High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

Exascale computing continues to work its way into the consciousness of wider and more diverse audiences, creating demand for more explanation of what it is and what the U.S. initiatives are that have forged the strategic foundation for making exascale in the U.S. a reality. "Two terms that often land in the middle of these conversations begging for some clarification are the Exascale Computing Initiative (ECI) and the Exascale Computing Project (ECP)."The post The Strategic Foundation of Exascale Computing in the USA appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Vyasa Analytics, announced it has joined the NVIDIA Inception program, which is designed to nurture startups revolutionizing industries with advancements in AI and data sciences. "Vyasa is a deep learning company specializing in the life sciences and healthcare spaces. Vyasa’s secure, highly-scalable deep learning software, Cortex, allows users to apply deep learning in specialized ways to large scale data sets like text, images, quantitative data and chemical structures. Cortex can integrate and analyze data for key use cases such as business development, competitive intelligence, EHR analytics, compliance/fraud detection, crystal morphology classification for formulation, drug repurposing and de novo compound design."The post Vyasa Analytics Joins NVIDIA Inception Program appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the Blue Waters Symposium, Roland Haas from NCSA presents: Tutorial: How to use Jupyter Notebooks. "Jupyter notebooks provide a web-based interface to Python, R, Julia and other languages. They allow code, code output, and documentation to be mixed in a single document making it possible to contain self-documented workflows. Focusing on Python I will show how to use Jupyter notebooks on Blue Waters to explore data, produce plots and analyze simulation output using numpy, matplotlib and time permitting, I will show how to use notebooks on login nodes and on compute nodes as well as, time permitting, how to use parallelism inside of Jupyter notebooks."The post Tutorial: “How to use Jupyter Notebooks” appeared first on insideHPC.

Over at the NVIDIA Blog, Chris Kawalek writes that Microsoft Azure is now a supported NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC) platform. "This means that data scientists, researchers and developers that use NVIDIA GPU instances on Microsoft Azure will be able to jumpstart their AI and HPC projects with a wide range of GPU-optimized software available at no additional charge through NGC. Thousands more developers, data scientists and researchers can now jumpstart their GPU computing projects, following today’s announcement."The post NVIDIA GPU Cloud comes to Microsoft Azure appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the HPC-AI Advisory Council announced the winning teams of the first Asia-Pacific HPC-AI Competition during a live award ceremony in Singapore. The award ceremony recognized the top three winners and meritorious performers from amongst 18 teams representing prestigious universities throughout Asia-Pacific.The post Student Teams Step up to 2018 APAC HPC-AI Student Competition appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the Dell EMC HPC Community Meeting, Venkatesh Ramanathan from Paypal describes how HPC innovation is helping the company invent new ways to make money safe and accessible for all. "Venkatesh is a senior data scientist at PayPal where he is working on building state-of-the-art tools for payment fraud detection."The post How Dell EMC Powers HPC at Paypal appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the National Science Foundation announced a $60 million award to TACC for the deployment of Frontera, a new machine that will be one of the fastest supercomputers ever available to academia. "The new Frontera systems represents the next phase in the long-term relationship between TACC and Dell EMC, focused on applying the latest technical innovation to truly enable human potential,” said Thierry Pellegrino, vice president of Dell EMC High Performance Computing. “The substantial power and scale of this new system will help researchers from Austin and across the U.S. harness the power of technology to spawn new discoveries and advances in science and technology for years to come.”The post New Frontera supercomputer at TACC to push the frontiers of science appeared first on insideHPC.

The Garvan Institute of Medical Research has selected Dell EMC to deliver an HPC system for Garvan’s Data Intensive Computer Engineering (DICE) group, designed to push scientific boundaries and transform the way genomic research is currently performed in Australia. "Genomics, the study of information encoded in an individual’s DNA, allows researchers to study how genes impact health and disease. When the first human genome was sequenced, the project took over 10 years and cost almost US$3 billion. In recent years, extraordinary advancements in DNA sequencing have made the analysis of whole human genomes viable, and today, Garvan can sequence up to 50 genomes a day at a base price of around US$1,000."The post Dell EMC Does Supercomputing Genomics Down Under appeared first on insideHPC.

New York University Arts and Science is seeking a talented HPC Specialist to join their Department of Biology in our Job of the Week. "This individual will provide technical leadership in design, development, installation and maintenance of hardware and software for the central High-Performance Computing and Biology Department server systems and/or scientific computing services at New York University. Plan, design and direct implementation of the Linux operating system's hardware, cluster management software, scientific computing software and/or network services. Analyze performance of computing systems; plan new system configurations; direct implementation of operating system enhancements that improve reliability and performance."The post Job of the Week: HPC Specialist at New York University appeared first on insideHPC.

Maurizio Pierini from CERN gave this talk at PASC18. "We investigate the possibility of using generative models (e.g., GANs and variational autoencoders) as analysis-specific data augmentation tools to increase the size of the simulation data used by the LHC experiments. With the LHC entering its high-luminosity phase in 2025, the projected computing resources will not be able to sustain the demand for simulated events. Generative models are already investigated as the mean to speed up the centralized simulation process."The post Generative Models for Application-Specific Fast Simulation of LHC Collision Events appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Penguin Computing announced that it is expanding its global headquarters in Fremont, California to become a two-building campus with a new, state-of-the art production facility, along with creation of both a benchmarking and innovation lab and a customer briefing center, all expected to be open by the end of the year. “This is an exciting milestone for Penguin Computing and helps position the company to respond to the changing HPC, AI, and storage landscape and the increasing demand for our services and technologies.”The post Under New Management, Penguin Computing is Coming Back to HPC in a Big Way appeared first on insideHPC.

Researchers are using Argonne supercomputers to better understand how charged particles emanating from Jupiter’s magnetosphere power a celestial version of the Aurora Borealis on northern and southern lights on Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. "This work confirms and furthers our understanding of electron physics in magnetospheric dynamics. It sheds light on how the Earth’s magnetic field prevents the solar wind from burning the Earth’s atmosphere to a crisp and the future of predictive technologies for space weather."The post Supercomputing “Northern Lights” on Other Planets appeared first on insideHPC.

"Machine learning enables systems to learn automatically, based on patterns in data, and make better searches, decisions, or predictions. Machine learning has become increasingly important to scientific discovery. Indeed, the U.S. Department of Energy has stated that “machine learning has the potential to transform Office of Science research best practices in an age where extreme complexity and data overwhelm human cognitive and perception ability by enabling system autonomy to self-manage, heal and find patterns and provide tools for the discovery of new scientific insights."The post Video: Overview of Machine Learning Methods appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the latest developments in processor technology coming out of the recent Hot Chips conference. "The HOT CHIPS conference typically attracts more than 500 attendees from all over the world. It provides an opportunity for chip designers, computer architects, system engineers, press and analysts, as well as attendees from national laboratories and academia to mix, mingle and see presentations on the latest technologies and products."The post Radio Free HPC Looks at Hot Chips for 2018 appeared first on insideHPC.

Over at The UberCloud, Wolfgang Gentzsch writes that researchers are using HPC in the Cloud in a revolutionary new way for the design of bioreactors. "It’s amazing to think of all the products created in bioreactors. The medications we take, the beer we drink and the yogurt we eat are all made in bioreactors optimized for the manufacturing of these products. Unfortunately, optimizations take a lot of work and data. In a new HPC Cloud project, engineers from ANSYS with support from UberCloud performed an extensive Design of Experiments in Microsoft’s Azure Cloud."The post UberCloud Works with ANSYS and Azure to Optimize Bioreactors appeared first on insideHPC.

Valentin Clement from the Center for Climate System Modeling in Switzerland gave this talk at PASC18. 'In order to profit from emerging high-performance computing systems, weather and climate models need to be adapted to run efficiently on different hardware architectures such as accelerators. This is a major challenge for existing community models that represent very large code bases written in Fortran. We introduce the CLAW domain-specific language (CLAW DSL) and the CLAW Compiler that allows the retention of a single code written in Fortran and achieve a high degree of performance portability."The post The CLAW DSL: Abstractions for Performance Portable Weather and Climate Models appeared first on insideHPC.

Berkeley Lab is seeking a Computer Science Postdoctoral Scholar in our Job of the Week. "Berkeley Lab’s Computational Research Division has an opening for a Computer Science Postdoctoral Scholar. Develop performance modeling and analytical capabilities and tools for manycore and GPU-accelerated supercomputers and apply them to distributed memory Office of Science applications running on such platforms."The post Job of the Week: Computer Science Postdoctoral Scholar at Berkeley Lab appeared first on insideHPC.

"We invite researchers and professionals to take part in this workshop to discuss the challenges of Machine Learning, AI and HPC, and share their insights, use cases, tools and best practices. HPML is held in conjunction with the 30th edition of SBAC-PAD. SBAC-PAD is an international conference on High Performance Computing started in 1987 in which scientists and researchers present recent findings in the fields of parallel processing, distributed computing and computer architecture."The post Agenda Published: High Performance Machine Learning Workshop in France appeared first on insideHPC.

Emma Haruka gave this talk at Google Next. "Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is ready for High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. Google Compute Engine (GCE) offers flexible network and virtual machine (VM) configuration options to run HPC workloads. This session explores why GCP is a good place to run HPC applications and save money. Topics will include CPU, GPU, and memory offerings, as well as underlying network architecture, preemptible VMs, and storage options. You will also learn how Google designs their cloud infrastructure and why it works for HPC workloads."The post Video: Introduction to HPC on the Google Cloud Platform appeared first on insideHPC.

SYCL is an open standard developed by the Khronos Group that enables developers to write code for heterogeneous systems using standard C++. Developers are looking at how they can accelerate their applications without having to write optimized processor specific code. SYCL is the industry standard for C++ acceleration, giving developers a platform to write high-performance code in standard C++, unlocking the performance of accelerators and specialized processors from companies such as AMD, Intel, Renesas, and Arm.The post Codeplay Releases First Fully-Conformant SYCL 1.2.1 Solution for C++ appeared first on insideHPC.

Etienne Lyard from the University of Geneva, Switzerland presents: Handling and Processing Data from the Cherenkov Telescope Array.

Dan Rosplock from Virginia Tech writes that Large-scale simulations could shed light on the 'dark' elements that make up most of our cosmos. By reverse engineering the evolution of these elements, they could provide unique insights into more than 14 billion years of cosmic history.The post Supercomputing Dark Matter appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) announced the recipients of its annual awards program. SWE Awards recognize individuals who have proven to be innovators and leaders in their local communities, the STEM community and the future generation of STEM. SWE award recipients include professionals and collegiates from influential businesses, corporations and universities across the globe who play an integral role in the support and advancement of women in engineering. "The men and women recognized today have broken boundaries in their careers and personal lives,” said Penny Wirsing, president of SWE. “They are leaders paving the way to empower and inspire future women engineers across the globe.”The post SWE Awards Recognize Engineers in the STEM Community appeared first on insideHPC.

Susan Bates from NCAR gave this talk at the Blue Waters Summit. "For the past five years, the Blue Waters Project has provided an invaluable platform for research in the fields of atmospheric science, climate, and weather. The computationally intensive numerical models running on Blue Waters push the limits of model resolution and/or capability in first-of-their-kind simulations."The post Advances in the Fields of Atmospheric Science, Climate, and Weather appeared first on insideHPC.

This guest article from Kingston Technology covers how NVMe SSDs and DRAM are being used for high performing mixed workloads.The post NVMe SSDs and DRAM for High Performing Mixed Workloads appeared first on insideHPC.

Today D-Wave Systems published a milestone study demonstrating a topological phase transition using its 2048-qubit annealing quantum computer. This complex quantum simulation of materials is a major step toward reducing the need for time-consuming and expensive physical research and development.The post D-Wave Demonstrates First Large-Scale Quantum Simulation of Topological State of Matter appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Tate Cantrell from Verne Global describes how the company is taking advantage of the nearly unlimited power and cooling available in Iceland for their datacenters running HPC workloads. "Whether deployed as stand-alone compute or used as an extension to existing in-house HPC infrastructure, hpcDIRECT from Verne Global offers a top specification (x86 and ARM), bare metal solution combining best-in-class design and an HPC optimised, low cost environment and location."The post Video: Moving HPC Workloads to Verne Global in Iceland appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Fujitsu published specifications for the A64FX CPU to be featured in the post-K computer, a future machine designed to be 100 times faster than the legendary K computer that dominated the TOP500 for years. "A64FX is the world's first CPU to adopt the Scalable Vector Extension (SVE), an extension of Armv8-A instruction set architecture for supercomputers. Building on over 60 years' worth of Fujitsu-developed microarchitecture, this chip offers peak performance of over 2.7 TFLOPS, demonstrating superior HPC and AI performance."The post Fujitsu Unveils Details on Post-K Supercomputer Processor Powered by ARM appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Mike Bernhardt sits down with Doug Kothe from the Exascale Computing Project for a quick update and a look ahead. "As we traverse the second half of the 2018 calendar year, the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) continues to execute confidently toward our mission of accelerating the delivery of a capable exascale computing ecosystem* to coincide with the nation’s first exascale platforms in the early 2020s."The post Video: An Update on the Exascale Computing Project appeared first on insideHPC.

VMware explores the concepts of virtual throughput clusters and CPU overcommitment with VMware vSphere to create multitenant and agile virtual HPC computing environments.The post Virtualization Adds Value, Benefits to HPC Environments appeared first on insideHPC.

In today's Startup news, HPC elder James Cuff has joined a new company called Witnix. Most recently at The Next Platform, James spent most of his career at the HPC center at Harvard before he retired a couple of times. Just ask him. "We love working with new and established advanced technology organizations alike. When you find you have a scaling issue, want to grow, deliver results and build profits even faster, let’s talk about how our approach will help you."The post HPC Elder James Cuff Joins Witnix Startup appeared first on insideHPC.

In this Chip Chat podcast, Lisa Spelman from Intel summarizes the recent Intel Data Centric Innovation Summit. In this interview, Spelman discusses Intel's view of data-centric computing and how our broad portfolio of silicon solutions will help customers move faster, store more, and process everything.The post Podcast: Lisa Spelman on Intel Data-Centric Solutions appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from PASC18, Dan Jacobson from ORNL describes the highlights from the conference and why scientists and engineers should consider attending PASC19 in Zurich. "Next year, PASC19 happens the week before the ISC 2019 conference in Germany. Be sure to catch both shows!"The post Interview: Dan Jacobson from ORNL on Why PASC19 will be The Show to Attend Next Year appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the Dell EMC HPC Community Meeting, Robert Dildy from Dell EMC describes how the company powers HPC for the Oil & Gas industry. "The Dell EMC HPC Community is a worldwide technical forum that fosters the exchange of ideas among researchers, computer scientists, technologists, and engineers and promotes the advancement of innovative, powerful HPC solutions."The post How Dell EMC Powers HPC for the Oil & Gas industry appeared first on insideHPC.

Today CoolIT Systems announced it has appointed STULZ ANZ as its master distributor for Rack DCLC products in the Australasian region. "As a business who prides itself on our innovations and future gazing approach, partnering with CoolIT ensures we can provide the latest liquid cooling technology to our portfolio of solutions, and ensure we remain at the forefront of our industry as it rapidly changes year by year.”The post CoolIT Systems Teams with STULZ for Liquid Cooling Down Under appeared first on insideHPC.

In this slidecast, Trish Damkroger from Intel presents: Technology Trends Driving HPC. "HPC is now critical for more use cases, complex workloads, and data-intensive computing than ever before. From AI and visualization to simulation and modeling, Intel provides the advantage of one platform for any workload by integrating world-class compute with powerful fabric, memory, storage, and acceleration. You can move your research and innovation forward faster to solve the world’s most complex challenges."The post Slidecast: Technology Trends Driving HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the new Eagle supercomputing under construction at NREL. "The new machine from HPE will run more detailed models that simulate complex processes, systems, and phenomena to advance early research and development on energy technologies across fields including vehicle, wind power, and data sciences."The post Radio Free HPC Looks at NREL’s new Eagle Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

This fall, the Intel Extreme Performance Users Group (IXPUG) will host a free conference focused on key high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing topics.This guest post from Intel explores how AI and HPC are converging and and how the two areas of technology — as well as cloud computing — are converging.The post Exploring the Convergence of AI, HPC & More appeared first on insideHPC.

A new effort from the Visual Genomes Foundation (VGF) looks to move visual artificial intelligence forward in big way. The first step: learn and record exabytes of visual DNA features from millions of images in a collaborative effort that is open to industry, academia, and government partners. “Nobody has ever created a working model of the entire human visual system – a true synthetic vision system. We have a first generation model working now that will only get better over time."The post Visual Genomes Foundation Looks to Exascale for Ai appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the Blue Waters 2018 Symposium, Maxim Belkin presents a tutorial on Containers: Shifter and Singularity on Blue Waters. "Container solutions are a great way to seamlessly execute code on a variety of platforms. Not only they are used to abstract away from the software stack of the underlying operating system, they also enable reproducible computational research. In this mini-tutorial, I will review the process of working with Shifter and Singularity on Blue Waters."The post Containers: Shifter and Singularity on Blue Waters appeared first on insideHPC.

Brian O'Shea from Michigan State University gave this talk at the Blue Waters Summit. "Astronomy, astrophysics, and space sciences are fields that are inundated with data, and involve physical phenomena that are complex and cannot be explored via experiments on Earth. As a result, sophisticated simulation tools are required to make theoretical progress in understanding these phenomena, and large-scale computing is required to both analyze observational data and to execute the necessary simulations. In this talk, I will highlight some of the most important advances made in astronomy, astrophysics, and space sciences using Blue Waters, including a variety of figures and animations contributed by the user community."The post Video: Exploring the Universe with Blue Waters appeared first on insideHPC.

Intel is seeking a Research Scientist for their Extreme Scale Computing team in Oregon in our Job of the Week. "In this position, you will be responsible for conceiving, researching, and prototyping new parallel and distributed computing algorithms and frameworks, with special emphasis on machine learning and graph analytics, and you will develop relevant software and hardware technologies with the goal of converting these into products and fueling Intel's growth. You will use your strong knowledge of scientific principles to identify and research promising technologies typically 3-5 years prior to product development. This requires a good understanding of state-of-the-art techniques in parallel computing, machine learning, distributed computing, optimization of algorithms, and bench-marking, along with a strong understanding of computer architecture."The post Job of the Week: Research Scientist at Intel appeared first on insideHPC.

Vasileios Karakasis from CSCS gave this talk at the the Directive Based GPU Programming Workshop. "Directives-based programming facilitates the task of parallelizing your application by letting you focus on its parallel logic rather than on the very details and the low-level intricacies of the GPU architecture. In this course, we will introduce the OpenACC programming paradigms for the GPU. We will cover the parallel execution model and how it can be used to leverage parallelism, the memory model and how this differs from the classic CPU paradigm."The post Video: Introduction to OpenACC appeared first on insideHPC.

This week at the Hot Chips conference, Tachyum CEO Dr. Radoslav Danilak described how the company's its Prodigy Universal Processor Chip combines the best attributes of CPU, GPU and TPU architectures to overcome HPC challenges. "I look forward to sharing with attendees at HOT CHIPS how a new approach is needed to overcome the challenges faced by all those in the hyperscale datacenter, HPC and AI markets.”The post Tachyum Touts Benefits of Universal Processor at HOT CHIPS appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Women in High Performance Computing (WHPC) group announced the launch of a Chapters and Affiliates Program to bring its vision and mission to the worldwide community and assist those passionate about diversity and inclusion in bringing about positive change in their localities. The pilot programme consists of six chapters and three affiliates across Europe and North America, and will allow WHPC to assess how a worldwide network of such chapters and affiliates might operate.The post Women in HPC Launches Chapters and Affiliates Pilot Program appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the DDN User Group at ISC 2018, James Coomer from DDN presents: A3I - Accelerated Any-Scale Solutions from DDN. "Engineered from the ground up for the AI-enabled data center, DDN’s A3I solutions are fully optimized to handle the spectrum of AI and DL activities concurrently: data ingest and preparation, training, validation, and inference. The DDN A3I platform is easy to deploy and manage, highly scalable in both performance and capacity, and represents a highly efficient and resilient solution for all of your current and future AI requirements."The post Video: Accelerated Any-Scale Ai Solutions from DDN appeared first on insideHPC.

In this Conversations with Dez podcast, Dez Blanchfield sits down with Jack Wells from ORNL to talk about about his personal & professional life journey, his role at Oak Ridge National Lab, how Artificial Intelligence is being deployed & leveraged in HPC, and the role IBM’s POWER9 solution is playing in supporting Oak Ridge and its mission. Jack Wells is the Director of Science for the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility.The post Podcast: From Here to Ai with Jack Wells from Oak Ridge appeared first on insideHPC.

SC18 continues its series of Invited Talk previews with this quick look at "Brain-Inspired Massively-Parallel Computing” by Stephen Furber. "The SpiNNaker (Spiking Neural Network Architecture) platform is an example of a highly flexible digital neuromorphic platform, based upon a massively-parallel configuration of small processors with a bespoke interconnect fabric designed to support the very high connectivity of biological neural nets in real-time models. Although designed primarily to support brain science, it can also be used to explore more applications-oriented research."The post SC18 Preview: Steve Furber on Brain-Inspired Massively-Parallel Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

Today ACM announced that Linda Gesenhues of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and Markus Höhnerbach of RWTH Aachen University are the recipients of the 2018 ACM-IEEE CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowships. "The ACM-IEEE CS George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship is endowed in memory of George Michael, one of the founding fathers of the SC Conference series. The fellowship honors exceptional PhD students throughout the world whose research focus is on high performance computing applications, networking, storage or large-scale data analytics using the most powerful computers that are currently available."The post Linda Gesenhues and Markus Höhnerbach to receive George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowships appeared first on insideHPC.

Tiziana DiMatteo from Carnegie Melon University gave this talk at the 2018 Blue Waters Symposium. "The first billion years is a pivotal time for cosmic structure formation. The galaxies and black holes that form then shape and influence all future generations of stars and black holes. Understanding and detecting the the first galaxies and black holes is therefore one of the main observational and theoretical challenges in galaxy formation."The post Video: Massive Galaxies and Black Holes at the Cosmic Dawn appeared first on insideHPC.