High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

NEC Deutschland GmbH has delivered an LX series supercomputer to Technische Universität Kaiserslautern (TUK), one of Germany's leading Universities of Technology. "The new HPC cluster consists of 324 compute nodes totaling nearly 7,800 cores of the latest-generation Intel Skylake CPUs, and comprises a highly optimized Intel Omni-Path Interconnect architecture for low-latency, high-bandwidth communication. Additional GPGPU compute nodes equipped with the latest NVIDIA VOLTA 100 GPUs contribute to a total peak performance of the HPC cluster at approximately 700 Teraflops."The post TUK in Germany installs NEC LX Supercomputer with Intel Omni-Path appeared first on insideHPC.

Chris Fregly from PipelineAI gave this talk at the Stanford HPC Conference. "Applying my Netflix experience to a real-world problem in the ML and AI world, I will demonstrate a full-featured, open-source, end-to-end TensorFlow Model Training and Deployment System using the latest advancements with TensorFlow, Kubernetes, OpenFaaS, GPUs, and PipelineAI."The post Deploy Serverless TensorFlow Models using Kubernetes, OpenFaaS, GPUs and PipelineAI appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Bright Computing announced it has joined the Linux Foundation and will participate in the OpenHPC Community project. "Many of our HPC customers incorporate both commercial and open source management regimens on clusters based on Intel Xeon Scalable processors,” said Trish Damkroger, Vice President and General Manager, Technical Computing Initiative at Intel Corporation. “By supporting OpenHPC packages in their software, Bright Computing will help enable HPC practitioners assemble the ideal management framework for their needs.”The post Bright Computing adds support for OpenHPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Cornell University announced that four new Cornell Virtual Workshop training topics are available at the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) user portal. "The Cornell University Center for Advanced Computing (CAC) is a leader in the development and deployment of Web-based training programs designed to enhance the computational skills of researchers, broaden the participation of underrepresented groups in the sciences and engineering, and accelerate the adoption of new and emerging technologies."The post XSEDE offers free HPC Training from Cornell Virtual Workshop appeared first on insideHPC.

The iRODS User Group Meeting has issued their Call for Proposals. Registration is now open for the event, which takes place June 5-7 in Durham, NC. "The meeting gives iRODS users and those interested in using iRODS the chance to learn about the latest updates to iRODS software, hear about iRODS implementations from users in different research domains and business sectors, discuss iRODS-enabled applications and discoveries, and glimpse the future of iRODS and the iRODS Consortium."The post Call for Proposals: iRODS User Group Meeting in Durham appeared first on insideHPC.

The project connecting the UC Santa Cruz’s Hyades supercomputer to LBNL is being awarded the CENIC 2018 Innovations in Networking Award for Research Applications. "To accelerate the rate of scientific discovery, researchers must get the data they need, where they need it, and when they need it,” said UC San Diego computer science and engineering professor Larry Smarr, Principal Investigator of the PRP and director of Calit2. “This requires a high-performance data freeway system in which we use optical lightpaths to connect data generators and users of that data.”The post High Speed Connection to Hyades Supercomputer wins CENIC Innovation Award appeared first on insideHPC.

Richard Childress Racing (RCR) is hoping to improve racing times through a multi-year partnership with ANSYS. RCR will use ANSYS Pervasive Engineering Simulation software to more accurately predict machine performance and enhance vehicle speed on the race track. "Using ANSYS Pervasive Engineering Simulation throughout the entire racecar lifecycle, RCR will race faster, safer and more aerodynamic vehicles."The post RCR uses Simulation to Accelerate Racecar Development appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Sandia engineers provide a behind-the-scenes look at the lab's efforts centered around High Performance Computing. "The Sandia team supports researchers who solve critical national and global problems - a challenging job with high impact results.Our unique mission responsibilities in the nuclear weapons program create a foundation from which we leverage capabilities, enabling us to solve complex national security problems."The post Behind the Scenes – HPC at Sandia appeared first on insideHPC.

The PEARC18 Conference has added Anita Nikolich from IIT to its lineup of Keynote Speakers. Her talk on Hacking Academia will certainly resonate with the conference, which takes place July 22-27 in Pittsburgh.The post Anita Nikolich to Keynote PEARC18 in Pittsburgh appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Lenovo unveiled the addition of 1,500 ultra-dense Lenovo ThinkSystem SD530 high-performance compute nodes for Niagara – Canada’s most-powerful research supercomputer. As the demand for high performance computing in quantitative research increases rapidly, the 4.6 Petaflop supercomputer will help Canadian researchers achieve meaningful results in artificial intelligence, astrophysics, climate change, oceanic research and other disciplines using big data.The post Lenovo’s Niagara Cluster Upgrade makes it Fastest Supercomputer in Canada appeared first on insideHPC.

To help prospective customers understand Intel OPA capabilities and inform new customers of how to take advantage of all that Intel OPA has to offer, Intel began presenting a series of webinars on the fabric nearly three years ago. This guest post explores Intel's advanced webinar series that focuses on understanding HPC fabrics and Intel Omni-Path Architecture.The post Intel’s Advanced Webinar Series for Understanding HPC Fabrics and Intel Omni-Path Architecture appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the European Processor Initiative, an effort to design a build an exascale computer based around European technology. "According to an interview in Primeur Magazine with EPI project coordinator Philippe Notton from Atos, the project involves not only a processor, but an accelerator as well. Will it be based on ARM, OpenPOWER, or something else like RISC-V? We will have to wait and see."The post Radio Free HPC Looks at the European Processor Initiative appeared first on insideHPC.

Queen Mary University of London and Newcastle University are the first UK academic institutions to install POWER9 systems. Deployed by OCF, both Universities have already integrated the machines into their existing HPC infrastructures. "Modern AI, HPC and Analytics workloads are driving an ever-growing set of data intensive challenges,” comments Julian Fielden, Managing Director of OCF. “These challenges can only be met with accelerated infrastructure, such as IBM’s POWER9. In such a highly competitive field as academic research, providing superior HPC services to compute large quantities of data quickly, can help to attract world-class researchers, as well as grants and funding.”The post OCF deploys first IBM POWER9 systems in UK Academia appeared first on insideHPC.

Damian Rouson from the Sourcery Institute gave this talk at the Stanford HPC Conference. "This talk will present performance and scalability results of the mini-app running on several platforms using up to 98,000 cores. A second application involves the use of teams of images (processes) that execute indecently for ensembles of computational hydrology simulations using WRF-Hyrdro, the hydrological component of the Weather Research Forecasting model also developed at NCAR. Early experiences with portability and programmability of Fortran 2018 will also be discussed."The post First Experiences with Parallel Application Development in Fortran 2018 appeared first on insideHPC.

Les Cottrell from SLAC gave this talk at the Stanford HPC Conference. "Scientists use LCLS to take crisp pictures of atomic motions, watch chemical reactions unfold, probe the properties of materials and explore fundamental processes in living things. The talk will introduce LCLS and LCLS-II with a short video, discuss its data reduction, collection, data transfer needs and current progress in meeting these needs."The post Linac Coherent Laser Source (LCLS-II): Data Transfer Requirements appeared first on insideHPC.

NVIDIA will host thousands of the world’s leading AI experts at its ninth annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC) on March 26-29 in San Jose, California. "GTC is where the world’s leading researchers and business leaders learn how to harness the power of AI,” said Greg Estes, vice president of Developer Programs at NVIDIA. “As GPU computing continues to drive the AI revolution, GTC is where you’ll see the future take shape.”The post GPU Technology Conference Returns to San Jose March 26-29 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the tradeoff between chip performance and security. In the aftermath of the recently disclosed Spectre and Meltdown exploits, Cryptograpy guru Paul Kocher from Rambus is calling for a divergence in processor architectures:The post Radio Free HPC Looks at Diverging Chip Architectures in the Wake of Spectre and Meltdown appeared first on insideHPC.

Shahin Khan from OrionX gave this talk at the Stanford HPC Conference. "We will review OrionX's predictions for 2018, the technologies that are changing the world (Iot, Blockchain, Quantum Computing, AI ...) and how HPC will be the engine that drives it."The post Outlook on Hot Technologies appeared first on insideHPC.

The Michigan State University Institute for Cyber Enabled Research is seeking a Senior Linux System Administrator/Information Technologist in our Job of the Week. "The Information Technologist II will develop, support and optimize systems and processes for the management and automation of High Performance Computing systems. Duties include: support and optimize data storage systems, including capacity planning and disaster recovery planning; security in particular network security and data security appropriate for research projects; ability to work with Firewall configuration and rules; experience with virtual machine implementations such as Docker and Singularity containers; participate in the development of facilities to support High Performance Computing systems on campus."The post Job of the Week: Senior Linux System Administrator at Michigan State University appeared first on insideHPC.

Paul Messina has been selected as the 2018 recipient of the CRA Distinguished Service Award for his significant contributions to the advancement of high performance computing and decades of service to the field. Messina has an incredible record of building and managing large-scale, diverse research activities. Over the course of his career, he has designed, directed, and otherwise executed numerous initiatives that have influenced U.S. policy and programs resulting in the U.S. leadership position in high-performance computing.The post Paul Messina Receives 2018 CRA Distinguished Service Award appeared first on insideHPC.

Getting young people interested in STEM careers is a big concern for the HPC community. Maybe what we really need is a superhero. "A new mascot at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) has the mission to bring supercomputers closer to young people and stimulate their interest in science and technology."The post BSC Adopts Supergeek Mascot to get kids into Supercomputing appeared first on insideHPC.

Bill Bryce writes that Univa Grid Engine is now available on the Amazon AWS Marketplace. As a leading distributed resource management system, Univa Grid engine powers enterprises in life sciences, oil and gas, and other sectors use it to manage workloads automatically and optimize shared resources for some of the largest clusters in the world, both on-premises or in the cloud. "It’s now easier than ever to spin-up fully functional Univa Grid Engine (UGE) clusters on AWS Marketplace using a 1-click installation process. Whether you’re deploying clusters just for testing or running large-scale simulations, the automated installation process makes installing a cluster easier than ever."The post Univa Grid Engine Comes to AWS Marketplace appeared first on insideHPC.

Burak Yenier and Francisco Sahli gave this talk at the Stanford HPC Conference. "Cardiac arrhythmia can be a potentially lethal side effect of medications. Before a new drug reaches the market, pharmaceutical companies need to check for the risk of inducing arrhythmias. Currently, this process takes years and involves costly animal and human studies. In this project, the Living Matter Laboratory of Stanford University developed a new software tool enabling drug developers to quickly assess the viability of a new compound. During this session we will look at how High Performance Computing in the Cloud is being used to prevent severe side effects and save lives."The post Living Heart Project: Using HPC in the Cloud to Save Lives appeared first on insideHPC.

The 12th ACM International Conference on Distributed and Event-Based Systems (DEBS 2018) in New Zealand has issued their Call for Proposals. The event takes place June 25-29 in Hamilton, New Zealand. "Over the past decade, the ACM International Conference on Distributed and Event‐Based Systems (DEBS) has become one of the leading venues for contributions in the fields of distributed and event‐based systems. The ACM DEBS conference provides a forum dedicated to the dissemination of original research, the discussion of practical insights, and the reporting of experiences relevant to distributed systems and event‐based computing. It brings together academia and industry to discuss innovative technology and exchange ideas."The post Call for Proposals: International Conference on Distributed and Event-Based Systems in New Zealand appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, SC18 Papers Chair Torsten Hoefler from ETH Zurich writes about big changes to the conference papers program. It's timely news as SC18 Paper Submissions open today. "In the light of this year’s “HPC Inspires” theme, we are looking forward to working with the technical papers team to make SC18 the best technical program ever and consolidate the leading position of the SC Conference Series in the field of HPC."The post SC18 Papers Submissions Open Today with New Review Process appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Spectra Logic announced a pair of new tape library products. These products include the all-new Spectra Stack, a highly scalable, modular and affordable tape library that allows users to start with a single tape drive and 10 tape slots, growing incrementally as their data needs increase, and the new Spectra T950v Tape Library, an affordable, entry-level model of the popular high-end Spectra T950 Tape Library family.The post Spectra Logic rolls out New Tape Library Offerings appeared first on insideHPC.

Mohan Potheri from VMware gave this talk at the Stanford HPC Conference. "Virtualized devices offer maximum flexibility. This session introduces SR-IOV, explains how it is enabled in VMware vSphere, and provides details of specific use cases that important for machine learning and high-performance computing. It includes performance comparisons that demonstrate the benefits of SR-IOV and information on how to configure and tune these configurations."The post Sharing High-Performance Interconnects Across Multiple Virtual Machines appeared first on insideHPC.

Tuning a complex application for today’s heterogeneous platforms requires an understanding of the application itself as well as familiarity with tools that are available for assisting with analyzing where in the code itself to look for bottlenecks. The process for optimizing the performance of an application, in general, requires the following steps that are most likely applicable for a wide range of applications.The post Performance Insights Using the Intel Advisor Python API appeared first on insideHPC.

Today CoolIT Systems reported company revenue for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2017 (FY2017) increased by 60%. Among the market segments driving growth in FY2017, Data Center saw the most significant escalation with sales up by 75% from the previous year. "Our focus on product quality and reliability continues to be a source of competitive strength. Second, through establishing close engineering partnerships with today’s leading server manufacturers and data center operators we help our customers efficiently manage the increasing heat loads of modern data center environments.”The post Liquid Cooling is Hot – CoolIT Systems Reports 60% Revenue Growth in 2017 appeared first on insideHPC.

“The Buck has been at the forefront of asking the most important questions in the field. Now, with the latest in bioinformatics and artificial intelligence, and with the involvement of world-class experts like Dr. Zhavoronkov, we will finally have the tools to answer them. Fully utilizing these powerful technologies, we will dramatically increase our understanding of how aging works, and what we can do about it.”The post Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov Joins Buck Institute to fight Aging with AI appeared first on insideHPC.

Infrastructure and security will continue to be crucial as the foundation and fundamental consideration for enterprises undertaking cloud migration. In view of this, Alibaba Cloud will launch ECS Baremetal Instance, a new high performance computing solution of ECS that combines the strengths of virtualized systems and bare metal servers. When connected as a supercomputer, ECS Baremetal Instances becomes a Super Computing Cluster that will reduce network latency to the level of micro-seconds while offering elasticity and supercomputing capabilities.The post Alibaba Cloud launches ECS Baremetal Instances in Europe appeared first on insideHPC.

“The LINPACK program used to represent a broad spectrum of the core computations that needed to be performed, but things have changed,” said Sandia researcher Mike Heroux, who created and developed the HPCG program. “The LINPACK program performs compute-rich algorithms on dense data structures to identify the theoretical maximum speed of a supercomputer. Today’s applications often use sparse data structures, and computations are leaner.”The post HPCG Benchmark offers a alternative way to rank Top Computers appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the HPC AI Advisory Council announced the 2018 APAC HPC-AI Competition. Co-sponsored by National Supercomputing Centre in Singapore, the 2018 APAC HPC-AI Competition will start on March 27, 2018 and continue until August 2018. "The APAC HPC-AI competition encourages international teams in the APAC region to showcase their HPC and AI expertise in a friendly yet spirited competition that builds critical skills, professional relationships, competitive spirits and lifelong comraderies. The competition is open to university and technical institute teams from the entire APAC region, and includes both creating missions and addressing challenges around AI development and testing, and high-performance computing workloads."The post Announcing the 2018 HPC-AI Competition in APAC appeared first on insideHPC.

University of Chicago computer scientists will lead a $10 million “expedition” into the burgeoning field of quantum computing, bringing applications of the nascent technology for computer science, physics, chemistry, and other fields at least a decade closer to practical use. Called EPiQC, the $10 million NSF 'expedition' for practical quantum computing is designed to help scientists realize the potential of quantum computing more rapidly.The post NSF Sponsors EPiQC ‘expedition’ for Practical Quantum Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Intel unveiled “AI: In Production,” a new program that makes it easier for developers to bring their artificial intelligence prototypes to market. Since its introduction last July, the Intel Movidius Neural Compute Stick has gained a developer base in the tens of thousands. "Intel AI: In Production means we can expect many more innovative AI-centric products coming to market from the diverse and growing segment of technologies utilizing Intel technology for low-power inference at the edge,” said Remi El-Ouazzane, Intel vice president and general manager of Intel Movidius.The post New Intel Movidius AI Program Enables Developers to Go To Market appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Alisa Alering from ScienceNode writes that a team of women engineers helped build SCinet as part of the WINS program at SC17. “A lot of these women come from small schools, and they may not normally get exposed to the technology SCinet provides,” says Meehl. “It’s a great experience technically, but they also get a great professional experience meeting people—that really brings value to your ability to do your job.”The post Mid-career Women help build SCinet with WINS Apprenticeship at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

Filippo Mantovani from BSC gave this talk at the GoingARM workshop at SC17. "Since 2011, Mont-Blanc has pushed the adoption of Arm technology in High Performance Computing, deploying Arm-based prototypes, enhancing system software ecosystem and projecting performance of current systems for developing new, more powerful and less power hungry HPC computing platforms based on Arm SoC. In this talk, Filippo introduces the last Mont-Blanc system, called Dibona, designed and integrated by the coordinator and industrial partner of the project, Bull/ATOS."The post The Mont-Blanc project: Updates from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature from Scientific Computing World, Adrian Giordani reports on recent vulnerabilities found in many modern CPUs. "These problems are here for the long term until the next generation of silicon processors hit the market. In the end, one of the original teams that found these security vulnerabilities says it best on their website: "As it is not easy to fix, it will haunt us for quite some time."The post How Spectre and Meltdown Could Affect Future Processors appeared first on insideHPC.

Ryan Quick from Providentia Worldwide gave this talk at the Stanford HPC Conference. "Microservices power cloud-native applications to scale thousands of times larger than single deployments. We introduce the notion of microservices for traditional HPC workloads. We will describe microservices generally, highlighting some of the more popular and large-scale applications. Then we examine similarities between large-scale cloud configurations and HPC environments. Finally we propose a microservice application for solving a traditional HPC problem, illustrating improved time-to-market and workload resiliency."The post High Availability HPC: Microservice Architectures for Supercomputing appeared first on insideHPC.

The good folks at HPC Carpentry have posted a new set of teaching materials designed to help new users take advantage of high-performance computing systems. No prior computational experience is required - these lessons are ideal for either an in-person workshop or independent study. "HPC Carpentry is not an organization - it is merely a set of publicly available teaching materials designed to make the task of teaching HPC a little easier. We welcome all contributions, in particular adaptations of our Intro to HPC lesson for other schedulers besides SLURM."The post HPC Carpentry Learning Portal Offers an Intro to HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Intel announced it has begun shipping its Intel Stratix 10 TX FPGAs, the industry’s only field programmable gate array (FPGA) with 58G PAM4 transceiver technology. "In this smart and connected world, billions of devices are creating massive amounts of data that need faster, flexible, and scalable connectivity solutions,” said Reynette Au, vice president of marketing, Intel Programmable Solutions Group. “With Stratix 10 TX FPGAs, Intel continues to provide architects with higher transceiver bandwidth and hardened IP to address the insatiable demand for faster and higher-density connectivity."The post Video: Intel Ships Stratix 10 TX FPGAs for Multi-Terabit Network Infrastructure appeared first on insideHPC.

Zhong Wang from the Genome Institute at LBNL gave this talk at the Stanford HPC Conference. "Whole genome shotgun based next generation transcriptomics and metagenomics studies often generate 100 to 1000 gigabytes (GB) sequence data derived from tens of thousands of different genes or microbial species. Here we describe an Apache Spark-based scalable sequence clustering application, SparkReadClust (SpaRC) that partitions reads based on their molecule of origin to enable downstream assembly optimization."The post SpaRC: Scalable Sequence Clustering using Apache Spark appeared first on insideHPC.

NREL researchers are testing immersive liquid cooling technologies that could potentially bring huge energy savings to HPC datacenters. With worldwide datacenters consuming an estimated 70 billion kWh per year, a disruptive energy-saving solution is needed, and a liquid-submerged server (LSS) technology from LiquidCool Solutions might be the answer. "The testing confirmed that the LSS technology could not only maintain target temperatures under heavy computational load, but that the hot liquid could be used to heat buildings more efficiently than NREL's current solution."The post NREL Report Evaluates LiquidCool Solutions for the Datacenter appeared first on insideHPC.

Chris Willard from Intersect360 Research gave this talk at the Stanford HPC Conference. "Intersect360 Research returns with an annual deep dive into the trends, technologies and usage models that will be propelling the HPC community through 2018 and beyond. Emerging areas of focus and opportunities to expand will be explored along with insightful observations needed to support measurably positive decision making within your operations."The post Video: HPC Computing Trends appeared first on insideHPC.

Christian Kniep from Docker Inc. gave this talk at the Stanford HPC Conference. "This talk will recap the history of and what constitutes Linux Containers, before laying out how the technology is employed by various engines and what problems these engines have to solve. Afterward, Christian will elaborate on why the advent of standards for images and runtimes moved the discussion from building and distributing containers to orchestrating containerized applications at scale."The post State of Linux Containers appeared first on insideHPC.

The need for faster data movement has never been more critical to the worlds of HPC and machine learning. In light of this demand, companies like Mellanox Technologies are working to introduce solutions to address the need for HPC and deep learning platforms to move and analyze data both in real-time and at faster speeds than ever.Download the new white paper from Mellanox that explores the company’s end-to-end HDR 200G InfiniBand product portfolio and the benefits of in-network computing.The post HDR 200G InfiniBand: Empowering Next Generation Data Centers appeared first on insideHPC.

Oil & Gas giant Eni of Italy has expanded the computing capacity of their Green Data Center with a massive GPU-powered system called HPC4. Built by HPE, the 22.4 Petaflop supercomputer is powered by 3,200 Tesla GPU accelerators. "Based in Ferrera Erbognone near Milan, HPC4 quadruples the company’s computational power and makes its HPC infrastructure the world’s most powerful industrial computing system today."The post NVIDIA Powers 22.4 Petaflop HPC4 Supercomputer at Eni appeared first on insideHPC.

In this Let’s Talk Exascale podcast, David Bernholdt from ORNL discusses the Open MPI for Exascale project, which is focusing on the communication infrastructure of MPI, or message-passing interface, an extremely widely used standard for interprocessor communications for parallel computing. "It’s possible that even though applications may make millions or billions of short calls to the MPI library during the course of an execution, performance improvements can have a significant overall impact on the application runtime."The post Podcast: Open MPI for Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.

Today UNLV announced new Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the university and Altair Engineering. "Per the agreement, Altair’s technology will enable Cherry Creek II users to simplify access and utilization of the supercomputer’s capabilities and capacity. When deployed, PBS Works, Altair’s high-performance computing management suite, will securely manage all Cherry Creek II compute workload."The post Altair to boost UNLV Supercomputing appeared first on insideHPC.

Rigetti Computing has released a new version of Forest, their quantum software platform. Forest 1.3 offers upgraded developer tools, improved stability, and faster execution. "Starting today, researchers using Forest will be upgraded to version 1.3, which provides better tools for optimizing and debugging quantum programs. The upgrade also provides greater stability in our quantum processor (QPU), which will let researchers run more powerful quantum programs. Forest is the easiest and most powerful way to build quantum applications today. We believe the combination of one of the most powerful gate-model quantum computers, cutting-edge classical hardware, and our unique hybrid classical/quantum architecture creates the clearest and shortest path toward the demonstration of unequivocal quantum advantage."The post Rigetti Computing Releases Forest 1.3 Quantum Software Platform appeared first on insideHPC.