Issue 143 August/September 2015 CONTENTS Laboratory Informatics Profile Making lighter work of heavy data
Sophia Ktori profiles Waters' NuGenesis and its data capture abilities International cooperation: A portable format for lab data
Wolfgang Colsman andRachel Uphill describe the work of Allotrope Foundation in harmonising lab data formats
High-Performance Computing China: two 100 Petaflop machines within a year? The world's fastest supercomputer offers an open invitation
Tom Wilkie interviewed professor Yutong Lu, the deputy chief designer of the Tianhe-2 China kicks commercial companies overseas
Tom wilkie reports on how the Chinese Government is supporting commercial computing companies in their export drive
The new realism: software runs slowly on supercomputers
Robert Roe andTom Wilkie report that we need to recalibrate our expectations of exascale and tune our soſtware better
Your money and your life in the cloud? Applications Profile: The silver bullet for engineering simulation?
Gemma Church profiles CD-adapco and how its soſtware improves simulation and collaboration
Profile: Simulating one step at a time
Gemma Church profiles Maplesoſt and its expansion beyond symbolic computing to modelling and simulation
Cloud computing powers the profitability of wind energy Simulation on show in Paris Robert Roe previews the Altair European Technology Conference
Resources Suppliers' directory
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Te wind energy industry is using cloud-based modelling and simulation to solve engineering problems, as Gemma Church reports
32 26 24 22
Tere are life and death issues dependent on big data and the cloud. Tom Wilkie previews the ISC Cloud and Big Data conference to be held at the end of September
20 12
Tom Wilkie reports on how the US embargo has fostered the development of China's ShenWei CPU chip, which will power one of two 100 Petaflop computers
16 18 4 8
Software, speed, simulation
Tis issue starts the expansion of our coverage of modelling, simulation, and engineering, with the first of a series of profiles of companies providing the soſtware that makes an engineer's life easier. Gemma Church profiles CD-adapco on page 24 and Maplesoſt on page 26. Over time, we hope these articles will grow into a valuable archive profiling the industry and the range of soſtware available. Gemma also illustrates the use of engineering soſtware in her article on wind energy on page 28. ISC High Performance took place in
Frankfurt in July, and although everyone will take their own impressions away from such a large event, for me three themes emerged: speed; soſtware; and China. Tere appeared to be a much wider
acceptance that the traditional Linpack measure of a supercomputer's speed (as used in the Top500 rankings, for example) does not reflect how fast a real-life application will run on the machine. Adrian Giordani discussed this issue on page 22 of our June/July 2015 issue, and we return to it on page 22 of this issue. Application soſtware needs to be tuned if it is to run efficiently on massively parallel machines, and while this has been recognised for some time, the topic came up repeatedly in Frankfurt. Perhaps most interesting, however, were the
insights to be gained on the ambitions of both Government and private enterprise in China. China expects to have not one but two 100 Pflop machines by 2016, one of them powered by China's own CPU chip, as reported on page 12. Te deputy chief designer of the world's fastest supercomputer, professor Yutong Lu gave Scientific Computing World an exclusive interview, in which she invited other countries scientists to come and use the facility (page 16), while China's commercial companies have their eyes set firmly on the export market (page 18).
Tom Wilkie Editor-in-chief
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AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2015 3
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