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

In this special guest feature, Elizabeth Leake from the STEM-Trek Nonprofit reflects on inclusivity at the recent ISC 2019 conference in Frankfurt. "A favorable experience means that attendees are more likely to return. And they do; this year, 164 exhibitors and 3,573 attendees from all domains and 64 countries were there. Attendance has doubled since 2009 and grows at a comfortable pace each year."The post ISC High Performance: Fueling Innovation & Fostering Family for 33 Years appeared first on insideHPC.

The world’s fastest supercomputer is sharing data with its cooling plant, reducing energy consumption and cost. "OLCF and technology consulting company Providentia Worldwide recently collaborated to develop an intelligence system that combines real-time updates from the Summit supercomputer with local weather and operational data from its adjacent cooling plant, with the goal of optimizing Summit’s energy efficiency. The OLCF proposed the idea and provided facility data, and Providentia developed a scalable platform to integrate and analyze the data."The post Providentia Worldwide Builds Intelligence into Summit Supercomputer Cooling appeared first on insideHPC.

SIGHPC, in collaboration with Intel, has announced the six recipients of the ACM SIGHPC/Intel Computational and Data Science Fellowships for 2019. The fellowships are highly competitive, and are awarded after a rigorous merit review. For the first time in the fellowship’s history, all of the recipients are women. The fellowship is funded by Intel and is presented each year at the annual SC conference.The post Announcing the 2019 ACM SIGHPC/Intel Computational and Data Science Fellowships appeared first on insideHPC.

How big is the move to HPC in the Cloud? "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. Do these reports of increasing HPC Cloud migration match what you readers are experiencing? There is one quick way to find out--by taking our HPC Cloud Survey."The post Moving HPC to the Cloud? Take our insideHPC Survey appeared first on insideHPC.

Raid Media Systems has become the latest partner to sign up to the Bright Computing Reseller Program. As a reseller, Raid Media Systems has chosen to partner with Bright Computing in order to provide its customers with an easy to use cluster management solution. The Reseller anticipates that Bright technology will allow its staff to spend less time on cluster management tasks and more time focusing on improving application performance and cluster utilization for its customers. "We are happy to partner with Bright to offer industry-proven cluster management software to our customer base," said Daniel Vogel, Systems Engineer at Raid Media Systems. "This ensures that our customers get the very best solutions for their needs.”The post Bright Reseller Raid Media Systems Targets German Supercomputing Market appeared first on insideHPC.

Professor Michela Taufer from the University of Tennessee has been selected to receive a 2019 IBM Faculty Award for $20,000 USD. This award is highly competitive and recognizes her leadership in High Performance Computing and its importance to the computing industry. "Dr. Taufer will lead work with IBM to bring the IBM Onsite Deep Learning Workshop on campus. As Deep learning and AI gain traction in scientific discovery, training EECS students in these disciplines will open tremendous opportunities for them in Tennessee and outside the state."The post Professor Michela Taufer to Receive 2019 IBM Faculty Award appeared first on insideHPC.

A new study led by a physicist at Berkeley Lab details how a quantum computing technique called “quantum annealing” can be used to solve problems relevant to fundamental questions in nuclear physics about the subatomic building blocks of all matter. As described in the journal Scientific Reports, it could also help answer other vexing questions in science and industry, too.The post Quantum Annealing could help solve fundamental questions in nuclear physics appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Xilinx launched the new Alveo U50 data center accelerator card, the industry’s first low profile adaptable accelerator with PCIe Gen 4 support. Designed for the datacenter, the Alveo U50 is uniquely designed to supercharge a broad range of critical compute, network and storage workloads, all on one reconfigurable platform. “We believe the combination of low-profile form-factor, HBM2 memory performance, and PCIe Gen 4 speed to interface with IBM Power processors will enable the OpenPOWER ecosystem to provide cutting edge adaptable acceleration solutions.”The post Xilinx Launches Alveo U50 FPGA Datacenter Accelerator Card appeared first on insideHPC.

Anderson Banihirwe from NCAR gave this talk at SciPy 2019. "This talk demonstrates how to use Dask and Jupyter on large high-performance computing (HPC) systems to scale and accelerate large interactive data analysis tasks -- effectively turning HPC systems into interactive big-data platforms. We will introduce dask-jobqueue which allows users to seamlessly deploy and scale dask on HPC clusters that use a variety of job queuing systems such as PBS, Slurm, SGE, and LSF. We will also introduce dask-mpi, a Python package that makes deploying Dask easy from within a distributed MPI environment."The post Interactive Supercomputing with Jupyter and DASK appeared first on insideHPC.

Today HPE announced it has acquired the business assets of MapR, whose data platform for artificial intelligence and analytics applications is powered by scale-out, multi-cloud and multi-protocol file system technology. This transaction includes MapR’s technology, intellectual property, and domain expertise in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) and analytics data management.The post HPE Acquires MapR Business Assets appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the growing trend of liquid cooling in the datacenter. "The new VSC-4 system built by Lenovo checks in at #82 on the TOP500 list and is liquid cooled, leading to a debate on the future of cooling and various forms of liquid-cooling: direct contact, immersion, and phase change."The post Podcast: Is Our Future Liquid Cooled? appeared first on insideHPC.

HPE is now shipping HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10 servers with the new Intel FPGA Programmable Acceleration Card D5005, the latest in a growing line of field programmable gate array-based, server-accelerator cards from Intel. "Compared to the Intel Programmable Acceleration Card with Intel Arria 10 GX FPGA, the Intel FPGA PAC D5005 accelerator card offers significantly more resources including three times the amount of programmable logic, as much as 32 GB of DDR4 memory (a 4x increase) and faster Ethernet ports (two 100GE ports versus one 40GE port)."The post HPE Speeds Gen10 Servers with Intel FPGA Programmable Acceleration Card D5005 appeared first on insideHPC.

Phison Electronics is showcasing its high performance PCIe Gen4 storage products this week at the Flash Memory Summit. "The Phison E16 provides industry leading performance, capacity and NVMe features required to build the PCIe Gen4 enabled data center of the future. Liqid is excited that the Phison E16 is now powering the fastest storage in the world, the LQD4500.”The post Phison Steps up with PCIe Gen4x4 NVMe SSD solutions appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Intel and Lenovo announced a multiyear collaboration focused on the rapidly growing opportunity in the convergence of HPC and AI to help accelerate solutions for the world’s most challenging problems. Building on the companies’ long-standing partnership in the data center, the multiyear global collaboration will accelerate the convergence of HPC and AI, creating solutions for organizations of all sizes.The post Lenovo and Intel Collaboration to Extend HPC and AI Leadership appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Bill Wagner from Bright Computing writes that the convergence of HPC & AI presents new challenges for containers, job scheduling, and system management. "But here’s the rub … traditional HPC applications run under the jurisdiction of an HPC workload manager like Slurm or PBS Pro, whereas machine learning applications are primarily run in containers under the jurisdiction of a container orchestration system, such as Kubernetes."The post The Convergence of HPC and AI appeared first on insideHPC.

Glenn Lockwood from NERSC gave this talk at the Samsung Forum. "In this talk, we will compare the storage and I/O requirements of large-scale HPC workloads with those of the cloud and show how HPC's unique requirements have led NERSC to deploy NVMe in the form of burst buffers and all-flash parallel file systems rather than block- and object-based storage. We will then explore how recent technological advances that target enterprise and cloud I/O workloads may also benefit HPC, and we will highlight a few remaining challenge areas in which innovation is required."The post Designing Future Flash Storage Systems for HPC and Beyond appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Silicon Catalyst announced the admission of three early-stage companies into the semiconductor industry’s highly acclaimed incubation program. "It’s with great pleasure that we welcome these three, exciting early-stage companies into our incubator, as they are developing leading edge solutions spanning the edge computing, artificial intelligence and power management segments. Their innovative products are poised to significantly improve overall performance and cost-effectiveness across many industries and applications.”The post Silicon Catalyst Announces Three Newly Admitted Startups to Semiconductor Incubator appeared first on insideHPC.

Global Science & Technology is seeking an experienced HPC Science Programmer in our Job of the Week. "The successful candidate will work with a group of scientists and software developers at the Satellite Oceanography and Climatology Division (SOCD) under the NOAA Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR). The position is long term, contingent upon performance."The post Job of the Week: HPC Programmer at Global Science & Technology appeared first on insideHPC.

NCSA has announced a new collaboration to produce digital elevation models (DEM) of the entire Earth, among other geospatial research projects. "This is the beginning of building a long-term strategic relationship between NGA and the University of Illinois, centered on high-performance computing and data analysis. The Blue Waters collaboration is the first of what we anticipate will be many years of research collaborations between NGA and Illinois faculty as well as NCSA."The post NCSA to help build world’s most powerful geospatial system appeared first on insideHPC.

Today ​Nimbix​ announced their collaboration with the US Sailing Team (USST) as the “Official Compute Partner of the US Sailing Team.” For us, it is all about providing the team with fast access to high-performance cloud computing to support their supercomputing simulation needs. The team is using software to analyze high priority fluid-structure studies that will hopefully help the team stand atop the podium,” said Nimbix CEO, Steve Hebert.The post Nimbix HPC Cloud Powers US Sailing Team appeared first on insideHPC.

As an all-new parallel file system, DAOS will be a key component of the the upcoming Aurora supercomputer coming to Argonne National Laboratory in 2021. "DAOS is an open source software-defined scale-out object store that provides high bandwidth, low latency, and high I/O operations per second (IOPS) storage containers to HPC applications. It enables next-generation data-centric workflows that combine simulation, data analytics, and AI."The post DAOS: Scale-Out Software-Defined Storage for HPC/Big Data/AI Convergence appeared first on insideHPC.

Oregon State University’s College of Engineering is accelerating its work in artificial intelligence, robotics, driverless vehicles and other areas by acquiring six advanced NVIDIA systems that give the college some of the most powerful computing resources among universities worldwide. "The computing power we now possess will accelerate our research in artificial intelligence and machine learning, while exposing our computer science students to the most advanced technology available in higher education.”The post OSU Invests $2.6 million in AI Computing Resources appeared first on insideHPC.

XSEDE has selected five Campus Champions Fellows for the 2019-2020 academic year. These exceptional researchers will have the opportunity to work side-by-side with staff of the XSEDE project to solve real-world science and engineering projects. "The five Fellows selected for this year will work on projects spanning from hydrology gateways to undergraduate data science curriculum development under the overarching goal of increasing cyberinfrastructure expertise on campuses by including Campus Champions as partners in XSEDE's projects."The post XSEDE Campus Champions to Focus on Research Collaboration appeared first on insideHPC.

Mark Neubauer from the University of Illinois gave this talk at the Blue Waters Symposium. "In this talk, we present our work using deep learning techniques on the Blue Waters supercomputing to develop and optimize a novel method of identifying the decays of highly-boosted Higgs bosons produced at the LHC a signature of new particles and/or phenomena at the energy frontier of particle physics. We also discuss our ongoing work using Blue Waters to develop scalable cyberinfrastructure for sustainable and reproducible data analysis workflows through the NSF-funded IRIS-HEP Institute and SCAILFIN project."The post Deep Learning for Higgs Boson Identification and Searches for New Physics at the Large Hadron Collider appeared first on insideHPC.

The Defense Department is testing a Shipping Container Supercomputer. "The $12 million contract provides for a supercomputing system housed in a shipping container with on-board power conditioning and cooling, along with the corresponding hardware and software maintenance services. The “HPC in a Container” is designed to be deployable to the tactical edge and deployment opportunities to remote locations are currently being evaluated."The post Defense Department is testing a Shipping Container Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Sylabs announced the Generally Available Release of Singularity 3.3.0. As the premier Container platform for performance-sensitive workloads, this release of Singularity focused on quality and stability. "Given the frenetic pace of development, we saw this as an opportunity to double down on quality and stability. Three release candidates later, you can appreciate that the quality and stability objective has been achieved in spades. Kudos to the entire user, developer, and provider community for their collective and substantial efforts in reaching this milestone."The post Singularity 3.3.0 Goes GA appeared first on insideHPC.

Ivo Sbalzarini from TU Dresden gave this keynote presentation at ISC 2019. In his talk, Sbalzarini mainly discussed the rapidly growing importance and influence in the life sciences for scientific high-performance computing. "The cooperative, interdisciplinary effort to develop and advance our understanding of life using computational approaches not only places high-performance computing center stage, but also provides stimulating impulses for the future development of this field."The post The Algorithms of Life – Scientific Computing for Systems Biology appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Robert Roe from Scientific Computing World writes that companies faced with increasing complexity are developing new services and tools to help users manage their HPC resources. "The single biggest thing that people do is focus too much on the hardware, and forget about the rest of the stuff. The procurement process is driven by the compute system. It doesn’t necessarily take into account that you are going to need people and software to deliver value," said Andrew Jones from NAG.The post Considerations for Managing HPC Resources appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Wes Armour from the Oxford eResearch Centre discusses the role of GPUs in processing large amounts of astronomical data collected by the Square Kilometre Array and how CUDA is the best suited option for their signal processing software. “The massive computational power of modern day GPUs allows code to perform algorithms such as de-dispersion, single pulse searching and Fourier Domain Acceleration Searching in real-time on very large data-sets which are comparable to those which will be produced by next generation radio-telescopes such as the SKA.”The post Exploring the Universe with the SKA Radio Telescope and CUDA appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Advania Data Centers (ADC) announced the industry’s first HPC cloud service based on Intel Xeon Platinum 9200 processors. This combination provides unprecedented performance and application compatibility, enabling customers to gain faster time to insights with HPC workloads in finance, weather, satellite, manufacturing, and artificial intelligence (AI) applications. "This service offering will combine ADC’s expertise in efficiently operating 100% renewable energy HPC datacenters with Intel’s computing technology."The post Advania Launches First HPC cloud service based on Intel Xeon Platinum 9200 processors appeared first on insideHPC.

According to this new report, “Archival data is piling up faster than ever as organizations are quickly learning the value of analyzing vast amounts of previously untapped digital data. The need to securely store, search for, retrieve and analyze massive volumes of archival content is fueling new and more effective advancements in archive solutions.”The post Active Archive Alliance Report: Solving Data Growth Challenges appeared first on insideHPC.

Jisc in the UK is deploying Ciena’s Packet Networking platforms to enhance its Janet Network and provide high-speed connectivity across the UK. “Ciena’s platforms help us provide the fast, highly-resilient and scalable connectivity that gives our members the best research and collaboration experience possible.”The post Ciena Bolsters Janet Network in the U.K. for Education and Research appeared first on insideHPC.

The National Science Foundation has awarded SDSC a two-year grant worth almost $400,000 to deploy a new system called Triton Stratus. "Triton Stratus will provide researchers with improved facilities for utilizing emerging computing paradigms and tools, namely interactive and portal-based computing, and scaling them to commercial cloud computing resources. Researchers, especially data scientists, are increasingly using toolssuch as Jupyter notebooks and RStudio to implement computational and data analysis functions and workflows."The post SDSC Awarded NSF Grant for Triton Stratus appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Salme Cook from the University of New Hampshire describes how she is using NCSA's Blue Waters supercomputer to model estuaries. One of the big challenges oceanographers face is the inability to observe their science directly. Cook is focused on modeling two particular estuaries in New Hampshire that are experiencing water quality degradation.The post Video: Supercomputing Sediment Transport in Estuaries appeared first on insideHPC.

Is Cloud too expensive for HPC? Enquiring minds want to know, as does the HPC community whose single-minded obsession with maximum price-performance is notorious and legendary. The Radio Free team looks at actual cloud pricing based on available data and Dan's research which fuel a hearty discussion. They look at configurations, compare prices, talk about the costs that are not included, segment the market, and then segment the applications.The post Podcast: Is Cloud too expensive for HPC? appeared first on insideHPC.

CASC serves as LLNL’s window to the broader computer science, computational physics, applied mathematics, and data science research communities. In collaboration with academic, industrial, and other government laboratory partners, investigators conduct world-class scientific research and development on problems critical to national security. CASC applies the power of high-performance computing (HPC) and the efficiency of modern computational methods to the realms of stockpile stewardship, cyber and energy security, and knowledge discovery for intelligence applications.The post Video: HPC at CASC appeared first on insideHPC.

Researchers are using XSEDE supercomputing resources in the search for new materials for power-efficient electronics. "Using a combination of calculations on XSEDE-allocated resources and lab experiments, a UCLA-led group showed that an atomistic model can explain and predict the transfer of heat between aluminum and black phosphorous, a highly anisotropic material with possible applications in future devices."The post Supercomputing Heat Transfer between 2D Electronic Components appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from PASC19 in Zurich, Mike Heroux from Sandia National Labs shares the reasons he attends the conference every year. As a multi-disciplinary show, PASC gives him the opportunity to keep up with the international science community. "PASC19 is the sixth edition of the PASC Conference series, an international platform for the exchange of competences in scientific computing and computational science, with a strong focus on methods, tools, algorithms, application challenges, and novel techniques and usage of high performance computing."The post Why PASC19 is a great show for the International Science Community appeared first on insideHPC.

The Centre for Research in Agricultural Genomics (CRAG) in Spain has announced plans to deploy Pure Storage solutions to improve its high performance computing environment. CRAG is dedicated to cutting-edge scientific research in plant and farm animal biology. The new solution ensures the speed, scalability and stability required by CRAG’s scientists to carry out vital research projects.The post CRAG Adopts Pure Storage for Agricultural Genomics appeared first on insideHPC.

William Kramer has been selected as the next director of the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. "It’s our great fortune to recruit Bill, who is known and honored nationally for his leadership and innovations in the world of supercomputing,” said Rob A. Rutenbar, senior vice chancellor for research at the University of Pittsburgh. “In many ways, his career path is emblematic of the role of supercomputing in modern scientific research. The field has grown specifically because of his innovations and commitment.”The post Bill Kramer to Lead Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Fujitsu announced a contract to upgrade the Australia's fastest supercomputer at NCI. Called "Gadi," the new supercomputer will replace the NCI's current supercomputer, Raijin, which was also provided by Fujitsu back in 2012. "The upgrade of this critical infrastructure will see Australia continue to play a leading role in addressing some of our greatest global challenges. This new machine will keep Australian research and the 5,000 researchers who use it at the cutting-edge."The post Fujitsu to Deploy Gadi Supercomputer at NCI in Australia appeared first on insideHPC.

The MVAPICH User Group Meeting (MUG 2019) has published its Speaker Agenda. The event will take place from August 19-21 in Columbus, Ohio. "MUG aims to bring together MVAPICH2 users, researchers, developers, and system administrators to share their experience and knowledge and learn from each other. The event includes Keynote Talks, Invited Tutorials, Invited Talks, Contributed Presentations, Open MIC session, hands-on sessions MVAPICH developers, etc."The post Agenda Posted: MVAPICH User Group (MUG) Meeting in Ohio appeared first on insideHPC.

Piotr Balcer and Cheng Xu from Intel gave this talk at the 2019 Spark+AI Summit. "Intel Optane DC persistent memory breaks the traditional memory/storage hierarchy and scales up the computing server with higher capacity persistent memory. Also it brings higher bandwidth & lower latency than storage like SSD or HDD. And Apache Spark is widely used in the analytics like SQL and Machine Learning on the cloud environment."The post Accelerate Your Apache Spark with Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory appeared first on insideHPC.

D.E. Shaw Research is seeking and HPC System Administrator in our Job of the Week. "Exceptional sysadmins sought to manage systems, storage, and network infrastructure for a New York–based interdisciplinary research group. Ideal candidates should have strong fundamental knowledge of Linux concepts such as file systems, networking, and processes in addition to practical experience administering Linux systems."The post Job of the Week: HPC System Administrator at DE Shaw Research appeared first on insideHPC.

Marek MagryÅ› from Cyfronet gave this talk at the DDN User Group. "This talk will describe the architecture and implementation of high capacity Lustre file system for the need of a data intensive project. Storage is based on DDN ES7700 building block and uses RDMA over Converged Ethernet as network transport. What is unusual is that the storage system is located over 10 kilometers away from the supercomputer. Challenges, performance benchmarks and tuning will be the main topic of the presentation."The post Video: Lustre, RoCE, and MAN appeared first on insideHPC.

Large, error-correcting quantum computers envisioned today could be decades away, yet experts are vigorously trying to come up with ways to use existing and near-term quantum processors to solve useful problems despite limitations due to errors or noise. "Now, the Virginia Tech team is devising an algorithm that can more efficiently calculate the properties of molecules on a noisy quantum computer."The post Virginia Tech researchers lead breakthrough in quantum computing appeared first on insideHPC.

Atos was recently selected by GCS AURAGEN to provide and orchestrate the high-performance computing infrastructure and storage of a new genomic pilot platform for high-flow sequencing calculation. "The Atos solution is designed to support the entire life cycle of genomic data - from DNA sequencing to analysis production."The post Atos Powers HPC for Genomic Pilot Platform appeared first on insideHPC.

Lenovo has deployed the fastest supercomputer in Austria. Installed by EDV-Design at TU Wien, the water cooled Vienna Scientific Cluster 4 (VSC-4) ranks #82 in the TOP500 list. "The compute nodes are directly water cooled allowing to use primary cooling water with a temperature in excess of 43 ℃, permitting year-round free cooling. Up to 90% of the energy will be removed by this high-temperature loop with the remainder being removed by air cooling. This permits a very reasonable energy foot-print."The post VSC-4 from Lenovo is Austria’s most powerful supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

Sam Hatfield from the University of Oxford gave this talk at the PASC19 conference. "In this paper, we investigate the use of mixed-precision hardware that supports floating-point operations at double-, single- and half-precision. In particular, we investigate the potential use of the NVIDIA Tensor Core, a mixed-precision matrix-matrix multiplier mainly developed for use in deep learning, to accelerate the calculation of the Legendre transforms in the Integrated Forecasting System (IFS), one of the leading global weather forecast models."The post Accelerating High-Resolution Weather Models with Deep-Learning Hardware appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $37 million in funding for targeted research in materials and chemistry to advance the important emerging field of Quantum Information Science (QIS). "America was a pioneer in the establishment of the Information Age,” said Under Secretary for Science Paul Dabbar. “It’s critical that we remain in the forefront of information science and technology, and this new research will help ensure continued U.S. leadership in the information economy in the years ahead.”The post DOE Funds $37 Million for Materials and Chemistry Research in Quantum Information Science appeared first on insideHPC.