Nashville Technology Council

Nashville Tech Story (2/25/10)

Tuesday, 25 Venture Capital firms pledged to invest a total of $3.5 billion in technology start-ups over the next two years. The group who formed this pledge is a part of the Invest in America Alliance, headed by Intel, consisting of 25 venture capital firms as well as 17 high tech companies.  Intel suggested this figure includes a $200 million Intel Capital Investment,  which will target clean technology, information technology and biotechnology.  Venture capital firms the new alliance include Braemar Energy Ventures, Canaan Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Institutional Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Menlo Ventures, Mohr Davidow Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Sevin Rosen Funds, U.S. Venture Partners, Venrock and Walden International.

In addition to the billions of dollars promised, the 17 enterprise companies promised to hire 10,500 college graduates during the next two years, meaning some companies will be doubling their hiring of grads. These high tech companies include: Accenture, Adobe Systems, Autodesk, Broadcom, Cisco Systems, Dell, eBay, EMC Corp., GE, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Marvell Semiconductor, Microsoft, and Yahoo.

Find out more here: http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=223100356

Find out more about Invest in America Alliance here: http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/InvestinAmerica/

Nashville Tech Story (11/19/09)

Last week, Intel’s Roadshow made a stop in Music City.  I thought it a bit strange to have their roadshow following CMA’s at the Sommet, but come to find out it was a genius move.  They coupled their CMA tickets for clients and got to see some great country music as well as tout their new technologies.

The event itself was interesting.  Intel is really pushing the envelope on chip speed and size.  I learned about ticks and tocks.  Ticks are minor processor improvements, whereas tocks are large scale changes in size and momentum.

Some of their new healthcare technologies pique my interest.  They are working on bedside monitoring and clinician input modules to feed the electronic health record.

The average data center cost $1,000/square foot to build.  For every dollar spent on the data center it requires $8 for maintenance.  For every dollar spent on hardware, it requires $.50 in power and cooling.  Wow!

The Intel chip of today is the Nehalem EX and the future is the Westmere EX – Expandable.  Both are built on the Boxboro Platform.  It will continue to change the data center environment.  I was most impressed by their energy efficiencies in their new chip.  They are talking about 90% energy cost reductions and an 8 month payback as an ROI.  That is planning tough to beat.  If you are planning a tech refresh, you may want to check with the local Intel rep and have them provide you with their Excel tools to help you plan the refresh.

For more information or to download the presentations, click here.

Nashville Tech Story (11/17/09)

A Cray supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has regained the title of the world’s most powerful supercomputer, overtaking the installation that was ranked at the top in June, while China entered the Top 10 with a hybrid Intel-AMD system.

The upgraded Jaguar supercomputer at Oak Ridge, in Tennessee, now boasts a speed of 1.759 petaflops per second from its 224,162 cores, while the IBM Roadrunner system at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico slowed slightly to 1.042 petaflops per second after it was repartitioned. A petaflop is one thousand trillion calculations per second.

The list of the Top 500 supercomputers, set to be released on Monday during the SC09 supercomputing conference in Portland, Oregon, is compiled twice a year and is now in its 34th installment. The total capacity of the systems on the new list is 27.6 petaflops, up from 22.6 petaflops on the previous list in June.
Jaguar has been upgraded since June with new processors and surged ahead to take the lead. It is based on the Cray XT5 Linux supercomputer platform, which uses Advanced Micro Devices Opteron (AMD) processors. Its total peak capability is 2.3 petaflops per second.

The No. 3 system is Kraken, at the National Institute for Computational Sciences at the University of Tennessee, which performs at 832 teraflops per second. This Cray XT5 supercomputer was ranked No. 6 in June, when it was rated at just 463 teraflops per second.

Intel processors power 402 of the systems on the list, or 80.4 percent, up slightly from 399 in June. The IBM Power architecture is the second most commonly used, with 52 systems, down from 55. AMD’s Opteron family appears in 42 of the systems.

Most of the Top 500 supercomputers — 426 systems — now use quad-core processors. Only 59 use dual-core chips, and just four systems are based on single-core architectures. There were six systems on the latest list using IBM’s nine-core Cell Broadband Engine processor, also used in the PlayStation 3. Gigabit Ethernet is the internal interconnect technology in 259 installations, compared with 181 using InfiniBand.

Hewlett-Packard led in the number of systems on the list, with 210 supercomputers or 42 percent, compared with 185 for IBM. However, the IBM systems accounted for the most computing power, with 34.8 percent of total performance, down from 39.8 percent. HP held 22.8 percent.

The Top 500 list is compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim in Germany, Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

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