High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

Today Sweden's National Supercomputing Centre (NSC) at Linköping University announced it has awarded ClusterVision a contract to build its new flagship cluster, Tetralith. Available to all researchers in Sweden, the 4 Petaflop machine will be Scandinavia's most powerful yet with 60,544 cores based on Intel Xeon.The post ClusterVision to build Scandinavia’s Most Powerful Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

Today OpenSFS announced the release of Lustre 2.11.0, the fastest and most scalable parallel file system. OpenSFS, founded in 2010 to advance Lustre development, is the premier non-profit organization promoting the use of Lustre and advancing its capabilities through coordinated releases of the Lustre file system.The post Lustre 2.11.0 Released appeared first on insideHPC.

"This presentation offers an impartial look at benchmarking of HPC systems by Andrew Jones (@hpcnotes), NAG VP Strategic HPC Consulting & Services. This is described as a must-see for anyone involved in high performance or scientific computing."The post Video: Benchmarking as the Answer to HPC Performance and Architecture Questions appeared first on insideHPC.

Over at the NVIDIA blog, Loyd Case shares some recent advancements that deliver dramatic performance gains on GPUs to the AI community. "We have achieved record-setting ResNet-50 performance for a single chip and single server with these improvements. Recently, fast.ai also announced their record-setting performance on a single cloud instance. A single V100 Tensor Core GPU achieves 1,075 images/second when training ResNet-50, a 4x performance increase compared to the previous generation Pascal GPU."The post New AI Performance Milestones with NVIDIA Volta GPU Tensor Cores appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team takes a look at daunting performance targets for the DOE’s CORAL-2 RFP for Exascale Computers. “So, 1.5 million TeraFlops divided by 7.8 Teraflops per GPU is how many individual accelerators you need, and that’s 192,307. Now, multiply that by 300 watts per accelerator, and it is clear we are going to need something all-new to get where we want to go.”The post Radio Free HPC Does the Math on pending CORAL-2 Exascale Machines appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Cavium announced the General Availability of ThunderX2, Cavium's second generation of Armv8-A SoC processors. "Integrating ThunderX2 into the HPE Apollo 70 Servers is another example of HPE's leadership in driving innovation and superior technical solutions into the HPC server market. The ThunderX2 processor provides excellent compute and memory performance that is critical for our HPE Apollo 70 customers and the applications they depend on."The post Cavium ThunderX2 Processor goes GA for HPC and Beyond appeared first on insideHPC.

This is the third in a five-part series that explores the potential of unified deep learning with CPU, GPU and FGPA technologies. This post explores DNN implementation, optimization and challenges.The post DNN Implementation, Optimization, and Challenges appeared first on insideHPC.

Over a the University of Texas at Austin, Marc Airhart writes that researchers are using TACC supercomputers to better understand the physics behind the spread of cancer. "Having a physicist working on cancer can provide a new perspective into how a tumor evolves," said Abdul Malmi-Kakkada, a postdoctoral researcher who led the project, along with postdoctoral researcher Xin Li, and professor and chair of chemistry Dave Thirumalai. "And rather than only looking at genetics or biology, trying to attack the problem of cancer from different perspectives can hopefully lead to a better understanding."The post Supercomputing How Cancer Spreads through Superdiffusion appeared first on insideHPC.

Dr. Chris Loken gave this talk at the HPC User Forum. "We collaborate with our partners to centralize strategy and planning for Ontario’s advanced computing assets, including hardware, software, data management, storage, storage, security, connectivity and Highly Qualified Personnel. Together, we strive to address concerns about Ontario’s capacity to supply advanced computing at the level required for leading research and enabling industrial competitiveness."The post HPC in Ontario, Canada appeared first on insideHPC.

Today hyperscale storage provider Quobyte announced that it has accepted an invitation to join the Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC) Benchmark Council, an influential group of technologists in the finance industry. "Quobyte provides massively scalable software storage to allow the industry to take advantage of the insights they can gain from the extensive amount of historical trading data they have collected,” said Björn Kolbeck, Quobyte’s CEO and Co-Founder. “We’ve found that Quobyte storage software running on a cluster of industry standard whitebox servers can significantly reduce time spent on backtesting — literally converting time saved into money.”The post Quobyte Joins STAC Benchmark Council to help Financial Services Solve Storage Challenges appeared first on insideHPC.

Two Sigma Investments in New York is seeking a Quantitative Software Engineer for High Frequency Trading in our Job of the Week. "We are seeking leading software engineers to join our dynamic, fast-paced high frequency team. Equal parts code experts and mathematical thinkers, our quantitative software engineers bring together technical and analytical expertise to grapple with difficult computational and data-related problems directly and implement efficient and innovative solutions. Entailing a sophisticated knowledge of algorithms, statistics, and high-performance computing, this effort has attracted ACM programming competition finalists, Top Coder contenders, and other highly technical, competitive problem solvers."The post Job of the Week: Quantitative Software Engineer for High Frequency Trading appeared first on insideHPC.

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center will host the RISC-V Workshop next week, a gathering the open source processor design community to share RISC-V updates, projects and implementations. Founded in 2015, the RISC-V Foundation comprises more than 100 members building the first open, collaborative community of software and hardware innovators powering innovation at the edge forward. BSC is promoting the adoption of RISC-V as a key partner of the European Processor Initiative, the consortium to design and develop Europe's low-power processors and related technologies for extreme-scale, high-performance computing, which will be funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 program.The post BSC to host the RISC-V Workshop on the Road to European Processor Initiative appeared first on insideHPC.

Over at the Fast.AI Blog, Jeremy Howard writes that his Startup has achieved an amazing deep learning benchmark milestone – the ability to do an ImageNet training in 3 hours for just $25. "His recent discovery of an extraordinary phenomenon he calls super convergence shows that it is possible to train deep neural networks 5-10x faster than previously known methods, which has the potential to revolutionize the field."The post Fast.ai Trains Neural Net in Record Time with Super Convergence appeared first on insideHPC.

The High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) and Supercomputing Center of Wuhan University have announced plans to cooperate on technology and training projects. "HLRS and the Supercomputing Center at Wuhan University plan to exchange scientists and to focus on key research topics in high-performance computing. Both sides will also share experience in installing large-scale computing systems, particularly because both Wuhan and Stuttgart aim to develop exascale systems."The post HLRS and Wuhan to Collaborate on Exascale Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

Steve Reinhardt from D-Wave Systems gave this talk at the HPC User Forum. "Despite the incredible power of today’s supercomputers, there are many complex computing problems that can’t be addressed by conventional systems. While we are only at the beginning of this journey, quantum computing has the potential to help solve some of the most complex technical, scientific, national defense, and commercial problems that organizations face. We expect that quantum computing will lead to breakthroughs in science, engineering, modeling and simulation, healthcare, financial analysis, optimization, logistics, and national defense applications."The post Quantum Computing – Timing is Everything appeared first on insideHPC.

In this edition of Let's Talk Exascale, Thom Dunning from the University of Washington describes the software effort underway to for molecular modeling at exascale with NWCHEMEX. "To date, our work is focused on the redesign of Northwest Chem, but we’ve also explored a number of alternate strategies for implementing the overall redesign as well as the redesign of the algorithms, and this work required access to the ECP computing allocations."The post Let’s Talk Exascale: Thom Dunning on Molecular Modeling with NWCHEMEX appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Bright Computing announced a reseller and services partnership agreement with X-ISS. "

Amanda Randles from Duke University will receive the 2018 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, which recognizes young researchers for major technical or service contribution to computation. A Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (DOE CSGF) alumna, Randles built supercomputing models to capture details of the human circulatory system.The post ACM Honors Amanda Randles from Duke University appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Rescale announced that XFdtd electromagnetic simulation software from Remcom is now available on Rescale’s ScaleX platform for HPC in the cloud. The combined solutions allows engineers to quickly and easily run complex, high-fidelity EM simulation models from any web browser. "We are very excited to be partnering with Remcom,” said Joris Poort, CEO at Rescale. “We believe that Remcom users will benefit from the fast, flexible, secure, and huge on-demand resources that Rescale can bring to computationally demanding tools, such as electromagnetic simulation.”The post Rescale Brings NVIDIA GPU-Accelerated Electromagnetic Simulation To The Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature from Scientific Computing World, Robert Roe talks to Southampton University’s Oz Parchment about the decision-making behind installing the latest HPC system at the University. "Iridis 4 was based On Sandy Bridge and the current one we have got now is based on Sky Lake so you can see we have jumped four generations of development. Four years is a long time in HPC performance," stated Oz Parchment, director of i-solutions at the University of Southampton.The post Iridis 5 Supercomputer to Simplify Use of HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Scott McNealy, former CEO of Sun Microsystems, joins the Masons Leadership Summit to back, learn, and inform the future. "Scott talked about some of the projects he’s currently involved with (curriki.org, wayin.com, drivescale.com), offered his opinions on internet privacy (“there isn’t any, get over it”), provided advice on how Mark Zuckerberg should have approached the recent Senate hearings, and offered his views on the value (or lack thereof) of most college educations."The post Video: Scott McNealy on Why the Network is Still the Computer appeared first on insideHPC.

"The 14th Annual OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) Workshop, held in scenic Boulder, Colorado, recently concluded its week-long, community-wide collaboration and dialogue on OpenFabrics. As the premier means of fostering lively discussions among those who develop fabrics, deploy fabrics, and create applications that rely on fabrics, the Workshop is the ideal venue for the OpenFabrics community and networking industry at large to identify and address the wide variety of emerging industry requirements and challenges that remain."The post The OpenFabrics Alliance 2018 Annual Workshop Recap appeared first on insideHPC.

"If you’re doing any kind of parallel simulation, and you have a bit of imbalance, all the other cores have to wait for the slowest one,” Junghans says, a problem that compounds as the computing system’s size grows. “The bigger you go on scale, the more these tiny imbalances matter.” On a system like LANL’s Trinity supercomputer up to 999,999 cores could idle, waiting on a single one to complete a task.The post Balancing the Load – A Million Cores in Concert appeared first on insideHPC.

Today ACM announced the recipients of four prestigious technical awards. These leaders were selected by their peers for making significant contributions that have had far-reaching impact on the ascendance of computing as an integral part of how we live and work today, opening promising new avenues for research exploration and commercial application in the coming years. "The ACM - AAAI Allen Newell Award is presented to an individual selected for career contributions that have breadth within computer science, or that bridge computer science and other disciplines. The Newell award is accompanied by a prize of $10,000, provided by ACM and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and by individual contributions."The post ACM Recognizes Innovators in Open Source Software, Biotechnology, Networks, and Artificial Intelligence appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the HPC User Forum in Tucson, Earl Joseph from Hyperion Research presents an HPC Market Update. "Hyperion Research is the new name for the former IDC high performance computing analyst team. As Hyperion Research, we continue all the worldwide activities that spawned the world’s most respected HPC industry analyst group."The post HPC Market Update from Hyperion Research appeared first on insideHPC.

Frameworks, applications, libraries and toolkits—journeying through the world of deep learning can be daunting. If you’re trying to decide whether or not to begin a machine or deep learning project, there are several points that should first be considered. This is the final article in a five-part series that covers the steps to take before launching a machine learning startup. This article provides a variety of resources to employ when first exploring machine learning.The post What Next? Entering the World of Machine Learning appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, CJ Newburn from NVIDIA describes how users can benefit from running their workloads in the NVIDIA GPU Cloud. "A container essentially creates a self contained environment. Your application lives in that container along with everything the application depends on, so the whole bundle is self contained. NVIDIA is now offering a script as part of an open source project called HPC Container Maker, or HPCCM that makes it easy for developers to select the ingredients they want to go into a container, to provide those ingredients in an optimized way using best-known recipes."The post NVIDIA Simplifies Building Containers for HPC Applications appeared first on insideHPC.

Housing registration is now open for SC18 in Dallas. Unlike previous years, you should register now because the conference hotels expected to run out of rooms sometime soon. "SC18 has room blocks reserved at 21 hotels in the vicinity of the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center Dallas. A range of prices and hotel types are available."The post Register Now for SC18 Housing in Dallas – Rooms will run out appeared first on insideHPC.

Branch predictor (BP) is an essential component in modern processors since high BP accuracy can improve performance and reduce energy. However, reducing latency and storage overhead of BP while maintaining high accuracy presents significant challenges. Especially in light of Spectre attack, which arises due to speculative execution such as branch prediction, a relook on branch predictors is very important. In this paper, we present a survey of dynamic branch prediction techniques. We review two-level BPs, neural-BPs, hybrid BPs and techniques for improving BP accuracy and reducing implementation overheads.The post New Paper: A Survey of Techniques for Dynamic Branch Prediction appeared first on insideHPC.

"In this TACC Podcast, Ross Maguire and Jeroen Ritsema of the University of Michigan describe how supercomputer simulations of volcanos show how mantle plumes form and how they rise from Earth's mantle. What's more, the researchers say their work could guide future experiments with seismic imaging and help get to the bottom of mysteries like the origin of Hawaii's volcanos."The post Podcast: TACC Powers Deep Earth Imaging appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Nlyte Software announced the company has partnered with the IBM Watson IoT group to offer its first cognitive DCIM solution – Nlyte Machine Learning. The company is tapping into the analytical and machine-learning power of IBM Watson IoT to unlock hidden patterns from millions of environmental, power, systems, thermal and other operational data-points, to improve the process of placing and managing workloads in the data center.The post Nlyte Sofware Taps IBM Watson for Optimization of Workload Infrastructure appeared first on insideHPC.

John Martinis from Google presents: Quantum Computing and Quantum Supremacy. "The goal of the Google Quantum AI lab is to build a quantum computer that can be used to solve real-world problems. Our strategy is to explore near-term applications using systems that are forward compatible to a large-scale universal error-corrected quantum computer. In order for a quantum processor to be able to run algorithms beyond the scope of classical simulations, it requires not only a large number of qubits."The post Video: Quantum Computing and Quantum Supremacy at Google appeared first on insideHPC.

The UK’s fastest academic supercomputer, based at the University of Cambridge, will be made available to artificial intelligence (AI) technology companies from across the UK, in support of the government’s industrial strategy. “Artificial Intelligence is at the centre of our plans to make the UK the best place in the world to start and grow a digital business."The post Unversity of Cambridge Receives £10 million in funding for new AI supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Seagate announced that it has achieved Common Criteria (CC) certification across a broad portfolio of its Hard Disc Drives and SSDs, expanding on its existing Seagate Secure Certified Service Level. "Seagate remains committed to certified hardware security solutions and is proud to have worked with the international community for several years to develop the FDE Protection Profiles. We’re excited to now bring Common Criteria certified products to the market to meet our customer’s data security and data privacy requirements, as well as regional and international regulations,” said Monty Forehand, Product Security Officer at Seagate.The post Seagate Storage Devices Achieve Common Criteria Certification for GDPR Security appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Intel released the Intel Saffron AI Quality and Maintenance Decision Support Suite – a suite of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered software applications using associative memory learning and reasoning to facilitate faster issue resolution. "Intel Saffron AI simulates a human’s natural ability to learn, remember and reason in real time. It uses associative memory learning and reasoning to analyze structured and unstructured text data sets to find hidden patterns, trends and similarities. It surfaces insights in a transparent way through an easy-to-use interface so human operators can make better-informed decisions."The post Intel Saffron AI Speeds Issue Resolution for Manufacturing appeared first on insideHPC.

"In the last six years UberCloud has performed 200 cloud experiments with engineers and scientists and their complex applications. In a series of challenging high performance computing applications in the Life Sciences, UberCloud’s HPC Containers have been packaged recently with several scientific workflows and application data to simulate complex phenomena in human’s heart and brain. As the core software for these HPC Cloud experiments we are using the (containerized) Abaqus solver running in a fully automated multi-node HPE environment in the Advania HPC Cloud."The post Video: Moving Towards Personalized Medicine at The UberCloud appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the Dell EMC HPC Community meeting, Shreya Shar and Onur Celebioglu from Dell describe the new Dell EMC AI Challenge. "Dell EMC invites you to participate in an AI Challenge! Abstracts and proposals will be accepted through May 31, 2018, and will be reviewed according to the following three criteria: Most innovative use of AI technology, Biggest economic or social impact, and Highest potential for commercialization."The post Announcing the Dell EMC AI Challenge appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the new interactive USA Supercomputing Map from Hyperion Research. "As part of the discussion, Rich recaps Hyperion’s recent HPC User Forum in Tucson. The event featured an extended session on Quantum Computing with presentations by D-Wave Systems, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NIST, and Rigetti Computing."The post Radio Free HPC Looks at New USA Supercomputing Map appeared first on insideHPC.

This is the second post in a five-part series from a report that explores the potential of unified deep learning with CPU, GPU and FGPA technologies. This post explores the possibilities and functions of software for deep learning.The post Exploring the Possibilities of Deep Learning Software appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the HPC User Forum in Tucson, Miyoshi Takemasa from RIKEN presents: Big Data Assimilation Revolutionizing Weather Prediction. "A new project harnessing data from a Japanese satellite called Himawari-8 could improve weather forecasting and allow officials to issue life-saving warnings before natural disasters. The breakthrough is the result of pairing data collected by Japan’s Himawari-8 weather satellite with a program run on a supercomputer at the RIKEN science institute."The post Video: Big Data Assimilation Revolutionizing Weather Prediction appeared first on insideHPC.

Argonne is now accepting proposals for the ALCF Data Science Program (ADSP). "The program, which currently supports eight projects, allocates computing time and supporting resources to research teams focused on using the ALCF’s leadership-class systems and infrastructure to explore, demonstrate, and improve a wide range of data and learning techniques. These techniques include uncertainty quantification, statistics, machine learning, deep learning, databases, pattern recognition, image processing, graph analytics, data mining, real-time data analysis, and complex and interactive workflows."The post Call for Proposals: ALCF Data Science Program at Argonne appeared first on insideHPC.

The Ohio State University is seeking an Scientific Applications Engineer in our Job of the Week. "The OSC Scientific Applications (SA) Group is responsible for provisioning, optimizing, and maintaining the library and application level software environment on OSC’s HPC systems. "The individual in this position will perform software installations, license server administration, adhere to and make improvements to OSC’s software deployment processes and infrastructure, and create user-facing documentation."The post Job of the Week: Scientific Applications Engineer at Ohio State University appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre announced it has received $70 million in funding for a new supercomputing infrastructure. "This is a reflection of the government’s understanding of the value that the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre delivers to the Australian scientific landscape by accelerating innovation and increasing opportunities for engagement between Australian researchers and their peers internationally."The post Pawsey Centre receives $70 Million for Supercomputing Down Under appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the RStor startup launched a "hyper-distributed multicloud platform" that enables organizations to compute, connect, and operate above the cloud. "

Solarflare has announced the general availability of X2, its second generation of XtremeScale NICs. "For modern data centers, X2 lays a new foundation for NIC-based network virtualization needed for their highly distributed applications with thousands of inter-connected cloud services, machine learning, and big data workloads. X2 is the first and only NIC platform that can establish ultra-scale connectivity to thousands of virtual networks, while at the same time providing real-time packet and flow information. The combination of ultra-high bandwidth, ultra-low latency, ultra-scale connectivity and packet telemetry allows X2 NICs to serve as the Industry’s first commercial platform for micro-segmented NIC fabric services that scale with each server, VM or container."The post Solarflare X2 NICs Deliver Super Low Latency appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the 2018 Internet2 Global Summit announced that Daniel Reed from the University of Iowa will keynote the conference with a talk on the convergence of academic and research collaboration. Registration is now open for the event, which takes place May 6-9 in San Diego. "Dr. Reed’s presentation will explore the intersections of balancing the needs of supporting the academic enterprise and the research community from a technology, application, and cyberinfrastructure perspective. He will provide an in-depth viewpoint on both the challenges and opportunities by addressing how cloud and edge computing, along with new technologies, will continue to play a significant role across both domains."The post Daniel Reed to Keynote Internet2 Global Summit in San Diego appeared first on insideHPC.

The PASC18 conference has posted their conference speaker agenda. Registration is now open for this HPC event, which takes place July 2-4 in Basel, Switzerland. "PASC18 offers three days of stimulating technical sessions with more than 200 talks in total. The program includes keynote presentations, minisymposia, peer-reviewed papers, posters, an interdisciplinary dialogue, and a panel discussion."The post Speakers Announced for PASC18 in Basel appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the HPC User Forum in Tucson, David McCallen from LBNL describes how exascale computing capabilities will enhance earthquake simulation for improved structural safety. "With the major advances occurring in high performance computing, the ability to accurately simulate the complex processes associated with major earthquakes is becoming a reality. High performance simulations offer a transformational approach to earthquake hazard and risk assessments that can dramatically increase our understanding of earthquake processes and provide improved estimates of the ground motions that can be expected in future earthquakes."The post How Exascale will Move Earthquake Simulation Forward appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Hyperion Research launched an information-rich, interactive map of 765 HPC sites in the United States. "The mapped sites include government, academic and industrial HPC data centers, along with HPC vendors. This powerful tool can be used to identify the economic impact of HPC in a user-defined area (state, Congressional district, et al.) or for the United States as a whole, or to understand where HPC jobs are located, as well as who the Congressional district representatives are."The post Hyperion Research Posts Interactive Map of 765 U.S. HPC Sites appeared first on insideHPC.

Today ISC 2018 announced that the conference will host whopping 23 HPC & AI workshops this year. Registration is now open for the conference, which takes place June 24-28 in Frankfurt, Germany. "Chaired by John Shalf from LBNL, the goal of workshops is to provide attendees with a focused and in-depth platform for presentations, discussion and interaction in a particular subject area."The post 23 HPC & AI Workshops coming to ISC 2018 in Frankfurt appeared first on insideHPC.