High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at NVIDIA’s new EULA GeForce Software user license, which prohibits the use of consumer GPUs in the datacenter. We are not looking to beat up on anyone, but our focus is on what these kind of limitations might mean for the industry.

Building upon the success of Intel Cluster Ready and Intel Scalable System Framework (Intel SSF), Intel is facilitating the deployment of computing resources to non-traditional HPC users with the recently announced Intel Select Solutions for HPC. The following guest article from Intel explores how Intel Select Solutions is working to enable and simplify HPC for a broader set of users.The post Intel Select Solutions: Enabling HPC for a Broader Set of Users appeared first on insideHPC.

The Xinhua news service reports that prototype for China's new-generation exascale supercomputer is set for launch in 2018. "China's ongoing efforts in HPC are evident in the recent TOP500 list, where the nation has the two fastest supercomputers in the world. In fact, China has overtaken the US in the total number of ranked systems by a margin of 202 to 143."The post China Readies Exascale Prototype appeared first on insideHPC.

In this slidecast from the POP Centre of Excellence in Barcelona, Jon Gibson from NAG presents: How to Improve the Performance of Parallel Codes. As part of the EU-funded Performance Optimization and Productivity (POP) Centre of Excellence, NAG offers HPC expertise to organizations who want help to understand and improve the performance of parallel software.The post Slidecast: How to Improve the Performance of Parallel Codes appeared first on insideHPC.

HPC vendor One Stop Systems has announced plans to raise $20 million in an initial public offering (IPO) on Wednesday, January 31. Founded in 1998, the company plans to issue 2,900,000 shares at a price of $6.00-$8.00 per share. "OSS designs, manufactures and markets high-end systems for high performance computing applications. We combine state-of-the art components from major technology providers to design and manufacture purpose-built systems that allow our customers to exploit Big Data opportunities faster and more efficiently."The post One Stop Systems Plans for IPO appeared first on insideHPC.

Eric Nielsen from NASA gave this talk at SC17 in Denver. "In the field of computational fluid dynamics, the Navier-Stokes equations are often solved using an unstructured-grid approach to accommodate geometric complexity. Furthermore, turbulent flows encountered in aerospace applications generally require highly anisotropic meshes, driving the need for implicit solution methodologies to efficiently solve the discrete equations. To prepare NASA Langley Research Center's FUN3D CFD solver for the future HPC landscape, we port two representative kernels to NVIDIA Pascal and Volta GPUs and present performance comparisons with a common multi-core CPU benchmark."The post Unstructured-Grid CFD Algorithms at NASA on Volta GPUs appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Robert Roe reports from the SC17 conference keynote. "Philip Diamond, director general of SKA and Rosie Bolton, SKA regional centre project scientist and project scientist for the international engineering consortium designing the high performance computing systems used in the project, took to the stage to highlight the huge requirements for computation and data processing required by the SKA project."The post SC17 Keynote Looks at the SKA Telescope: Life, the Universe, and Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

Adel El-Hallack from IBM gave this talk at SC17 in Denver. "The era of AI is here, but realizing business value with deep learning can have its challenges. See how IBM is making it easy to have enterprise-ready deep learning through a combination of high performance hardware and software."The post Video: Enterprise Ready Deep Learning from IBM appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the European Union announced that the Czech Republic is the 14th country to sign the European declaration on high-performance computing. The initiative aims at building European supercomputers that would rank among the world's top three by 2022-2023. "We are prepared to provide the Czech national HPC capacities and capabilities for this joint mission and contribute to accomplish it successfully."The post Czech Republic joins EuroHPC Initiative appeared first on insideHPC.

Scientists at NCSA have pioneered the use of GPU-accelerated deep learning for rapid detection and characterization of gravitational waves. This new approach will enable astronomers to study gravitational waves using minimal computational resources, reducing time to discovery and increasing the scientific reach of gravitational wave astrophysics.The post Video: Deep Learning for Real-Time Gravitational Wave Discovery appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Netlist, Nyriad, and HPC Systems announced their joint collaboration to deliver superior throughput, IOPs and resilience for high performance Lustre storage solutions for large and small files targeted at large-scale cluster computing. "This collaboration is one of the exciting revolutions in high performance computing where larger scale solutions result in a leap in efficiency," said Teppei Ono, President of HPC Systems. "With Nyriad's NSULATE technology, we get higher performance and resilience the more drives we add to a node. At larger storage scales with higher throughput, we can dispense with RAID controllers and use NVDIMM's from Netlist to achieve millions of IOPs for large and small file transactions."The post Nyriad to Accelerate Persistent Memory and GPUs for Storage appeared first on insideHPC.

The Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) is one of the three national supercomputing centres in Germany. It is partnering with leading technology providers on co-design hardware architectures for future supercomputers. In this context we research on current and future ARM-based architectures for high-performance computing. The research will be performed within the European project "MB2020".The post Job of the Week: Research Scientist specializing in HPC Processor Architectures at Jülich appeared first on insideHPC.

Certain applications, such as automated driving, require low latency small matrix-matrix multiplication in real time. They use specialized libraries that can be customized for small matrix operations. Recompiling and linking those libraries with the highly optimized DGEMM routine in the Intel® Math Kernel Library 2018 can give speedups many times over native libraries.The post Intel MKL Speeds Up Small Matrix-Matrix Multiplication for Automatic Driving appeared first on insideHPC.

Doug Miles from NVIDIA gave this talk at SC17. "CUDA Unified Memory for NVIDIA Tesla GPUs offers programmers a unified view of memory on GPU-accelerated compute nodes. The CPUs can access GPU high-bandwidth memory directly, the GPUs can access CPU main memory directly, and memory pages migrate automatically between the two when the CUDA Unified Memory manager determines it is performance-profitable. PGI OpenACC compilers now leverage this capability on allocatable data to dramatically simplify parallelization and incremental optimization of HPC applications for GPUs."The post Accelerating HPC Programmer Productivity with OpenACC and CUDA Unified Memory appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the CloudLightning project released a new report entitled: The Future of HPC in the Cloud. "Based upon the critical issues and problems identified through this research, industry, researchers and policymakers can more accurately design a roadmap and strategy to increase the adoption of HPC in the Cloud."The post CloudLightning Project Report: The Future of HPC in the Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

Jason Bond from Auburn University gave this talk at SC17 in Denver. "The Tree of Life Web Project (ToL) is a collaborative effort of biologists and nature enthusiasts from around the world. On more than 10,000 World Wide Web pages, the project provides information about biodiversity, the characteristics of different groups of organisms, and their evolutionary history (phylogeny)."The post Video: HPC and the Tree of Life Project appeared first on insideHPC.

Today CESNET announced the research community's first deployment of Ciena´s Waveserver Ai platform. The Czech research organization has interconnected GÉANT´s high-capacity routers using a 300 Gbps alien wavelength over 530km of CESNET network with Czech Light Open Line System. "Our network is designed to support the transfer of extremely large data sets and dedicated photonic services among geographically dispersed locations."The post CESNET Deploys Ciena Waveserver AI for Research appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Asetek announced a new order from OEM partner Fujitsu for the Institute of Fluid Science at Tohoku University in Japan. The supercomputing system will consist of multiple computational sub-systems using the latest liquid-cooled Fujitsu PRIMERGY x86 servers, and is planned to deliver a peak theoretical performance exceeding 2.7 petaflops.The post Tohoku University Liquid Cools HPC Systems with Asetek appeared first on insideHPC.

In this Let's Talk Exascale podcast, Kenny Roche from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory describes the ECP’s Application Assessment Project. "With Productivity, we’re aiming to coordinate how to improve software productivity of the code teams and to sustain that performance and development progress to the completion of each ECP application code project."The post Let’s Talk Exascale Podcast: ECP’s Application Assessment Project appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the CloudLightning project announced a free open online course on High Performance Computing in the Cloud. "Developed in collaboration with the Irish Centre for Cloud Computing and Commerce (IC4) and Dublin City University, the course provides an advanced graduate-level introduction to using cloud computing for high-performance computing workloads. It will cover a wide range of topics from cloud architecture and infrastructure supporting HPC to the business opportunities that are enabled by HPC in the cloud."The post FutureLearn Offers Free Course on HPC in the Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

NEC has deployed a new supercomputer at the ONERA center in France to power aerospace research. Called SATOR, the 667 Teraflop machine features Intel Broadwell E5-2680v4 processors and the Intel Omni-Path interconnect. "According to NEC, ONERA plans to upgrade the machine to 1.14 Petaflops peak sometime later this year."The post NEC Deploys Sator Supercomputer at ONERA in France appeared first on insideHPC.

The Galicia Supercomputing Center (CESGA) and Appentra Solutions will host a GPU Hackathon March 5-9 in Santiago de Compostela. "CesgaHack18 aims to help scientists and developers accelerate the execution of their scientific simulation applications using the hardware, software and a team of expert mentors in optimization, parallelization and execution of simulation programs."The post CesgaHack GPU Hackathon Returns to Spain in March appeared first on insideHPC.

Chris Gottbrath from NVIDIA gave this talk at SC17 in Denver. "This talk will introduce the TensorRT Programmable Inference Accelerator which enables high throughput and low latency inference on clusters with NVIDIA V100, P100, P4 or P40 GPUs. TensorRT is both an optimizer and runtime – users provide a trained neural network and can easily creating highly efficient inference engines that can be incorporated into larger applications and services."The post High Performance Inferencing with TensorRT appeared first on insideHPC.

Modern enterprises are being challenged to implement new technologies and produce results faster without increasing their IT budgets. This is the first a series of features exploring new resource management solutions for workload convergence, such as Bright Cluster Manager by Bright Computing.The post Successfully Managing Workload Convergence in Your Data Center appeared first on insideHPC.

Applications are now open for the PRACE Summer of HPC 2018. The Summer of HPC is a PRACE outreach and training program that offers summer placements at top HPC centers across Europe to late-stage undergraduates and early-stage postgraduate students. "Consisting of a training week and two months on placement at top HPC centers around Europe, the program offers participants the opportunity to learn and share more about PRACE and HPC, and includes accommodation, a stipend and travel."The post Apply Now for the Summer of HPC in Edinburgh appeared first on insideHPC.

Reanalysis of public genetic data using innovative computational methods has allowed the identification of new genetic markers associated with an increased risk to develop Type 2 Diabetes (T2D). "The study, led by Barcelona Supercomputing Center and published today in Nature Communications, represents a new way of exploiting preexisting genetic data to obtain new and relevant discoveries for genetics and biomedicine, highlighting the importance of data sharing initiatives and policies in science."The post Supercomputing New Risk Variants for T-2 Diabetes appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Atos announced has a contract to deliver its a 12 Petaflop supercomputer to Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany. The BullSequana X1000 machine will be Germany’s fastest supercomputer and one the most powerful computers in the world. "Among numerous other activities, the BullSequana will be used in research for the Human Brain Project, which has as its goal to improve the understanding of the processes in the human brain through simulation."The post Atos to Deploy 12 Petaflop Supercomputer at Jülich in Germany appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the recent cryptocurrency crash and why prices for these coins is so volatile. After that, we do our Catch of the Week, where the IBM Cloud is leading the company back to profitability.The post Radio Free Looks at the Cryptocurrency Crash appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC17 in Denver, Bo Ewald from D-Wave Systems hosts a Quantum Computing Seminar. "We will discuss quantum computing, the D-Wave 2000Q system and software, the growing software ecosystem, an overview of some user projects, and how quantum computing can be applied to problems in optimization, machine learning, cyber security, and sampling.”The post Video: D-Wave Systems Seminar on Quantum Computing from SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today ClusterVision announced the successful deployment of a new high performance computing GPU cluster system for the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON). "By utilizing the deep learning capabilities of the GPU cluster, the telescopes will be able to detect pulsar flashes with much greater accuracy through self-learning. In the past, ASTRON scientists had to manually detect and input pulsar patterns. With deep learning, ARTS does it for them."The post Consumer GPUs Power 2 Petaflop Deep Learning Cluster at ASTRON appeared first on insideHPC.

Richard Loft from NCAR gave this talk at the NVIDIA booth at SC17. "The objectives of NCAR's exploration of accelerator architectures for high performance computing in recent years has been to 1) speed up the rate of code optimization and porting and 2) understand how to achieve performance portability on codes in the most economical and affordable way.The post Building a GPU-enabled and Performance-portable Global Cloud-resolving Atmospheric Model appeared first on insideHPC.

In this episode of Let’s Talk Exascale, Mike Bernhardt from ECP discusses the GAMESS project with Mark Gordon from Ames Laboratory. Gordon is the principal investigator for the ECP project called General Atomic and Molecular Electronic Structure System (GAMESS), which is developing methods for computational chemistry. "Just about anything a user would want to do with computational chemistry can be done with GAMESS—everything from very high-level quantum chemistry to semi-empirical methods to classical force fields."The post Let’s Talk Exascale Podcast looks at the GAMESS Project for Computational Chemistry appeared first on insideHPC.

Graduate students and postdoctoral scholars from institutions in Canada, Europe, Japan and the United States are invited to apply for the ninth International HPC Summer School on HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences in the Czech Republic July 8-13, 2018. "Hosted by the IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Centre, the summer school in Ostrava is organized by the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE), the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (RIKEN AICS), and the SciNet HPC Consortium."The post Apply Now for 2018 International HPC Summer School appeared first on insideHPC.

CSRA Inc. has acquired another compute expansion under its High Performance Computing contract with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. "This HPC expansion brings our compute capacity to over 50 petaFLOPS for all CSRA HPC contracts across the federal government,” said Sharon Hays, PhD., Director of CSRA’s HPC Center of Excellence. “This HPC expansion will help NASA researchers meet their mission objectives and bring a greater understanding of the earth’s climate system."The post NASA Goddard Boosts Discover Supercomputer to 5 Petaflops appeared first on insideHPC.

In this Chip Chat podcast, Mike Reed, Director of the Blockchain Program Office at Intel, joins us to discuss Intel’s blockchain journey and how Intel technologies provide unique capabilities that can improve privacy, security, scalability, and trust of distributed ledger networks. "Mike also discusses how Intel has been working to make blockchains more secure with Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX)."The post Podcast: What’s Intel up to with Blockchain? appeared first on insideHPC.

The use of new Exascale architectures and the corresponding advances in codes to fully exploit new chip capabilities will help address challenges for combustion technologies, wind power generation and hydrocarbon exploration, allowing a transition to greener and more advanced energy systems based on alternative fuels combined with renewable energy technologies. "This project has revealed the synergies between European and Brazilian researchers, and has strengthened the bilateral relationships. From the point of view of the technical results, the project has been a success, having achieved all the planned objectives."The post New HPC for Energy White Paper looks at Exascale Architectures for Greener Combustion Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

Ian Buck from NVIDIA gave this talk at SC17 in Denver. “Supercomputing has swept rapidly from the far edges of science to the heart of our everyday lives. And propelling it forward – bringing it into the mobile phone already in your pocket and the car in your driveway – is GPU acceleration."The post Accelerated Computing: The Path Forward appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the PASC18 conference announced that Marina Becoulet from CEA will be one of its keynote speakers. "The main goal of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project is the demonstration of the feasibility of future clean energy sources based on nuclear fusion in magnetically confined plasma. In the era of ITER construction, fusion plasma theory and modeling provide not only a deep understanding of a specific phenomenon, but moreover, modeling-based design is critical for ensuring active plasma control."The post Marina Becoulet from CEA to Keynote PASC18 appeared first on insideHPC.

The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) is seeking proposals for data and learning projects to help prepare for Aurora, the nation’s first exascale system scheduled for delivery in 2021. "The shift in plans for Aurora, which was initially scheduled to be a 180 petaflops supercomputer, is central to a new paradigm for scientific computing at the ALCF—the expansion from traditional simulation-based research to include data science and machine learning approaches. Aurora’s revolutionary architecture will provide advanced capabilities in the three pillars of simulation, data, and learning that will power a new era of scientific discovery and innovation."The post Call for Proposals: Aurora Early Science Program for Deep Learning appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Cray announced that the Ministry of Earth Sciences in India has deployed a pair of Cray XC40 supercomputers with Cray ClusterStor storage systems. The combined systems are the largest supercomputing resource in India, and extend Cray’s leadership position in the weather forecasting and climate research communities. "The two new Cray systems are major steps forward for MoES, and allows us to stand tall in the international weather and climate communities.”The post India’s Ministry of Earth Sciences Deploys two Cray XC40 Supercomputers appeared first on insideHPC.

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are an exciting technology that allows hardware designers to create new digital circuits through a programming environment. Compared to hardware that is designed once or software which must adhere to the hardware architecture, an FPGA allows developers to draw a circuit to solve a specific problem.The post Enabling FPGAs appeared first on insideHPC.

Jim Held from Intel Labs gave this talk at the Intel HPC Developer Conference in Denver. "Intel recently announced important progress in our research into future novel microarchitectures and device technology: neuromorphic and quantum computing. Loihi, our recently announced neuromorphic research chip, is extremely energy-efficient, uses data to learn and make inferences, gets smarter over time and does not need to be trained in the traditional way. Quantum computing offers the potential for exponentially greater performance on many algorithms that are computationally challenging on today’s computing architectures."The post Video: Leading the Evolution of Compute with Neuromorphic and Quantum Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, ANSYS 3D Physics simulations are used to predict device performance and solve biomedical-engineering challenges compressing design cycles. "With patient welfare hanging in the balance, disruptive innovation is a permanent concern and product failure is not an option in healthcare. Applying engineering simulation throughout development can make all the difference in bringing new treatments to patients while meeting safety standards and product deadlines."The post Video: Enabling Medical Device Innovation through Simulation appeared first on insideHPC.

The recently established Yale Center for Research Computing is seeking a Director of High Performance Computing (HPC). This position, under the supervision of the Executive Director of the Yale Center for Research Computing, will help create a world class HPC infrastructure to support computationally and data intensive research at Yale University.The post Job of the Week: Director of High Performance Computing at Yale appeared first on insideHPC.

Today a company called Bounded Floating Point announced a breakthrough patent in processor design, which allows representation of real numbers accurate to the last digit "for the first time in computer history." "This bounded floating point system is a game changer for the computing industry, particularly for computationally intensive functions such as weather prediction, GPS, and autonomous vehicles," said the inventor, Alan Jorgensen, PhD. “By using this system, it is possible to guarantee that the display of floating point values is accurate to plus or minus one in the last digit.”The post Has the Decades-Old Floating Point Error Problem been Solved? appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC17, Jack Dongarra, Erich Strohmaier, and Horst Simon give an Invited Talk on the history of the TOP500 list. "The TOP500 list has served as the defining yardstick for supercomputing performance since 1993. We briefly describe the project’s origins, the principles guiding data collection, and what has made the list so successful during the 25 year long transition from giga- to tera- to petascale computing. We also examine the list’s limitations."The post Video: The TOP500 Past, Present, and Future appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature from Scientific Computing World, Robert Roe looks at the role of integrators to deliver and support HPC systems. "There is an increasing propensity for organizations to buy and grow systems, so we help our customers to think ahead about the future use of their system. It is important for customers to be mindful of where they might be in three years’ time, where they are now and the path from one to the other."The post How Integrators Ensure Top Performance for HPC Clusters appeared first on insideHPC.

Dr. Joshua L. Willis from the California Institute of Technology and Dan Stanzione from TACC gave this talk at the Intel HPC Developer Conference. "These discoveries mark the beginning of gravitational wave astronomy, and in this talk we will highlight what we have learned and hope to learn in this new field, pointing out many of the ways in which high-throughput and high-performance computing have been essential to its progress."The post Gravitational Waves: The Role of Computing in Opening a New Field of Astronomy appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC17 in Denver, Dan McGuan from Red Hat describes the company's Multi-Architecture HPC capabilities with the Power9 architecture. "Red Hat and IBM have a long history of collaborating on Linux, going back more than 18 years. We laid the groundwork for supporting POWER9 processors several years ago and continue to collaborate with IBM to enable broader architecture support for IBM Power Systems across Red Hat’s portfolio."The post Red Hat steps up to POWER9 for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at European Commission’s recent move to fund exascale development with 1 Billion Euros. "While Europe already had a number of exascale initiatives under way, this is a major step forward in that it puts up the money. Under a new legal and funding structure, the Commission’s contribution will be $486 million, or roughly half of the projected EUR 1 Billion total."The post Radio Free HPC Looks at the European Union’s Big Investment in Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.