High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the semi-annual TOP500 BoF presentation by Jack Dongarra.The TOP500 list of supercomputers serves as a “Who’s Who” in the field of High Performance Computing. "This BoF will present detailed analyses of the TOP500 and discuss the changes in the HPC marketplace during the past years. The BoF is meant as an open forum for discussion and feedback between the TOP500 authors and the user community."The post Radio Free HPC Looks at TOP500 Trends on the Road to Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.

The action of driving an automobile is destined to take a very different route in the coming years as autonomous cars become commonplace on our roadways. The notion of autonomous driving is both scary and exciting, pushing the boundaries of what we know. IBM takes a look at one of the most vexing technology challenges posed by autonomous vehicles: how to manage all the data used in artificial intelligence development.The post Solving the Data Management Challenge of Autonomous Driving appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Univa announced the release of Navops Launch 1.0, the latest version of the most powerful hybrid HPC cloud management product and a significant advancement in the migration of HPC workloads to the cloud. Navops Launch meshes public cloud services and on-premise clusters to cost-effectively meet increasing workload demand. "A unique automation engine allows Navops Launch to integrate third-party data sources, including storage fabric, management systems, cluster and cloud environment attributes."The post Moving HPC Workloads to the Cloud with Univa’s Navops Launch 1.0 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC18 in Dallas, Michele De Lorenzi from CSCS in Switzerland provides an update on Piz Daint, the fastest supercomputer in Europe. "Recently upgraded with two additional cabinets full of NVIDIA V100 GPUs, the Cray XC50 system comes in at #5 in the world with 21.23 Petaflops of performance on the LINPACK benchmark."The post An Update on Piz Daint – the Fastest Supercomputer in Europe appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the DDN User Group at SC18 in Dallas, Brock Palen from the University of Michigan presents: HPC at the University of Michigan: A Multi‐Tenant, Multi‐Science Campus Service Provider. "Advanced Research Computing — Technology Services provides access to and support for advanced computing resources. ARC-TS facilitates new and more powerful approaches to research challenges in fields ranging from physics to linguistics, and from engineering to medicine."The post HPC at the University of Michigan: A Multi‐Tenant, Multi‐Science Campus Service Provider appeared first on insideHPC.

Raytheon in Tucson is seeking an Operations Research Simulation Engineer in our Job of the Week. "Our Modeling, Simulation and Analysis Center (MSA) headquarters in sunny Tucson, AZ, needs strong Simulation Developer and Analysts, who are ready to support Raytheon’s ongoing mission to support our war fighters and allies. Within the Systems Design & Performance directorate, MSA has the responsibility to provide, develop, and maintain performance and Operations Research simulations for all Raytheon Missiles Systems products, support new business initiatives and development and execution of technology roadmaps."The post Job of the Week: Operations Research Simulation Engineer at Raytheon in Tucson appeared first on insideHPC.

Last week at SC18, Micron announced that the company has joined CERN openlab, a unique public-private partnership, by signing a three-year agreement. Under the agreement, Micron will provide CERN with advanced next-generation memory solutions to further machine learning capabilities for high-energy physics experiments at the laboratory. Micron’s memory solutions that combine neural network capabilities will be tested in the data-acquisition systems of experiments at CERN.The post Micron Joins CERN openlab appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC18, Dr. Eng Lim Goh from HPE describes the Convergence of HPC and Ai. "Data analytics and insights are fueling innovation across scientific research, product and service design, customer experience management, and process optimization. Real-time analytics with in-memory computing, big data analytics, insights from simulation and modeling fueled by HPC and predictive analytics with artificial intelligence (AI) are core capabilities required by data-driven organizations looking to gain competitive advantage with their digital transformation initiatives."The post Dr. Eng Lim Goh Fireside Chat on the Convergence of HPC & Ai appeared first on insideHPC.

Last week at SC18 in Dallas, Univa announced a partnership with WekaIO, a high-performance scale-out file system storage company, to help enterprise customers accelerate the migration of their HPC workloads to the cloud. "Univa is working with WekaIO to integrate one of the industry’s fastest parallel file systems into its Navops Launch and offer customers a comprehensive, high-performance, hybrid cloud solution for HPC and machine learning workloads."The post Univa and WekaIO team to speed HPC Workloads in the Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the NVIDIA Showcase event at SC18, Jensen Huang hosts a demo of Singularity containers running a full galaxy simulation. "This has to be the best Container demo ever," said Huang. "As part of that effort, Huang announced new multi-node HPC and visualization containers for the NGC container registry, which allow supercomputing users to run GPU-accelerated applications on large-scale clusters. NVIDIA also announced a new NGC-Ready program, including workstations and servers from top vendors."The post Singularity Containers Power NVIDIA Full Galaxy Simulation appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC18, Philip Maher from Tyan describes how the company is packaging AMD EPYC processors with innovative server configurations for tackling data-intensive workloads. "AMD EPYC processors are based on the 14nm "Zen" x86 core architecture with 32 cores and 64 threads, featuring 8 memory channels and up to16 DIMMs per socket. The new powerful processor allows TYAN to offer the optimal balance of computing, memory and I/O for the customers. By adopting the latest AMD EPYC processor technology, TYAN brings high memory channel bandwidth and PCI Express high speed I/O connectivity features to enterprises and datacenters."The post AMD EPYC Powers Tyan Servers for Data-intensive Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

Last week at SC18, Atos announced support for AMD EPYC processors in its upcoming BullSequana X range of supercomputers. The next generation AMD EPYC processor (codenamed Rome) is expected to be available in Atos’ new BullSequana XH2000 liquid cooled supercomputer in 2019.The post Atos Adds AMD processors to BullSequana X Line of Supercomputers appeared first on insideHPC.

Last week at SC18 in Dallas, the Exascale Computing Project released a portion of the next version of collaboratively developed products that compose the ECP software stack, including libraries and embedded software compilers. "Mike Heroux, ECP Software Technology director, said in an interview at SC18 that the software pieces in this release represent new capabilities and, in most instances, are highly tested and quite robust, and point toward exascale computing architectures."The post Video: ECP Launches Extreme-Scale Scientific Software Stack 0.1 Beta appeared first on insideHPC.

Last week at SC18, Tyan showcased their Thunder SX GT62H-B7106 storage product line featuringIntel Xeon Scalable processors, large memory capacity and NVMe connectivity for high performance software defined storage applications. "New data-intensive applications, such as analytics and deep learning are changing data processing workflows. Data centers need powerful storage architectures that can extract economic value by managing massive amounts of data efficiently,” said Danny Hsu, Vice President of MiTAC Computing Technology Corporation’s TYAN Business Unit. ”The Thunder SX GT62H-B7106 is optimized for data center environment. The platform provides an outstanding foundation for all-flash storage by leveraging NVMe technology.”The post TYAN Storage Server Steps up with 10 NVMe Bays of High Performance Flash appeared first on insideHPC.

Last week at SC18, E8 Storage announced it is expanding its technology partnership with Mellanox with an integrated solution built on Mellanox BlueField SmartNICs. Customers will be able to maximize computing resources by pairing the E8 agent with the SmartNIC. The new integration will allow users to utilize the benefits of CPU offload to overcome any performance bottlenecks to application performance.The post Mellanox BlueField SmartNICs Accelerate E8 Storage appeared first on insideHPC.

The SC18 conference drew a record-breaking 13,071 attendees, making it the largest SC conference of all time. As the premier international conference showcasing high performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis, the conference and exhibition infused the local economy with more than $40 million in revenue, according to the local Dallas Convention Bureau.The post Record SC18 Attendance a Bellwether for Growth in HPC Market appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC18 in Dallas, Marc Hamilton from NVIDIA describe the all new overclocked DGX-2H supercomputer. Built by NVIDIA, a cluster of 36 DGX-2H devices with 3 Petaflops of LINPACK performance was just ranked #62 on the TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers.The post Overclocked NVIDIA DGX-2H Cluster Lands at #61 on the TOP500 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC18 in Dallas, Dr. Sofia Vallecorsa from CERN OpenLab describes how Ai is being used in design of experiments for the Large Hadron Collider. "An award-winning effort at CERN has demonstrated potential to significantly change how the physics based modeling and simulation communities view machine learning. The CERN team demonstrated that AI-based models have the potential to act as orders-of-magnitude-faster replacements for computationally expensive tasks in simulation, while maintaining a remarkable level of accuracy."The post Video: How Ai is helping Scientists with the Large Hadron Collider appeared first on insideHPC.

High performance computing manufacturers are increasingly deploying liquid cooling. To avoid damage to electronic equipment due to leaks, secure drip-free connections are essential. Quick disconnects for HPC applications simplify connector selection. And with expensive electronics at stake, understanding the components in liquid cooling systems is critical. This article details what to look for when seeking the optimal termination for connectors—a way to help ensure leak-free performance.The post The Right Terminations for Reliable Liquid Cooling in HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest post, Axel Huebl looks at the TOP500 and HPCG with an eye on power efficiency trends to watch on the road to Exascale. "This post will focus one efficiency, in terms of performance per Watt, simply because system power envelope is a major constrain for upcoming Exascale systems. With the great numbers from TOP500, we try to extend theoretical estimates from theoretical Flop/Ws of individual compute hardware to system scale."The post The Green HPCG List and the Road to Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.

Earlier this week CSC in Finland announced that Atos will build it's next-generation supercomputer for academic research. "The initial delivery will consist of the first partition of the supercomputer and its tightly integrated fast storage. The solution is based on next-generation Intel Xeon processors, code named Cascade Lake, and HDR InfiniBand interconnect from Mellanox."The post Atos to Build Finland’s Newest Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from CGTN, China's Tsinghua University takes the Student Cluster Competition at the SC18 conference in Dallas. The win was the final step in a Triple Crown for the team, as they won similar competitions in Asia and Germany earlier this year. "With sponsorship from hardware and software vendor partners, student teams design and build small clusters, learn designated scientific applications, apply optimization techniques for their chosen architectures, and compete in a non-stop, 48-hour challenge at the SC conference to complete a real-world scientific workload, showing off their HPC knowledge for conference attendees and judges."The post Video: China’s Tsinhua University Takes the Student Cluster Competition appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks back on the highlights of SC18 and the newest TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers.Buddy Bland shows off Summit, the world’s fastest supercomputer at ORNL. "The latest TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers is out, a remarkable ranking that shows five Department of Energy supercomputers in the top 10, with the first two captured by Summit at Oak Ridge and Sierra at Livermore. With the number one and number two systems on the planet, the “Rebel Alliance” vendors of IBM, Mellanox, and NVIDIA stand far and tall above the others."The post Radio Free HPC Runs Down the TOP500 Fastest Supercomputers appeared first on insideHPC.

The Institute of Defense Analyses (IDA) in La Jolla is seeking a Lead Systems Engineer in our Job of the Week. "We are seeking a Lead Systems Engineer, who with minimal supervision, envisions, designs, administers, and maintains multiple IT systems, servers and software. Applies advanced subject matter expertise to develop solutions to solve a full range of complex problems."The post Job of the Week: Lead Systems Engineer at Defense Analyses (IDA) in San Diego appeared first on insideHPC.

Two months after its introduction, the NVIDIA T4 GPU is featured in 57 separate server designs from the world’s leading computer makers. It is also available in the cloud, with the first availability of the T4 for Google Cloud Platform customers. "Just 60 days after the T4’s launch, it’s now available in the cloud and is supported by a worldwide network of server makers. The T4 gives today’s public and private clouds the performance and efficiency needed for compute-intensive workloads at scale.”The post NVIDIA’s New Turing T4 GPU is going gangbusters in the Cloud Space appeared first on insideHPC.

"With Bitfusion along with Mellanox and VMWare, IT can now offer an ability to mix bare metal and virtual machine environments, such that GPUs in any configuration can be attached to any virtual machine in the organization, enabling easy access of GPUs to everyone in the organization,” said Subbu Rama, co-founder and chief product officer, Bitfusion. “IT can now pool together resources and offer an elastic GPU as a service to their organizations.”The post Bitfusion Enables InfiniBand-Attached GPUs on Any VM appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC18 in Dallas, Thor Sewell from Intel describes the company's pending Cascade Lake Advanced Performance chip. "This next-gen platform doubles the cores per socket from an Intel system by joining a number of Cascade Lake Xeon dies together on a single package with the blue team's Ultra Path Interconnect, or UPI. Intel will allow Cascade Lake-AP servers to employ up to two-socket (2S) topologies, for as many as 96 cores per server."The post Intel Offers Sneak Peek at Cascade Lake Advanced Performance edition for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC18, Raj Hazra describes how Intel is driving the convergence of HPC and Ai. "To meet the new computational challenges presented by this AI and HPC convergence, HPC is expanding beyond its traditional role of modeling and simulation to encompass visualization, analytics, and machine learning. Intel scientists and engineers will be available to discuss how to implement AI capabilities into your current HPC environments and demo how new, more powerful HPC platforms can be applied to meet your computational needs now and in the future."The post Video: Intel Driving HPC on the Road to Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.

Indiana University staff and faculty will build the world’s first single-channel 400-gigabit-per-second-capable network for research and education at SC18. The connection will be capable of transmitting 50 gigabytes of data every second—or, enough to stream 16,000 ultra-high-definition movie. The demonstration, “Wide area workflows at 400 Gbps,” is IU’s submission to the conference’s annual Network Research Exhibition, which spotlights innovation in emerging network hardware, protocols, and advanced network-intensive scientific applications.The post Indiana University Demonstrates World’s First Single-Channel 400G Network appeared first on insideHPC.

"Cloud computing offers a potential solution by allowing people to create and access computing resources on demand. Yet meeting the complex software demands of an HPC application can be quite challenging in a cloud environment. In addition, running HPC workloads on virtualized infrastructure may result in unacceptable performance penalties for some workloads. Because of these issues, relatively few organizations have run production HPC work- loads in either private or public clouds."The post How Intel is Fostering HPC in the Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC18 in Dallas, Trish Damkroger describes how Intel is pushing the limits of HPC and Machine Learning with a full suite of Hardware, Software, and Cloud technologies. "

Today HLRS in Germany announced plans to deploy next-generation supercomputer for HLRS, 3.5 times faster than its current system. The upcoming system, which HLRS has named Hawk, will be the world’s fastest supercomputer for industrial production, powering computational engineering and research across science and industrial fields to advance applications in energy, climate, mobility, and health.The post HPE to build Hawk Supercomputer for HLRS in Germany appeared first on insideHPC.

"The emerging AI community on HPC infrastructure is critical to achieving the vision of AI," said Pradeep Dubey, Intel Fellow. "Machines that don’t just crunch numbers, but help us make better and more informed complex decisions. Scalability is the key to AI-HPC so scientists can address the big compute, big data challenges facing them and to make sense from the wealth of measured and modeled or simulated data that is now available to them."The post How Intel is Driving the Convergence of HPC & Ai appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC18 in Dallas, Dieter Kranzlmueller from LRZ in Germany describes how Intel powers the SuperMUC-NG supercomputer. "The 19.4 Petaflop machine ranks number 8 among the fastest supercomputers in the world. SuperMUC-NG is in its start-up phase, and will be ready for full production runs in 2019. The machine, build in partnership with Lenovo and Intel, has a theoretical peak of 26.9 petaflops, and is comprised of 6,400 compute nodes based on Intel Xeon Scalable processors."The post Intel Powers SuperMUC-NG Supercomputer at LRZ in Germany appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Hyperion Research announced that the winner of the 2018 Hyperion Award for Innovation Excellence goes to UberCloud and its project partners. "This work represents a breakthrough in demonstrating the high value of computational modeling and simulation in improving the clinical application of non-invasive electro-stimulation of the human brain in schizophrenia and the potential to apply this technology to the treatment of other neuropsychiatric disorders such as depression and Parkinson’s disease."The post UberCloud Wins Hyperion HPC Innovation Excellence Award with Neuromodulation Project appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Ayar Labs announced that Charlie Wuischpard, former vice president and general manager at Intel, has joined Ayar Labs as CEO and a member of the board of directors. “With his track record of driving growth in both small and large companies, forming deep trusted relationships with high performance computing industry participants, and delivering value to stakeholders, we know he will lead Ayar Labs to growth in the advanced computing and data center markets.”The post HPC Veteran Charlie Wuischpard Joins Optical Startup Ayar Labs appeared first on insideHPC.

Today OrionX Research today announced that Bitcoin and BTC.com top the first release of the CryptoSuper500 list. The list recognizes cryptocurrency mining as a new form of supercomputing and tracks the top mining pools. “The growth of the cryptocurrency market has put the spotlight on emerging decentralized applications, the new ways in which they are funded, and the software stack on which they are built.” Cryptocurrency technologies include blockchain, consensus algorithms, digital wallets, and utility and security tokens.The post Podcast: Announcing the New CryptoSuper500 List appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Dan Stanzione from TACC describes how Intel technologies from Intel will power the World's Fastest Supercomputer in Academia at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. "If completed today, Frontera would be the fifth most powerful system in the world, the third fastest in the U.S. and the largest at any university. For comparison, Frontera will be about twice as powerful as Stampede2."The post Video: Intel to Power Fastest Supercomputer in Academia at TACC appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Rescale announced its launch into academia with their ScaleX Pro for Students and ScaleX Pro for Classroom products. “Rescale’s ScaleX Pro for Students and ScaleX Pro for Classroom solve for today’s academia pain points by providing students with the ability to run projects immediately and unique access to different technology partner programs such as to cloud service providers.”The post Rescale Brings Cloud HPC to Academia appeared first on insideHPC.

Today NVIDIA showcased its HPC leadership in the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers. The closely watched list shows a 48 percent jump in one year in the number of systems using NVIDIA GPU accelerators. The total climbed to 127 from 86 a year ago, and is three times greater than five years ago. “With the end of Moore’s Law, a new HPC market has emerged, fueled by new AI and machine learning workloads. These rely as never before on our high performance, highly efficient GPU platform to provide the power required to address the most challenging problems in science and society.”The post NVIDIA Powers New Performance Records on TOP500 List appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Beenish Zia from Intel presents: BigDL Open Source Machine Learning Framework for Apache Spark. "BigDL is a distributed deep learning library for Apache Spark*. Using BigDL, you can write deep learning applications as Scala or Python* programs and take advantage of the power of scalable Spark clusters. This article introduces BigDL, shows you how to build the library on a variety of platforms, and provides examples of BigDL in action."The post Slidecast: BigDL Open Source Machine Learning Framework for Apache Spark appeared first on insideHPC.

We are pleased to offer our readers a Livestream of the HPC Inspires Plenary from SC18 in Dallas. "Simulation and modeling along with AI are being applied to some of our most challenging global threats and humanitarian crises. The SC18 plenary session will explore the capacity of HPC to help mitigate human suffering and advance our capacity to protect the most vulnerable, identify methods to produce enough food globally and ensure the safety of our planet and natural resources."The post Video Replay: HPC Inspires Plenary from SC18 appeared first on insideHPC.

Unlocking the bigger-picture meaning from raw data volumes is no easy task. Unfortunately, that means that many important insights remain hidden within the untapped data which quietly floods data centers around the globe each day. Today’s advanced applications require faster and increasingly powerful hardware and storage technologies to make sense of the data deluge. Intel seeks to address this critical trend with a new class of future Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, code-named Cascade Lake.The post New Class of Intel Xeon Scalable Processors Break Through Performance Bottlenecks appeared first on insideHPC.

The latest TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers is out, a remarkable ranking that shows five Department of Energy supercomputers in the top 10, with the first two captured by Summit at Oak Ridge and Sierra at Livermore. With the number one and number two systems on the planet, the "Rebel Alliance" vendors of IBM, Mellanox, and NVIDIA stand far and tall above the others.The post New TOP500 List topped by DOE Supercomputers appeared first on insideHPC.

The Women in High Performance Computing (WHPC) organization will be be leading the conversation on diversity and inclusion this week at SC18 in Dallas. "The movement is growing. More and more allies are joining in efforts to support diversity and encourage inclusion. Women in HPC members’ efforts are increasing and we are organizing at the grassroots level. We are now a force that is fostering positive change in the community,” says Dr. Toni Collis, Chair and Co-Founder of WHPC and Chief Business Development Officer at Appentra Solutions."The post Women in HPC Events on deck for SC18 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest post, Peter ffoulkes writes that automation software from companies like XTREME-D are making HPC datacenters more productive every day. "One such example of these capabilities comes from startup XTREME-D, which provides a simple point-and-click user interface based on HPC workload templates and the XTREME-Stargate cluster portal, which acts as a “super head node” to provide simple access to virtual cluster resources."The post Instant Gratification Takes Too Long and Costs Too Much for HPC. Or Does It? appeared first on insideHPC.

Today OFA issued their Call for Sessions for the annual OpenFabrics Alliance Workshop 2019. The event takes place March 19-21 in Austin, Texas. "The Workshop places a high value on collaboration and communication among participants. In keeping with the theme of collaboration, proposals for Birds of a Feather sessions and Panels are particularly encouraged."The post Call For Participation: OpenFabrics Workshop appeared first on insideHPC.

Today TYAN announced plans to showcase a full line of HPC, storage, and cloud computing server platforms at SC18 next week in Dallas. "Customers in the datacenter to the enterprise are facing the challenge to get more value out of enormous amounts of data. The demand is pushing to move data faster, store data more and analyze data accurately,” said Danny Hsu, Vice President of MiTAC Computing Technology Corporation's TYAN Business Unit. “TYAN’s leading portfolio of HPC, storage and cloud server platforms are based on the Intel Xeon Scalable processors and are designed to help our customers move, store and process massive amounts of data efficiently.”The post TYAN to showcases x86 HPC Solutions at SC18 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Rescale announced that the company is now delivering secure HPC in the Cloud to the public sector. "In our platform development we have taken several steps towards protecting customers through the security of our platform which is why we are proud to be the first HPC platform solution in the industry to be ITAR and EAR compliant. Additionally, we are the only HPC platform today that is both independently SOC 2 Type 2 attested and HIPAA compliant."The post Rescale Delivers Secure HPC in the Cloud for the Public Sector appeared first on insideHPC.

We are pleased to report that the Lenovo AI Challenge has chosen outstanding researchers in the Machine Learning arena to receive an all-expenses-paid trip to SC18. "The winning researchers will have the opportunity to share their work with the world through a presentation in the Lenovo SC18 booth and videos of their presentations that will live forever."The post Lenovo 2018 AI Challenge brings best and brightest to SC18 appeared first on insideHPC.