The Technical Papers Program at SC is the leading venue for presenting the highest-quality original research, from the foundations of HPC to its emerging frontiers. Papers presented at SC have to pass a high bar – only 21% of submissions were accepted for SC12. Abstract submissions are due April 5th and full submissions are due no later than April 12th 2013. The SC13 call for papers is available in PDF format as well.

The Khronos Group today announced the ratification and public release of the OpenCL 1.2 specification, providing enhanced performance and functionality to the industry-standard for heterogeneous, high-performance computing. A new conformance test suite was also made available to the developer community. New features in OpenCL 1.2 include seamless sharing of media and surfaces with DirectX® 9 and 11, enhanced image support, custom devices and kernels, device partitioning and separate compilation and linking of objects. The OpenCL 1.2 specifications, online reference pages and reference cards are all available on the Khronos website.

The 36th edition of the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers confirms the rumored takeover of the top spot by the Chinese Tianhe-1A system at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin, achieving a performance level of 2.57 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second).

What would you have if you put over 7000 NVIDIA Tesla GPUs together? Chances are you would have the worlds fastest computer. Chinas National University of Defense Technology has put together 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 (Fermi) GPUs, 14,336 CPUs, 262TB of memory and 2PB of storage, giving them the worlds fastest super computer with a Linpack performance of 2.5 petaflops. Peak performance of the new Tianhe-1A super computer is 4.7 petaflops. Oh, did I mention it draws 4 Megawatts of power! The Tianhe-1A super computer means the Us has lost its top spot in the TOP500.

The Western Australian Supercomputer Program (WASP) in conjunction with iVEC and the University of Western Australia is currently running an OpenCL course during the 2010 iVEC/WASP summer school programme. The course will concentrate on teaching students the fundamentals of OpenCL with a goal towards helping students gain a fundamental understanding of OpenCL as a technology framework for enabling heterogenous parallel processing. Online slides sets are available as the course unfolds.

AMD announced collaborate with SiSoftware to develope one of the first industry benchmark testing suites for OpenCL. To be released by SiSoftware, the OpenCL GPGPU benchmark suite is part of SiSoftware Sandra 2010. The benchmark suite includes remote analysis, benchmarking and diagnostic features for PCs, servers, mobile devices and networks, and can be used to test OpenCL performance on ATI Stream technology.

Top500.org will announce the new list of world’s most powerful supercomputers during this month during Supercomputing 09 conference held in Portland, Oregon between November 14-20. Among those announcements, the Chinese National University of Defense Technology is hoping to have their new system listed in the top ten, running in practice at 563.1 TFLOPS and theoretically at 1.206 PFLOPS using GPUs running Linpack, SOPEoptimized code. Their supercomputer is using 5120 AMD RV770 GPUs.