard as others. They said the Cypriot authorities should stagger the deposit seizures more, but insisted that the overall take should stay the same.
The new Cypriot proposal, if approved, would raise less funds than the ?5.8 demanded. It was unclear how the shortfall might be made up.
However, Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades told German Chancellor Angela Merkel in a telephone conversation Monday night that "the possibility of reducing the requirements from self-raised funds is being explored," government spokesman Christos Stylianides said Tuesday.
The two leaders were expected to speak again on Tuesday, Stylianides said.
Cyprus's central bank governor noted that the ECB "believes we have to try to protect guaranteed deposits."
Demetriades stressed the importance of the bill being voted on and passing in Parliament.
"It's important for the future of the banking sector and the economy that this bill is passed," he said in the committee meeting, adding that "we believe that once trust is restored, deposits will return."
Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund which is participating in Cyprus's bailout, said in Frankfurt that the IMF was "extremely supportive of the Cypriot authorities' intentions to introduce more progressive rates in the one-off tax."
Fivetran, a new Y Combinator-backed startup that is launching today, wants to bring spreadsheets into the modern age and make it easier for users to work with messy data and analyze large amounts of information. Most people, for better or worse, use their spreadsheets as databases, and Fivetran acknowledges this by combining SQL-like queries with standard spreadsheet functions and statistical tools that will look familiar to users of more advanced tools like Matlab. As the co-founders George Fraser (CEO) and?Taylor Brown (head of product) told me earlier this week, the idea behind the project is that “spreadsheets have 50 percent of the power of programming and we want to bring the other 50 percent to spreadsheets.” As the founders told me, there is still a huge gulf between tools like Excel and Matlab. The earliest prototypes of Fivetran still leaned more toward the Matlab side of things and looked more like a programming environment. Today, however, the service is more like a regular spreadsheet with extensive wizards that guide you through complex data transformations (including regression models) and the SQL-like selects and joins, as well as the tools data cleaning and text-mining features. Because the calculations happen in the cloud (on Amazon’s EC2 platform), spreadsheets can be extremely large and complex. The service, which the team started working on last December, allows users to upload Excel documents, as well as CSV and JSON files and start working with them immediately (in the long run, the team plans to add direct connections to databases, too). To give people a better idea of the power of Fivetran, the founders also created a March Madness bracket simulator, as well as a set of tutorials. Once they have added their initial data, users can manipulate it using Fivetran’s “step” system, which allows them to create additional sheets based on their calculations. This is a bit of a departure from how most spreadsheets work, but you can also still use your familiar Excel formulas (think SUM(a,b) etc.) to work with your data as well. The team is currently working on adding unit testing and a revision control system for spreadsheets. Fivetran is using an interesting pricing model that is a bit similar to what you would expect from a hosting provider. There are free accounts that allow you to create up to five projects that can use up to 1GB of memory. Basic accounts start
New ultra-efficient HPC data center debutsPublic release date: 19-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: David Glickson david.glickson@nrel.gov 303-275-4097 DOE/National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Scientists and researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are constantly innovating, integrating novel technologies, and "walking the talk." Since 1982, NREL has won 52 R&D 100 Awards known in the research and development community as "the Oscars of Innovation" for its groundbreaking work.
When it came time for the lab to build its own high performance computing (HPC) data center, the NREL team knew it would have to be made up of firsts: The first HPC data center dedicated solely to advancing energy systems integration, renewable energy research, and energy efficiency technologies. The HPC data center ranked first in the world when it comes to energy efficiency. The first petascale HPC to use warm-water liquid cooling and reach an annualized average power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.06 or better.
To accomplish this, NREL worked closely with industry leaders to track rapid technology advances and to develop a holistic approach to data center sustainability in the lab's new Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF).
"We took an integrated approach to the HPC system, the data center, and the building as part of the ESIF project," NREL's Computational Science Center Director Steve Hammond said. "First, we wanted an energy-efficient HPC system appropriate for our workload. This is being supplied by HP and Intel. A new component-level liquid cooling system, developed by HP, will be used to keep computer components within safe operating range, reducing the number of fans in the backs of the racks."
Next, the NREL team, which included the design firms SmithGroupJJR and the Integral Group, created the most energy-efficient data center it could to house and provide power and cooling to the HPC system. High-voltage (480 VAC) electricity is supplied directly to the racks rather than the typical 208 V, which saves on power electronics equipment, power conversions, and losses. Energy-efficient pumps largely replace noisy, less-efficient fans.
"Last but not least, we wanted to capture and use the heat generated by the HPC system," Hammond said. "Most data centers simply throw away the heat generated by the computers. An important part of the ESIF is that we will capture as much of the heat as possible that is generated by the HPC system in the data center and reuse that as the primary heat source for the ESIF office space and laboratories. These three things manifest themselves in an integrated 'chips-to-bricks' approach."
Like NREL's Research Support Facility, the ESIF HPC data center did not cost more to build than the average facility of its kind. It actually cost less to construct than comparable data centers and will be much cheaper to operate. NREL's approach was to minimize the energy needed, supply it as efficiently as possible, and then capture and reuse the heat generated.
"Compared to a typical data center, we may save $800,000 of operating expenses per year," Hammond said. "Because we are capturing and using waste heat, we may save another $200,000 that would otherwise be used to heat the building. So, we are looking at saving almost $1 million per year in operation costs for a data center that cost less to build than a typical data center."
Warm-Water Cooling Boosts Data Center Efficiency
The ultra-efficient HPC system in NREL's new data center has been designed in collaboration with HP and Intel. The HPC system will be deployed in two phases that will include scalable HP ProLiant SL230s and SL250s Generation 8 (Gen8) servers based on eight-core Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors as well as the next generation of servers using future 22nm Ivy Bridge architecture-based Intel Xeon processors and Intel Many Integrated Core architecture-based Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. The first phase of the HPC installation began in November 2012, and the system will reach petascale capacity in the summer of 2013.
In the spirit of overall energy efficiency, the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor delivers on several fronts. According to Intel, it can easily port complete applications in a short time, so software engineers won't need specialized tools or new languages to support significant software packages. "Intel coprocessors also increase the efficiency of computer resource usage," said Stephen Wheat, general manager of high performance computing at Intel. "The methods of code optimization for Xeon Phi are identical to what one does to make the most of Xeon processors. Finely tuned optimizations for Xeon Phi almost always result in a better-performing source code for Xeon processors. As the optimized and tuned application is run in production, the achieved performance per watt on both Xeon Phi and Xeon processors allows achieving the results with the lowest energy use."
While some of the NREL HPC components may be off the shelf, the team is taking a different approach in cooling this supercomputer.
"In traditional computer systems, you have a mechanical chiller outside that delivers cold water into the data center, where air-conditioning units blow cold air under a raised floor to try to keep computer components from overheating," Hammond said. "From a data center perspective, that's not very efficient; it's like putting your beverage on your kitchen table and then going outside to turn up the air conditioner to get your drink cold."
"NREL's ultimate HPC system is currently under development and will be a new, warm-water cooled high-performance system," said Ed Turkel, group manager of HPC marketing at HP. "It will be a next-generation HPC solution that's specifically designed for high power efficiency and extreme density, as well as high performance things that NREL requires."
Starting this summer, NREL's HPC data center will require just over 1 megawatt of power to operate. "That's a lot of power; the heat dissipated from that is very substantial," Hammond said. "Getting the heat directly to liquid rather than through air first and then to liquid is the most efficient way to utilize it."
Water being supplied to the servers will be approximately 75 degrees Fahrenheit; the water returning from the HPC will be in excess of 100 degrees Fahrenheit and is designed to be the primary source of heat for ESIF's office and lab spaces. Data-center waste heat is even used under the front plaza and walkway outside the building to help melt snow and ice. Thus, the heat byproduct from the data center will also improve safety around the ESIF.
Compared to a typical data center, NREL's HPC data center will be much warmer. The 75-degree-Fahrenheit design point is a higher starting temperature for computer cooling. Starting at this temperature allows NREL to eliminate compressor-based cooling systems and instead use cooling towers. In a data center, this is comparable to a homeowner using an energy-efficient swamp cooler rather than an air conditioner. In addition, the pump energy needed to move liquid in the cooling system is much less than the fan energy needed to move the air in a traditional data center. Water is about 1,000 times more effective than air in terms of the thermodynamics, or the heat exchange.
"We're quite enamored with NREL being able to reuse the heat for the building and parts of the campus," Wheat said. "While others have done this before, here we are looking at a combined total efficiency goal and not just harvesting heat. We're looking to see how this can be the best solution for the entire campus."
Using the HPC's waste heat to boost the ESIF's sustainability and finding unique solutions to cut the data center's PUE are just what NREL does. "This is in our DNA; it is part of our mission at the lab, and we want others to follow suit," Hammond said. "NREL isn't one-of-a kind in what we are doing but we've set out to be the first of a kind. For us, it just makes sense. Others can follow suit if it makes dollars and sense."
The lab's industry partners also see a long-term relationship for energy efficiency and HPC, especially when it comes to exascale computing.
"We see the area of HPC as being insatiable; people will have a need for ever-greater performance," Wheat said. "One of the things we are mindful of is that while our systems are becoming denser in terms of footprint, they are becoming more power efficient. NREL is the premiere place to demonstrate a means to continue the growth of HPC capability in an environmentally friendly way."
HP's Turkel echoes that sentiment: "As power-efficient and dense as our HPC systems are, to meet our customer's rapidly expanding requirements for performance, we would need to grow even our most powerful and efficient system to be impractically large and complex, while consuming enormous amounts of energy.
"To get to the levels of scale that our customers are demanding of us, we have to fundamentally change the dynamic around power, density, and performance," Turkel added. "We have to be able to do it in a much smaller package using less energy. This project is a step in that direction and it's apropos that NREL is a partner in the effort."
"eBay, Facebook, and others have data centers that are water capable, but there aren't any products on the market now that are providing liquid cooling," Hammond said. "NREL is getting the first product that is direct-component liquid cooled. We're going to show it's possible, efficient, safe, and reliable."
Expanding NREL's View into the Unseen
The $10 million HPC system will support the breadth of research at NREL, leading to increased efficiency and lower costs for research on clean energy technologies including solar photovoltaics, wind energy, electric vehicles, buildings technologies, and renewable fuels.
The new system is crucial to advancing NREL's mission and will enable scientists to address challenges that have been intractable to date. The new system will greatly expand NREL's modeling and simulation capabilities, including advancing materials research and developing a deeper understanding of biological and chemical processes. "Modeling and simulation capability is a key part of advancing our technologies," Hammond said. "It allows us to do research we can't do experimentally because it would be too expensive, or would take too long if actual systems were built. We can mathematically model and run numerical simulations that allow us to understand things through direct observation."
Before building an HPC data center in the ESIF, NREL had a small system on its campus, while collaborating with Sandia National Laboratories on the RedMesa supercomputer to bridge the gap until NREL had a facility to house its own HPC system. For the past two years, the NREL/Sandia solution has been oversubscribed. "We averaged 92% utilization day in and day out; we needed much more capable systems to meet growing demand for modeling and simulation," Hammond said.
According to Hammond, NREL will also reach out to the local utility to study demand-response scenarios. "There are times in summer when electricity demand is high that we could shed load with the data center to help Xcel Energy." NREL could alter workloads and schedule particular jobs to run in mornings when there's a high demand for heat and cooling is less expensive. In another scenario, NREL could schedule workloads to take advantage of lower electricity costs or be mindful of when rates are higher to help reduce operating expenses. "There is a lot of interest in looking at how to integrate the HPC system in the building automation system as part of the energy systems integration work that we're doing," Hammond said.
"The computational activities at NREL had to be part of the efficiency equation," said Wheat. "A motivation for Intel to work with NREL was the ability to work together to validate how to do an efficient data center. We needed to be able to assure that we had the right balance of processor performance for the workload with a performance-per-watt focus. Being a partner with NREL in this process is of value to us for demonstrating leadership in our community. Others are taking notice of what NREL has done; I believe we all benefit from that."
###
Learn more about Computational Sciences at NREL and the ESIF's HPC and data centerPDF.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
New ultra-efficient HPC data center debutsPublic release date: 19-Mar-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: David Glickson david.glickson@nrel.gov 303-275-4097 DOE/National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Scientists and researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are constantly innovating, integrating novel technologies, and "walking the talk." Since 1982, NREL has won 52 R&D 100 Awards known in the research and development community as "the Oscars of Innovation" for its groundbreaking work.
When it came time for the lab to build its own high performance computing (HPC) data center, the NREL team knew it would have to be made up of firsts: The first HPC data center dedicated solely to advancing energy systems integration, renewable energy research, and energy efficiency technologies. The HPC data center ranked first in the world when it comes to energy efficiency. The first petascale HPC to use warm-water liquid cooling and reach an annualized average power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating of 1.06 or better.
To accomplish this, NREL worked closely with industry leaders to track rapid technology advances and to develop a holistic approach to data center sustainability in the lab's new Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF).
"We took an integrated approach to the HPC system, the data center, and the building as part of the ESIF project," NREL's Computational Science Center Director Steve Hammond said. "First, we wanted an energy-efficient HPC system appropriate for our workload. This is being supplied by HP and Intel. A new component-level liquid cooling system, developed by HP, will be used to keep computer components within safe operating range, reducing the number of fans in the backs of the racks."
Next, the NREL team, which included the design firms SmithGroupJJR and the Integral Group, created the most energy-efficient data center it could to house and provide power and cooling to the HPC system. High-voltage (480 VAC) electricity is supplied directly to the racks rather than the typical 208 V, which saves on power electronics equipment, power conversions, and losses. Energy-efficient pumps largely replace noisy, less-efficient fans.
"Last but not least, we wanted to capture and use the heat generated by the HPC system," Hammond said. "Most data centers simply throw away the heat generated by the computers. An important part of the ESIF is that we will capture as much of the heat as possible that is generated by the HPC system in the data center and reuse that as the primary heat source for the ESIF office space and laboratories. These three things manifest themselves in an integrated 'chips-to-bricks' approach."
Like NREL's Research Support Facility, the ESIF HPC data center did not cost more to build than the average facility of its kind. It actually cost less to construct than comparable data centers and will be much cheaper to operate. NREL's approach was to minimize the energy needed, supply it as efficiently as possible, and then capture and reuse the heat generated.
"Compared to a typical data center, we may save $800,000 of operating expenses per year," Hammond said. "Because we are capturing and using waste heat, we may save another $200,000 that would otherwise be used to heat the building. So, we are looking at saving almost $1 million per year in operation costs for a data center that cost less to build than a typical data center."
Warm-Water Cooling Boosts Data Center Efficiency
The ultra-efficient HPC system in NREL's new data center has been designed in collaboration with HP and Intel. The HPC system will be deployed in two phases that will include scalable HP ProLiant SL230s and SL250s Generation 8 (Gen8) servers based on eight-core Intel Xeon E5-2670 processors as well as the next generation of servers using future 22nm Ivy Bridge architecture-based Intel Xeon processors and Intel Many Integrated Core architecture-based Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. The first phase of the HPC installation began in November 2012, and the system will reach petascale capacity in the summer of 2013.
In the spirit of overall energy efficiency, the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor delivers on several fronts. According to Intel, it can easily port complete applications in a short time, so software engineers won't need specialized tools or new languages to support significant software packages. "Intel coprocessors also increase the efficiency of computer resource usage," said Stephen Wheat, general manager of high performance computing at Intel. "The methods of code optimization for Xeon Phi are identical to what one does to make the most of Xeon processors. Finely tuned optimizations for Xeon Phi almost always result in a better-performing source code for Xeon processors. As the optimized and tuned application is run in production, the achieved performance per watt on both Xeon Phi and Xeon processors allows achieving the results with the lowest energy use."
While some of the NREL HPC components may be off the shelf, the team is taking a different approach in cooling this supercomputer.
"In traditional computer systems, you have a mechanical chiller outside that delivers cold water into the data center, where air-conditioning units blow cold air under a raised floor to try to keep computer components from overheating," Hammond said. "From a data center perspective, that's not very efficient; it's like putting your beverage on your kitchen table and then going outside to turn up the air conditioner to get your drink cold."
"NREL's ultimate HPC system is currently under development and will be a new, warm-water cooled high-performance system," said Ed Turkel, group manager of HPC marketing at HP. "It will be a next-generation HPC solution that's specifically designed for high power efficiency and extreme density, as well as high performance things that NREL requires."
Starting this summer, NREL's HPC data center will require just over 1 megawatt of power to operate. "That's a lot of power; the heat dissipated from that is very substantial," Hammond said. "Getting the heat directly to liquid rather than through air first and then to liquid is the most efficient way to utilize it."
Water being supplied to the servers will be approximately 75 degrees Fahrenheit; the water returning from the HPC will be in excess of 100 degrees Fahrenheit and is designed to be the primary source of heat for ESIF's office and lab spaces. Data-center waste heat is even used under the front plaza and walkway outside the building to help melt snow and ice. Thus, the heat byproduct from the data center will also improve safety around the ESIF.
Compared to a typical data center, NREL's HPC data center will be much warmer. The 75-degree-Fahrenheit design point is a higher starting temperature for computer cooling. Starting at this temperature allows NREL to eliminate compressor-based cooling systems and instead use cooling towers. In a data center, this is comparable to a homeowner using an energy-efficient swamp cooler rather than an air conditioner. In addition, the pump energy needed to move liquid in the cooling system is much less than the fan energy needed to move the air in a traditional data center. Water is about 1,000 times more effective than air in terms of the thermodynamics, or the heat exchange.
"We're quite enamored with NREL being able to reuse the heat for the building and parts of the campus," Wheat said. "While others have done this before, here we are looking at a combined total efficiency goal and not just harvesting heat. We're looking to see how this can be the best solution for the entire campus."
Using the HPC's waste heat to boost the ESIF's sustainability and finding unique solutions to cut the data center's PUE are just what NREL does. "This is in our DNA; it is part of our mission at the lab, and we want others to follow suit," Hammond said. "NREL isn't one-of-a kind in what we are doing but we've set out to be the first of a kind. For us, it just makes sense. Others can follow suit if it makes dollars and sense."
The lab's industry partners also see a long-term relationship for energy efficiency and HPC, especially when it comes to exascale computing.
"We see the area of HPC as being insatiable; people will have a need for ever-greater performance," Wheat said. "One of the things we are mindful of is that while our systems are becoming denser in terms of footprint, they are becoming more power efficient. NREL is the premiere place to demonstrate a means to continue the growth of HPC capability in an environmentally friendly way."
HP's Turkel echoes that sentiment: "As power-efficient and dense as our HPC systems are, to meet our customer's rapidly expanding requirements for performance, we would need to grow even our most powerful and efficient system to be impractically large and complex, while consuming enormous amounts of energy.
"To get to the levels of scale that our customers are demanding of us, we have to fundamentally change the dynamic around power, density, and performance," Turkel added. "We have to be able to do it in a much smaller package using less energy. This project is a step in that direction and it's apropos that NREL is a partner in the effort."
"eBay, Facebook, and others have data centers that are water capable, but there aren't any products on the market now that are providing liquid cooling," Hammond said. "NREL is getting the first product that is direct-component liquid cooled. We're going to show it's possible, efficient, safe, and reliable."
Expanding NREL's View into the Unseen
The $10 million HPC system will support the breadth of research at NREL, leading to increased efficiency and lower costs for research on clean energy technologies including solar photovoltaics, wind energy, electric vehicles, buildings technologies, and renewable fuels.
The new system is crucial to advancing NREL's mission and will enable scientists to address challenges that have been intractable to date. The new system will greatly expand NREL's modeling and simulation capabilities, including advancing materials research and developing a deeper understanding of biological and chemical processes. "Modeling and simulation capability is a key part of advancing our technologies," Hammond said. "It allows us to do research we can't do experimentally because it would be too expensive, or would take too long if actual systems were built. We can mathematically model and run numerical simulations that allow us to understand things through direct observation."
Before building an HPC data center in the ESIF, NREL had a small system on its campus, while collaborating with Sandia National Laboratories on the RedMesa supercomputer to bridge the gap until NREL had a facility to house its own HPC system. For the past two years, the NREL/Sandia solution has been oversubscribed. "We averaged 92% utilization day in and day out; we needed much more capable systems to meet growing demand for modeling and simulation," Hammond said.
According to Hammond, NREL will also reach out to the local utility to study demand-response scenarios. "There are times in summer when electricity demand is high that we could shed load with the data center to help Xcel Energy." NREL could alter workloads and schedule particular jobs to run in mornings when there's a high demand for heat and cooling is less expensive. In another scenario, NREL could schedule workloads to take advantage of lower electricity costs or be mindful of when rates are higher to help reduce operating expenses. "There is a lot of interest in looking at how to integrate the HPC system in the building automation system as part of the energy systems integration work that we're doing," Hammond said.
"The computational activities at NREL had to be part of the efficiency equation," said Wheat. "A motivation for Intel to work with NREL was the ability to work together to validate how to do an efficient data center. We needed to be able to assure that we had the right balance of processor performance for the workload with a performance-per-watt focus. Being a partner with NREL in this process is of value to us for demonstrating leadership in our community. Others are taking notice of what NREL has done; I believe we all benefit from that."
###
Learn more about Computational Sciences at NREL and the ESIF's HPC and data centerPDF.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
President Obama invited Yityish Aynaw, the first black Israeli to be named?Miss Israel,?to join him and the prime minister for a meal. Her success is a victory for long marginalized Ethiopian-Israelis.
By Ryan Lenora Brown,?Correspondent / March 14, 2013
A Palestinian woman walks past posters showing President Obama in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Tuesday. Obama's trip to Jerusalem and the West Bank, which Israeli officials say will take place next week, is the US leader's first trip to the region as president, and his first overseas trip since being reelected.
Nasser Shiyoukhi/AP
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In a 48-hour trip to Israel next week, President Obama will tick off the usual diplomatic visit boxes: meeting diplomats and visiting the country?s historic sites.
Skip to next paragraph Ryan Lenora Brown
Correspondent
Ryan Brown edits the Africa Monitor blog and contributes to the national and international news desks of the Monitor. She is a former Fulbright fellow to South Africa and holds a degree in history from Duke University.?
Click Here for your FREE 30 DAYS of The Christian Science Monitor Weekly Digital Edition
And then he will have dinner with a beauty queen.
Obama?s staff personally invited the newly crowned Miss Israel, Yityish Aynaw ? who is the first black Israeli to the hold the title ? to a dinner at the home of President Shimon Peres next Thursday, a symbolic nod, perhaps, to the country?s 120,000 Ethiopian Jews, a community that has long faced?discrimination?in Israel.
Ms. Aynaw, who was crowned last month and will represent Israel at this year?s Miss Earth pageant, has already dazzled the Israeli press with the narrative of her hardscrabble childhood and rags-to-riches rise to beauty-queen stardom ? and is now making the rounds in international outlets as well.
"Ten years ago I was walking around barefoot in Ethiopia,? she?told Israeli news site Ynet News?yesterday. ?I never imagined that one day I would be in the land of Israel, meeting the Israeli president and the president of the United States. I could never have imagined such a powerful and exciting situation."
Born near the town of Gondar in northwestern Ethiopia, Aynaw was an orphan by age 10, and immigrated to Israel two years later to live with her grandparents. By the time she was 19, she?d become fluent in Hebrew, won a national student film competition, and was training to be a military police commander in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
Aynaw eventually led a cadre of guards, whom she trained to fire guns, man security checkpoints, and find bombs, according to?a profile in Tablet, a US-based Jewish magazine.
?I taught them to be human,? Aynaw said of her soldiers, who checked Palestinians driving through military checkpoints. ?My soldiers would ask, ?How can I be so nice when there were instances of a 9-year-old kid or a pregnant woman blowing themselves up at a checkpoint?? ? She?d tell them: ?There are many Palestinians who have a wife waiting at home, a family waiting for dad to bring bread home.?
Aynaw has offered other hints of her politics as well. She?told an Israeli news station?that she hoped to ask President Obama to release Jonathan Pollard, an American Jew who is currently serving out a life sentence for spying on the US for Israel.
And when a reporter told her that American beauty queens often tout their hopes for ?world peace,? she shot back, ?to say a sentence like that, in my opinion, is to sound retarded.?
?Iran is trying to develop a nuclear weapon, China is trying to become a superpower,? she continued. ?To say that I want world peace, of course I want it. It?s a dream. But I don?t think it will happen now.?
Ethiopian Jews have a checkered history in Israel. A series of dramatic airlifts in the 1980s and 1990s by the Israeli government brought thousands to the Jewish state, but they, their children, and subsequent waves of African immigrants have faced a hostile ? and at times overtly racist ? reception.
Today, the average income of an Ethiopian Israeli is?half that of Israelis at large, and more than half of employers surveyed in 2010 said they would prefer not to hire an Ethiopian. In January, the Israeli state copped to giving a number of Ethiopian women in Israel long-term birth control shots without their consent.
Aynaw has walked into that fray with diplomatic beauty-queen aplomb.
"It's important that a member of the Ethiopian community win the competition for the first time,? she told a judging panel during the Miss Israel competition. ?There are many different communities of many different colors in Israel, and it's important to show that to the world."
As the Tablet profile notes, however, Aynaw is not the first politically charged pick for Miss Israel. Israeli beauty pageants, he writes, have long been a powerful lens for understanding the image Israel wants to project to the world.
In 1952, at the height of tensions between Israel?s European veterans and Middle Eastern Jewish newcomers, Yemen-born Ora Vered became the first Miss Israel of Middle Eastern Jewish descent. In 1993, in the midst of Israel?s tidal wave of Soviet immigration, Kiev-born Jana Khodriker won, and in 1999, the peak of Israel?s optimism that Arab-Israeli peace was imminent, judges crowned Rana Raslan the first Arab Miss Israel.
Now, Israeli diplomats seem intent on building similar goodwill with Aynaw. Leo Vinovezky, Israel's deputy ambassador to Ethiopia,?told an Israeli newspaper?last week that ?this is the Ethiopian Jewry's finest hour."?
Aynaw will have her own shot at diplomacy of sorts when she competes in the Miss Earth pageant later this year: The competition will take place in Indonesia, a country with which Israel has no formal diplomatic ties.?
Mississippi guard Marshall Henderson (22) reacts to drawing a foul against Mississippi during the second half of an NCAA college basketball game in the final round of the Southeastern Conference tournament, Sunday, March 17, 2013, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/John Bazemore)
Mississippi guard Marshall Henderson (22) reacts to drawing a foul against Mississippi during the second half of an NCAA college basketball game in the final round of the Southeastern Conference tournament, Sunday, March 17, 2013, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/John Bazemore)
Mississippi forward Murphy Holloway (31) passes the ball as Florida guard Kenny Boynton (1) jumps over during the first half of an NCAA college basketball game in the final round of the Southeastern Conference tournament, Sunday, March 17, 2013, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/John Bazemore)
Florida center Patric Young (4) vies for a rebound with Mississippi forward Murphy Holloway (31) during the first half of an NCAA college basketball game in the final round of the Southeastern Conference tournament, Sunday, March 17, 2013, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/John Bazemore)
Mississippi head coach Andy Kennedy reacts to play against Florida during the first half of an NCAA college basketball game in the final round of the Southeastern Conference tournament, Sunday, March 17, 2013, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/John Bazemore)
Florida guard Mike Rosario (3) heads to the hoop against Mississippi's Reginald Buckner (23) and Murphy Holloway (31) during the first half of an NCAA college basketball game in the final round of the Southeastern Conference tournament, Sunday, March 17, 2013, in Nashville, Tenn. (AP Photo/Dave Martin)
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) ? The Mississippi Rebels now have two very big items on their resume that nobody can take away.
Murphy Holloway scored 23 points and Marshall Henderson had 21 as the Rebels gave coach Andy Kennedy his first NCAA tournament berth by upsetting 13th-ranked Florida 66-63 on Sunday for the Southeastern Conference tournament championship.
"So much is made about the NCAA tournament," Kennedy said. "I was just glad to get the albatross that is the NCAA tournament off the neck of our program so people can now exhale and get a new focal point."
The Rebels (26-8) have won seven of eight grabbing their first tournament title since 1981 and their second ever. Even though they thought reaching this game for the first time since 2001 probably clinched their seventh NCAA bid in Kennedy's seventh season as coach, the Rebels wanted the SEC championship too.
"We worked so hard to get to this point, and it just feels so good to celebrate with the guys in the locker room," Rebels senior guard Nick Williams said. "I don't know man. I'm at a loss for words."
Reginald Buckner added 13 points for Ole Miss, which won two straight without point guard Jarvis Summers. The sophomore suffered a concussion in Friday night's 64-62 win over Missouri. That forced Kennedy to use Ladarius White, while Henderson and freshman Derrick Millinghaus also handled the ball.
"Can you imagine going into a game of this magnitude with a backup quarterback?" Kennedy said. "And that's what this team had to do."
Florida (26-7) hasn't won this tournament since wrapping up a three-peat in 2007, and the Gators lost to Kentucky in this game two years go. The SEC regular season champs still haven't won a game by fewer than 10 points this season. They go into the NCAA tournament 0-6 in games decided by six points or less.
"The people trying to create this drama around a situation that's not necessarily true," Florida coach Billy Donovan said. "Our guys haven't lost confidence at all. They dug themselves a hole with our lack of defense. ... The truth of the matter is we were up 12 and allowed Ole Miss to shoot 53 percent in the second half and we shot 29 percent."
The Gators had a final chance to force overtime. Scottie Wilbekin missed two free throws with 4.2 seconds left, and Kenny Boynton's last gasp 3 glanced off the rim after he took a step back to make sure he was over the line.
"I kind of rushed it because I was trying to back up and make sure it was a 3-point shot before time ran out," Boynton said.
Mike Rosario had 18 points and Boynton added 13 for the Gators.
Ole Miss outshot the regular season champs 47.4 percent (27 of 57) compared to 37.3 percent (22 of 59) and outrebounded them 37-34. That gave the Rebels an 11-5 edge on second-chance points. The Gators struggled at the free throw line, making 3 of 11 there in the second half. They missed their final five attempts over the last 4:19.
Florida came in third nationally holding opponents to 52.3 points a game, while Ole Miss is the sixth-best scoring offense in the country with 78.7 points a game.
"The frustrating part for me was just our defense because we clearly have been one of the better defensive teams all year long," Donovan said.
Florida led 38-26 at halftime after hitting 7 of 14 3-pointers, taking advantage of Henderson hitting just 1 of 6 from the floor with three points.
The Rebels opened the second half on a 10-3 run to get back into the game. The Gators missed eight of their first 10 shots in the half, and Henderson found Buckner for a dunk with 13:39 left that tied it up for the first time at 43. The teams swapped the lead with the Gators using seven straight points to go up 53-52 on a 3-pointer by Murphy.
Then Williams hit a jumper, Henderson scored on a driving layup, and Henderson knocked down another 3 off a miss by Williams when Buckner poked the ball out to the feisty guard, putting Ole Miss up 59-53 with 7:15 left. Henderson celebrated by doing the gator chomp at Florida fans before heading to the bench for a timeout.
Henderson was named the tournament MVP after being snubbed by league coaches for the All-SEC first team earlier in the week.
"They didn't win this tournament. We did," Henderson said. "We went in with a chip on our shoulder. Maybe they'll be smarter next year."
The Gators got within two points twice down the stretch, the last at 65-63 when Rosario drove to the basket for a layup with 35.4 seconds left. Casey Prather stole the ball from Henderson with 22.3 seconds left, and Donovan called a timeout.
Erik Murphy missed an 8-foot jump hook over Buckner with less than 10 seconds left, and Holloway grabbed his 10th rebound and was fouled immediately. He hit a free throw with 8.6 seconds remaining for the final margin setting up the Gators' last chance.
"I was just like, 'Man, just make one. Just make one just in case they hit a 3 we can go into overtime,'" Holloway recalled. "Me and my boy Reg been struggling, ever since we got here, we've been struggling. I knew I had to step up. So I stepped up. I made one."
All Critics (190) | Top Critics (40) | Fresh (195) | Rotten (8) | DVD (46)
It may be harder nowadays to dazzle audiences with fancy visual effects, but Monsters, Inc. 3D proves that smart, imaginative storytelling still does the trick every time.
Most of the charm of "Monsters Inc." comes from its vocal cast.
If history is any guide, you and your family - whether young or old - will probably want to see "Monsters University" over and over.
The movie itself stands up well, even from an adult, two-dimensional perspective.
Its reassuring message is more relevant than ever.
The good guys are those who realize that laughter is stronger than fear. That's a message worth taking to heart these jittery days.
Pixar's overlooked gem arrives in a worthwhile collector's edition bursting with features and exceptional A/V presentation.
While nippers will love the colourful creatures and their slapstick antics, grown-ups will find less humour and layers than in the likes of Toy Story, meaning less overall appeal as a result.
[I] really don't see the point of paying extra for children under eight. Their eyes are still developing, their noses are still small for slippery glasses, and... isn't a trip to the pictures enough for them in any case?
If anything, it improves with age.
Monsters displays wonderful imagination which makes it worth reliving in an extra dimension - particularly the energetic chase scene along a conveyor belt of doors.
Pixar's soaringly lovely fourth feature ...
[An] exciting, imaginative and very likable adventure.
Despite its eternal message about physical differences and the importance of love over fear of the unknown, Monsters, Inc primarily remains an ambitious concept film.
It's in the visuals that 'Monsters Inc' comes to life, from the jazzy, Norman McLaren influenced opening to the hilarious, shakycam amateur-dramatic recap over the closing credits.
Another chance to see Pixar's most dazzling premise, now spruced up with a third dimension.
Now in 3D, the filmmakers have created a wonderful reality - the reality of Monstropolis, which like the worlds of Oz and Pleasantville, whisk us far, far away on a magic carpet of fantasy
A shrewdly timed reminder of Pixar's early, heady days, when the animation powerhouse could do no wrong.
This didn't need 3D to work. It long ago passed the kids-wear-out-the-DVD-rewatching-it test.
There's really little reason to check out Monsters, Inc. 3D in... well, 3D, rather than going for a good old-fashioned 2D screening instead.
It does well, but not brilliantly: an amusing trifle from a studio whose best work still lay ahead of it.
Not quite a Pixar classic, but funny, witty and visually spectacular enough to be enjoyed again on the big screen.
Monsters, Inc. continues a positive 3D trend for the company, who appear to be selecting their upgraded titles wisely, choosing features that benefit from the additional depth.
Not even the opportunistic 3D-ification can squander the pure delight of the film's meticulously detailed world of ragtag creatures.
In an effort to improve students' access to high-demand courses, a California state senator is proposing the creation of up to 50 online courses, perhaps spurring a dialogue on college education.
By Stacy Teicher Khadaroo,?Staff writer / March 14, 2013
California State Sen. Darrell Steinberg wants to bridge two universes in education ? the traditional campus and the realm of innovative online courses.
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The leader of the California Senate unveiled legislation Wednesday that would pave the way for up to 50 online courses, in subjects that are traditionally oversubscribed, to be offered statewide for credit. Such a partnership between California?s public university systems and various online providers would ?break the bottleneck that prevents students from completing courses,? he said in a web-streamed announcement.
As the first such legislative proposal, ?it certainly is going to spark a national dialogue ? [and may mark] a turning point in instructional program delivery in this country,? says Dan Hurley, director of state relations and policy analysis for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.
With community colleges in California in recent years reporting hundreds of thousands of students on waiting lists for classes, the proposal was cheered by student Richard Copenhagen, president of the Student Senate for California Community Colleges.
?For a long time students have really suffered from a lack of access to courses they need,? he said. They have had to take ?frivolous? courses to keep their financial aid, and some have even ?gone homeless because of these significant access issues,? he said at the Wednesday press conference. Online courses won?t solve all the access issues but will offer students much-needed flexibility, he said.
The phenomenon of students being shut out of important courses because of overcrowding is most pronounced in California, but it?s not unheard of in other areas. In a survey of 1,205 community college students, 37 percent said they were unable to enroll in a class in the fall of 2011 because it was full, according to the Pearson Foundation, a nonprofit wing of the Pearson global education company.
That survey also showed 57 percent of the community college students had taken an online course.
Nationally, 6.7 million college students (about 32 percent) took at least one online course in the fall of 2011, according to a survey by Babson College.
Massive Open Online Courses, known as MOOCs, have expanded access to courses, largely offering them for free, though not usually for credit. But they are so new that it?s still unknown how well they compare with traditional in-classroom learning.
Just under 3 percent of higher education institutions offered MOOCs in 2011, but another 9 percent were planning to, the Babson survey showed. Only 30 percent of chief academic officers in the survey said they believed their faculty accepted the value and legitimacy of online education.
Two major MOOC startups are based in California, Udacity and Coursera.
Senator Steinberg and other supporters of the bill stressed that it would require a faculty panel to approve the online courses, and that it was intended as an extra tool for students, not a broad substitute for on-campus classes.
The California Faculty Association issued a statement that it would work with Steinberg on the legislation to ensure that it ?improves student success? and at the same time does not ?end up costing the state more financial and human resources in the long run.?
Another California faculty group is highly skeptical, however. ??The same people who cut our budget now are telling us to basically cheapen our educational product and basically outsource it,? says Bob Samuels, president of the University Council?American Federation of Teachers, which represents some faculty and librarians at the University of California. ?We have questions about what real faculty control will be involved and who?s profiting from this deal.?
If approved by the faculty panel, the courses could be provided by commercial ventures, according to the proposed bill.
The bill signals a growing ?openness to look at alternative forms of credit,? says Cathy Sandeen, vice president for education attainment and innovation at the American Council on Education (ACE), a higher education membership group in Washington.
Since the 1970s, ACE has reviewed military and workplace education and experiences to recommend whether they can be counted toward college degrees, she says. Now it is exploring doing something similar with MOOCs.
A study of five Coursera courses ? including a pre-calculus class and introduction to genetics and evolution ? found that all were able to satisfy faculty reviewers. That included meeting standards for ensuring the identity of the student taking the course, and proctoring online exams (via live webcam).
Fivetran, a new Y Combinator-backed startup that is launching today, wants to bring spreadsheets into the modern age and make it easier for users to work with messy data and analyze large amounts of information. Most people, for better or worse, use their spreadsheets as databases, and Fivetran acknowledges this by combining SQL-like queries with standard spreadsheet functions and statistical tools that will look familiar to users of more advanced tools like Matlab. As the co-founders George Fraser (CEO) and?Taylor Brown (head of product) told me earlier this week, the idea behind the project is that “spreadsheets have 50 percent of the power of programming and we want to bring the other 50 percent to spreadsheets.” As the founders told me, there is still a huge gulf between tools like Excel and Matlab. The earliest prototypes of Fivetran still leaned more toward the Matlab side of things and looked more like a programming environment. Today, however, the service is more like a regular spreadsheet with extensive wizards that guide you through complex data transformations (including regression models) and the SQL-like selects and joins, as well as the tools data cleaning and text-mining features. Because the calculations happen in the cloud (on Amazon’s EC2 platform), spreadsheets can be extremely large and complex. The service, which the team started working on last December, allows users to upload Excel documents, as well as CSV and JSON files and start working with them immediately (in the long run, the team plans to add direct connections to databases, too). To give people a better idea of the power of Fivetran, the founders also created a March Madness bracket simulator, as well as a set of tutorials. Once they have added their initial data, users can manipulate it using Fivetran’s “step” system, which allows them to create additional sheets based on their calculations. This is a bit of a departure from how most spreadsheets work, but you can also still use your familiar Excel formulas (think SUM(a,b) etc.) to work with your data as well. The team is currently working on adding unit testing and a revision control system for spreadsheets. Fivetran is using an interesting pricing model that is a bit similar to what you would expect from a hosting provider. There are free accounts that allow you to create up to five projects that can use up to 1GB of memory. Basic accounts start![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_su9DOvnpdI3dnb4Jc4bAlLuzaxhRGK_VU6s69wxVtvSF-ZT17Z0lvbzTGNU-9CqAiIz3c1SmkAnanB0IRbe2gB-af-5XFsH7FhGLfpyks=s0-d){kind=small}
Public release date: 19-Mar-2013
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