Inside HPC & AI News | High-Performance Computing & Artificial Intelligence

Claudia Rosas from BSC gave this talk at the HPCKP'19. "In this talk, we present the general benefits of using the frameworks in current HPC platforms and describe both of them when applied to develop and deploy wave propagation simulations which are highly valuable for the Oil & Gas industry. The knowledge obtained from work with BSIT has motivated the concepts and methodology behind GeNESiS to consolidate years of experience in one robust, flexible and modern tool for numerical simulations."The post Experiences developing and running numerical simulations on HPC platforms: BSIT and GeNESiS appeared first on insideHPC.

Sylabs just released the Singularity 3.4.0. The major new feature of this release is the ability to build and run encrypted containers. "Singularity containers remain encrypted throughout their entire lifecycle — when they are created, when they are at rest or transferred around, and yes, even when they are in use. Owing to their use of kernel space for data decryption, there is no need to clean up a decrypted rootfs upon termination."The post Singularity 3.4.0 Enables Build and Run Encrypted Containers appeared first on insideHPC.

Today TACC unveiled Frontera, the 5th most powerful supercomputer in the world. "Frontera has been supporting science applications since June and has already enabled more than three dozen teams to conduct research on a range of topics from black hole physics to climate modeling to drug design, employing simulation, data analysis, and artificial intelligence at a scale not previously possible."The post TACC Unveils Frontera – Fastest Supercomputer in Academia appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team is joined by Glenn Heinle to review the highlights of the Hot Chips conference. "Since it started in 1989, HOT CHIPS has been known as one of the semiconductor industry’s leading conferences on high-performance microprocessors and related integrated circuits. The conference is held once a year in August in the center of the world’s capital of electronics activity, Silicon Valley."The post Radio Free HPC Recaps the Hot Chips Conference appeared first on insideHPC.

Jithin Jose from Microsoft gave this talk at the MVAPICH User Group. "This talk focuses on how HPC offerings in Azure address these challenges and explains the design pillars that allow Microsoft to offer "bare-metal performance and scalability" on the Microsoft Azure Cloud. This talk also covers the features of latest Microsoft Azure HPC offerings and provides in-depth performance insights and recommendations for using MVAPICH2 and MVAPICH2-X on Microsoft Azure."The post Offering Bare-Metal Performance and Scalability on Cloud: The Azure-HPC Approach appeared first on insideHPC.

"At HPE, we've seen many organizations struggle with technology that couldn't handle enormous volumes of data. As a national facility serving a large research community, DiRAC needed HPC solutions that could manage complex workloads without the risk of downtime. It also needed more computing power, better storage capabilities, and faster processing to allow its researchers to compete internationally."The post HPE Powers Research at DiRAC HPC Facility appeared first on insideHPC.

Greg Becker from LLNL gave this talk at the MVAPICH User Group. "Spack is an open-source package manager for HPC. This presentation will give an overview of Spack, including recent developments and a number of items on the near-term roadmap. We will focus on Spack features relevant to the MVAPICH community; these include Spack's virtual package abstraction, which is used for API-compatible libraries including MPI implementations, package level compiler wrappers, and packages which modify other package's build environments."The post Video: Managing HPC Software Complexity with Spack appeared first on insideHPC.

"This year, the IBTA is celebrating 20 years of growth and success in delivering these widely used and valued technologies to the high-performance networking industry. Over the past two decades, the IBTA has provided the industry with technical specifications and educational resources that have advanced a wide range of high-performance platforms. InfiniBand and RoCE interconnects are deployed in the world’s fastest supercomputers and continue to significantly impact future-facing applications such as Machine Learning and AI."The post IBTA Celebrates 20 Years of Growth and Industry Success appeared first on insideHPC.

ExxonMobil is seeking a Computational Fluid Scientist in our Job of the Week. "We are looking to hire candidates to work on challenging practical fluid mechanics problems within our upstream business that focuses on exploration, development, production and marketing and transportation of hydrocarbons. Specific areas of interest for this position include the application of computational fluid mechanics, numerical simulations, and programming skills to tackle various flow modeling challenges in, but not limited to, reservoir, wellbore, and surface equipment."The post Job of the Week: Computational Fluid Scientist at ExxonMobil appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Intel announced that it has begun shipments of the first Intel Agilex field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to early access program customers. In what may be a surprise to many, the F-Series variant of the chip family also provides the option to integrate a quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor to provide high system integration. "Intel FPGAs have provided Microsoft tremendous value for accelerating real-time AI, networking, and other applications/infrastructure across Azure Cloud Services, Bing, and other data center services."The post Intel Ships First 10nm Agilex FPGAs with Integrated Arm Processors appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Mellanox CTO Michael Kagan talks about the next step for SmartNICs and the company's newly released ConnectX-6 Dx product driven by its own silicon. "The BlueField-2 IPU integrates all the advanced capabilities of ConnectX-6 Dx with an array of powerful Arm processor cores, high performance memory interfaces, and flexible processing capabilities in a single System-on-Chip (SoC), supporting both Ethernet and InfiniBand connectivity up to 200Gb/s."The post Video: Mellanox Rolls Out SmartNICs appeared first on insideHPC.

Rosa M. Badia from the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre has received the Euro-Par Achievement Award 2019. Euro-Par is a major series of European conferences on parallel processing. The Euro-Par Steering Committee has granted the Euro-Par Achievement Award at the yearly Euro-Par conference since 2008 individuals who have made special contributions to parallel processing.The post Rosa M. Badia from BSC receives Euro-Par Achievement Award appeared first on insideHPC.

Vikram Saletore from Intel gave this talk at the MVAPICH User Group. "Intel collaborates with customers and partners worldwide to build, accelerate, scale and deploy their AI applications on Intel based HPC platforms. We share with you our insights on several customer AI use cases we have enabled, the orders of magnitude performance acceleration we have delivered via popular open-source software framework optimizations, and the best-known methods to advance the convergence of AI and HPC on Intel Xeon Scalable Processor based servers. We will also demonstrate how large memory systems help real world AI applications efficiently."The post The Confluence of HPC and AI – Intel Customer Use Cases appeared first on insideHPC.

Appentra has released Parallelware Trainer 1.3, an interactive, real-time code editor with features that facilitate the learning, usage, and implementation of parallel programming by understanding how and why sections of code can be parallelized. "We’re happy to announce the release of Parallelware Trainer 1.3 which now supports the detection of defects and recommendations for concurrency and parallelism. We expect this new feature to further improve the learning process by providing feedback about code issues right in the integrated editor."The post Appentra Releases Parallelware Trainer 1.3 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Intel announced Baidu is architecting the in-memory database of its Feed Stream services to harness the high-capacity and high-performance capabilities of Intel Optane DC persistent memory. Paired with 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, building a new memory platform based on Intel Optane DC persistent memory allows Baidu to lower its total cost of ownership (TCO) while delivering more personalized search results to users. Intel and Baidu disclosed details of this deployment and other joint collaborations on Thursday at the 2019 Baidu ABC Summit in Beijing.The post Baidu to Speed Services with Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Tachyum announced it has joined the Compute Express Link (CXL) Consortium, a group of companies dedicated to advancing a new, open-industry standard interconnect designed to address the increasing demands of high-performance computational workloads. "With worldwide data center capacity doubling every five years, and with AI, Machine Learning, and High-Performance Computing rapidly migrating from purpose-built systems to the cloud, the importance of a fast industry-standard interconnect, which supports memory coherency, cannot be overstated."The post Tachyum Joins CXL High-Speed Interconnect Consortium appeared first on insideHPC.

Brad Chamberlain from Cray gave this talk at the HPCKP'19 conference. "Though Chapel has been under development for some time now, its performance and feature set have only recently reached the point where it can seriously be considered by users with HPC-scale scientific, data analytic, and artificial intelligence workloads. In this talk, I will introduce Chapel for those who are new to the language, and cover recent advances, milestones, and performance results for those who are already familiar with it."The post Chapel Comes of Age: a Language for Productivity, Parallelism, and Performance appeared first on insideHPC.

Dr. Steven Squyres from Cornell University will keynote the SC19 conference in Denver. His talk will be entitled "Exploring the Solar System with the Power of Technology." Steve Squyres' research focuses on the robotic exploration of planetary surfaces, the history of water on Mars, geophysics and tectonics of icy satellites, tectonics of Venus, planetary gamma-ray and x-ray spectroscopy.The post Dr. Steven Squyres from Cornell to Keynote SC19 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Atos announced the delivery of Quantum-Learning-as-a-Service (QLaaS) to Xofia to help develop quantum-powered artificial intelligence solutions for the enterprise. "Xofia is a startup based in Houston that combines artificial intelligence with quantum-based algorithms to implement problem-solving strategies to create a futuristic platform for the enterprise. Engaging Atos’ QLaaS model, Xofia’s research and development team will access a remote Atos Quantum Learning Machine, a stand-alone appliance that provides access to an evolutive quantum programming environment and simulates the behavior of any kind of quantum computing technology."The post Atos delivers Quantum-Learning-as-a-Service to Xofia for Big Data Challenges appeared first on insideHPC.

AI technologies are being used to help develop Next-gen nuclear energy systems that could help reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. In this special guest feature, Dawn Levy and Weiju Ren from ORNL explore the challenges and opportunities in sharing nuclear materials knowledge internationally. "A knowledgebase is more than a database. Data are just symbols representing observations or the products of observations. Knowledge is not only data, but also people’s understanding of the data."The post Interview: Knowledgebase is power for nuclear reactor developers appeared first on insideHPC.

Federal agencies are leveraging the new CyberRax Data Flow Pipeline from PSSC Labs to achieve their goals. Certified compatible with Cloudera Dataflow (and Apache NiFi), CyberRax DataFlow Pipeline provides high-speed data ingestion, edge data collection, and IoT scale streaming data processing…in real time. "The U.S. Air Force recently deployed several CyerRax Data Flow Pipelines for both their NIPR and SIPR networks."The post Federal Agencies Tap New Data Streaming Solution from PSSC Labs appeared first on insideHPC.

Nicholas Brown from EPCC gave this talk at the MVAPICH User Group. "In this talk I will describe work we have done in exploring the performance properties of MVAPICH, OpenMPI and MPT on one of these systems, Fulhame, which is an HPE Apollo 70-based system with 64 nodes of Cavium ThunderX2 ARM processors and Mellanox InfiniBand interconnect. In order to take advantage of these systems most effectively, it is very important to understand the performance that different MPI implementations can provide and any further opportunities to optimize these."The post A Performance Comparison of Different MPI Implementations on an ARM HPC System appeared first on insideHPC.

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded researchers at its Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory more than $3.5 million to boost research in the fast-emerging field of Quantum Information Science. "Few pursuits have the revolutionary potential that quantum science presents,” said Fermilab Chief Research Officer Joe Lykken. “Fermilab’s expertise in quantum physics and cryogenic engineering is world-class, and combined with our experience in conventional computing and networks, we can advance quantum science in directions that not many other places can.”The post Department of Energy awards Fermilab $3.5 million for quantum science appeared first on insideHPC.

Today quantum startup QC Ware announced that the company been awarded a U.S. Department of Energy grant to use quantum computing to better understand complex material and chemical systems. Collaborating with SLAC, QC Ware will apply its expertise to develop hybrid classical-quantum algorithms. These algorithms will run on quantum computers and could dramatically improve the accuracy of photochemical simulations used to design new chemicals and materials.The post QC Ware and SLAC to develop Chemistry Applications for Quantum Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC looks at Cray's series of big wins for DOE Exascale systems. "Guess who's having a great year? Think Aurora, Frontier, and El Capitan. Cray has put some nice numbers on the accounts receivable ledger, and these are not ordinary numbers. The Exascale era is being defined substantially by the DOE Coral program and the commercial markets are watching as their computing needs start looking like those of the national labs."The post Podcast: Cray Pulls an Exascale Hat Trick appeared first on insideHPC.

DK Panda gave this talk at the MVAPICH User Group. "This talk will provide an overview of the MVAPICH project (past, present, and future). Future roadmap and features for upcoming releases of the MVAPICH2 software family (including MVAPICH2-X and MVAPICH2-GDR) for HPC and Deep Learning will be presented. Features and releases for Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS will also be presented. Current status and future plans for OSU INAM, OMB, and Best Practices Page will also be presented."The post Overview of the MVAPICH Project and Future Roadmap appeared first on insideHPC.

Today NVIDIA and VMware announced plans to deliver accelerated GPU services for VMware Cloud on AWS to power modern enterprise applications, including AI, machine learning and data analytics workflows. These services will enable customers to seamlessly migrate VMware vSphere-based applications and containers to the cloud, unchanged, where they can be modernized to take advantage of high-performance computing, machine learning, data analytics and video processing applications.The post NVIDIA to Accelerate Machine Learning on VMware Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Mellanox announced that its RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) networking solutions for VMware vSphere enable virtualized Machine Learning solutions that achieve higher GPU utilization and efficiency. "As Moore's Law has slowed, traditional CPU and networking technologies are no longer sufficient to support the emerging machine learning workloads," said Kevin Deierling, vice president marketing, Mellanox Technologies. "Using hardware compute accelerators such as NVIDIA T4 GPUs and Mellanox's RDMA networking solutions has proven to boost application performance in virtualized deployments."The post Mellanox Powers Virtualized Machine Learning with VMware and NVIDIA appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Supermicro extended its vSAN system portfolio and introduced a new enterprise-class vSAN solution -- Ultra SuperServer -- to its broad portfolio of fully configured, ready to deploy server systems. Supermicro solutions, coupled with industry-proven vSAN, provides turn-key solutions for the hyper-converged infrastructure marketplace. “The Supermicro 2U/1U Ultra SuperServers are configurable with support of 20, 10, 4, or 2 hot-swappable NVMe drives and leverage 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors and Intel Optane DC SSDs. The BigTwin, a high-density multi-node (2U-4 node) system, is optimized for mission-critical applications supporting up to 6TB memory per node and configured for hyper-converged infrastructure. Both systems are ideal for specific workloads offering operational simplicity, scalability, low total cost of ownership (TCO), and resource-savings for intelligent enterprise deployments.”The post Supermicro Launches New High-Performance vSAN Solution appeared first on insideHPC.

Atos and India's C-DAC have signed a Cooperation Agreement to work together in the areas of Quantum Computing, Artificial Intelligence, and Exascale Computing. "Building on our position as the leading technology provider globally for Supercomputing, AI, Quantum Computing and others, this agreement is a significant step forward in our strategic relationship. This will strengthen the R&D activities between France and India with C-DAC and Atos significantly contributing to technology development and nation economic growth.”The post Atos and C-DAC to Collaborate on AI, Quantum Computing, and Exascale in India appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Dan Olds from OrionX.net writes that IBM ambitions in the HPC market have fallen short. "Without more commitment and support, IBM’s POWER processor runs the risk of becoming this generations version of the DEC Alpha CPU. It was a fantastic processor and ran rings around competitors, but ultimately failed because of a lack of marketing and operating environment support from DEC."The post IBM’s HPC Dreams are Tattered appeared first on insideHPC.

Miguel Terol from Lenovo gave this talk at HPCKP'19. "Technology players are refining their chip and platform designs to enable much denser systems. The trade-off of this trend is chips are getting more and more power hungry, and cooling those components becomes a challenge in terms of sustainability, either for the environment or the economy. In this talk we will present the high density technology landscape and different approaches to address the cooling challenges."The post Cooling Challenges for Ultra-high Density Compute Clusters appeared first on insideHPC.

Gilad Shainer from Mellanox gave this talk at the MVAPICH User Group. "In-Network Computing transforms the data center interconnect to become a "distributed CPU", and "distributed memory", enables to overcome performance barriers and to enable faster and more scalable data analysis. These technologies are in use at some of the recent large scale supercomputers around the world, including the top TOP500 platforms. The session will discuss the InfiniBand In-Network Computing technology and performance results, as well as view to future roadmap."The post Video: InfiniBand In-Network Computing Technology and Roadmap appeared first on insideHPC.

In this Conversations in the Cloud podcast, Esther Baldwin from Intel describes how the convergence of HPC and AI is driving innovation. "On the topic of HPC & AI converged clusters, there’s a perception that if you want to do AI, you must stand up a separate cluster, which Esther notes is not true. Existing HPC customers can do AI on their existing infrastructure with solutions like HPC & AI converged clusters."The post Podcast: HPC & AI Convergence Enables AI Workload Innovation appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, PCI-SIG President and Board Member, Al Yanes, shares and overview of PCI Express 5.0 and 6.0 specifications. “With the PCIe 6.0 specification, PCI-SIG aims to answer the demands of such hot markets as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, networking, communication systems, storage, High-Performance Computing, and more.”The post Video: PCI Express 6.0 Specification to Reach 64 GigaTransfers/sec appeared first on insideHPC.

Pawsey’s Supercomputing Team is responsible for providing the infrastructure to fulfill the needs of the Australian research community and to engage with that community to make best use of the infrastructure. You will be part of this highly skilled team of professional specialists and developers, will work collaboratively with researchers to assist them in exploiting the vast opportunities afforded by the infrastructure operated in the Pawsey centre.The post Job of the Week: Supercomputing Applications Specialist at CSIRO appeared first on insideHPC.

The good folks at Basement Supercomputing have published a white paper comparing one of the company's on-prem Limulus personal HPC appliance to Amazon EC2 Cloud instances. The economics are quite interesting. "In this careful study equivalent EC2 cluster instances were configured using current pricing (Spring 2019). A comparison of Basement Supercomputing Limulus appliance workstations with the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is presented. The capabilities of both approaches are discussed along with a detailed comparison of two Limulus appliance designs."The post White Paper: Basement Supercomputer beats Amazon EC2 on Cost and Performance appeared first on insideHPC.

Quantum Computing holds tremendous promise, but it could also put today's cryptographic-based security systems at risk. Enter IBM, who just announced plans to provide quantum-safe cryptography services on the IBM public cloud in 2020. The company is now offering a Quantum Risk Assessment from IBM Security to help customers assess their risk in the quantum world. Additionally, IBM cryptographers have prototyped the world's first quantum computing safe enterprise class tape, an important step before commercialization.The post IBM Cloud to Provide Quantum-safe Cryptography in 2020 appeared first on insideHPC.

Robert Harrison from Brookhaven gave this talk at the MVAPICH User Group. "MADNESS, TESSE/EPEXA, and MolSSI are three quite different large and long-lived projects that provide different perspectives and driving needs for the future of message passing. All three of these projects employ MPI and have a vested interest in computation at all scales, spanning the classroom to future exascale systems."The post Video: Three Perspectives on Message Passing appeared first on insideHPC.

A recent report from Hyperion Research indicate that as much as 10 percent of HPC workloads are already in cloud and that 70 percent of HPC centers are running some jobs in public clouds. Are these numbers indicative of what you're seeing in your workplace? There is one quick way to find out--by taking our HPC Cloud Survey.The post Silence the Critics: Take our Quick Survey on HPC Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

In this Conversations in the Cloud podcast, Lee Carter from Bright Computing offers comprehensive software for deploying, managing, and monitoring clustered infrastructure, in the data center or the cloud. "Looking forward, Lee speculates that the future of AI will see new technologies like autonomous cars using complex simulation and modeling in small scale systems, continuing the legacy of HPC."The post Podcast: Reducing Complexity with Cluster Management from Bright Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Calista Redmond writes that the European Processor Initiative is designing an HPC accelerator based on RISC-V. "The accelerator will be designed for high throughput and power efficiency within the general purpose processor (GPP) chip. The EPI explains that using RISC-V enables the program to leverage “open source resources at [the] hardware architecture level and software level, as well as ensuring independence from non-European patented computing technologies.”The post How the European Processor Initiative is Leveraging RISC-V for the Future of Supercomputing appeared first on insideHPC.

A new HPE supercomputer at NASA’s Ames Research Center will run modeling and simulation workloads for lunar landings. The 3.69 Petaflop "Aitken" system is a custom-designed supercomputer that will support modeling and simulations of entry, descent, and landing (EDL) for the agency’s missions and Artemis program, a mission to land the next humans on the lunar South Pole region by 2024.The post Aitken Supercomputer from HPE to Support NASA Moon Missions appeared first on insideHPC.

Christian Kniep gave this talk at HPCKP'19. "This talk will dissect the convergence by refreshing the audiences’ memory on what containerization is about, segueing into why AI/ML workloads are leading to fully fledged HPC applications eventually and how this will inform the way forward. In conclusion Christian will discuss the three main challenges `Hardware Access`, `Data Access` and `Distributed Computing` in container technology and how they can be tackled by the power of open source, while focusing on the first."The post Containerized Convergence of Big Data and Big Compute appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Xilinx announced the expansion of its 16 nanometer (nm) Virtex UltraScale+ family to now include the world’s largest FPGA — the Virtex UltraScale+ VU19P. With 35 billion transistors, the VU19P provides the highest logic density and I/O count on a single device ever built, enabling emulation and prototyping of tomorrow’s most advanced ASIC and SoC technologies, as well as test, measurement, compute, networking, aerospace and defense-related applications.The post Video: Xilinx Unveils World’s Largest FPGA appeared first on insideHPC.

This week at The Linux Foundation Open Source Summit, IBM announced it is opening the POWER Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). "The opening of the Power ISA, an architecture with a long and distinguished history, will help the open hardware movement continue to gain momentum," said Mateo Valero, Director of Barcelona Supercomputing Center. "BSC, which has collaborated with IBM for more than two decades, is excited that IBM's announcements today provide additional options to initiatives pursuing innovative new processor and accelerator development with freedom of action."The post IBM Opens POWER Instruction Set Architecture appeared first on insideHPC.

The CANcer Distributed Learning Environment, or CANDLE, is a cross-cutting initiative of the Joint Design of Advanced Computing Solutions for Cancer collaboration and is supported by DOE’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP). CANDLE is building a scalable deep learning environment to run on DOE’s most powerful supercomputers. The goal is to have an easy-to-use environment that can take advantage of the full power of these systems to find the optimal deep-learning models for making predictions in cancer.The post Exascale CANDLE Project to Fight Against Cancer appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks into the AMD Rome CPU, a beast that brings back the glory days of Opteron and establishes itself as the chip to have, and establishes AMD as the company to beat. After that, they kick off their new regular segment: Henry Newman’s Feel-Good Security Corner.The post Podcast: AMD is Back to Glory Days wit Rome CPU appeared first on insideHPC.

Dan Stanzione from TACC gave this talk at the MVAPICH User Group. "In this talk, I will describe the main components of the award: the Phase 1 system, “Frontera”, the plans for facility operations and scientific support for the next five years, and the plans to design a Phase 2 system in the mid-2020s to be the NSF Leadership system for the latter half of the decade, with capabilities 10x beyond Frontera. The talk will also discuss the key role MVAPICH and Infiniband play in the project, and why the workload for HPC still can't fit effectively on the cloud without advanced networking support."The post Frontera: The Next Generation NSF HPC Resource, and Why HPC Still isn’t the Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

Today NetApp announced the NetApp EF600 storage array. The EF600 is an end-to-end NVMe midrange array that accelerates access to data and empowers companies to rapidly develop new insights for performance-sensitive workloads. "The storage industry is currently transitioning from the SAS to the NVMe protocol, which significantly increases the speed of access to data,” said Tim Stammers, senior analyst, 451 Research. “But conventional storage systems do not fully exploit NVMe performance, because of latencies imposed by their main controllers. NetApp’s E-Series systems were designed to address this architectural issue and are already used widely in performance-sensitive applications. The EF600 sets a new level of performance for the E-Series by introducing end-to-end support for NVMe, and should be considered by IT organizations looking for high-speed storage to serve analytics and other data-intensive applications.”The post NetApp EF600 Storage Array Speeds HPC and Analytics appeared first on insideHPC.