High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

Today Rescale announced that ANSYS Elastic Licensing can now be purchased directly through Rescale’s ScaleX, a SaaS platform purpose-built for solving the world’s most challenging engineering, scientific and mathematical problems with HPC in the cloud. "Pay-per-use licenses from ANSYS have been very popular with Rescale customers since we introduced ANSYS Elastic Licensing to the platform in 2016. Now we’re delivering the additional flexibility of being able to seamlessly purchase elastic units on-demand directly through the Rescale platform."The post Rescale Offers ANSYS Software On Demand appeared first on insideHPC.

Coming up next week in Manchester, the HiPEAC 2018 conference will once again bring together the best minds in computer architecture and compilation to exploit the enormous potential of new computing paradigms. "The HiPEAC conference is the flagship networking event of our 2000-strong community of computing experts,’ says HiPEAC coordinator Koen de Bosschere of Ghent University. "This year we are very happy to have two leading European companies (ARM for mobile computing and DeepMind for deep learning) as the main sponsors of the event. They are creating the key technological components of future smart devices."The post HiPEAC18 Conference to Focus on Performance and Security Next Week in Manchester appeared first on insideHPC.

While various kernel patches are already out for the Spectre and Meltdown, the performance impact of these patches on HPC performance has been a big question. Now ClusterVision has published a timely white paper on this important topic. "These vulnerabilities have only been discovered recently, so information is still developing. Therefore, this document should not be interpreted as a complete overview of the situation but as an informative view of the potential impact on HPC."The post ClusterVision White Paper Looks at HPC Performance Impact of Spectre and Meltdown appeared first on insideHPC.

In this episode of Let’s Talk Exascale, Scott Gibson discusses the ECP Data and Visualization project with Jim Ahrens from Los Alamos National Lab. Ahrens is principal investigator for the Data and Visualization project, which is responsible for the storage and visualization aspects of the ECP and for helping its researchers understand, store, and curate scientific data.The post Podcast: The Exascale Data and Visualization project at LANL appeared first on insideHPC.

David Leutwyler from ETH Zurich gave this talk at the 2017 Chaos Communication Congress. "The representation of thunderstorms (deep convection) and rain showers in climate models represents a major challenge, as this process is usually approximated with semi-empirical parameterizations due to the lack of appropriate computational resolution. Climate simulations using kilometer-scale horizontal resolution allow explicitly resolving deep convection and thus allow for an improved representation of the water cycle. We present a set of such simulations covering Europe and global computational domains."The post Video: Weather and Climate Modeling at Convection-Resolving Resolution appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Thomas Zacharia from ORNL testifies before the House Energy and Commerce hearing on DOE Modernization. "At the OLCF, we are deploying a system that may well be the world’s most powerful supercomputer when it begins operating later this year. Summit will be at least five times as powerful as Titan. It will also be an exceptional resource for deep learning, with the potential to address challenging data analytics problems in a number of scientific domains. Summit is among the products of CORAL, the Collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne, and Livermore."The post Video: Thomas Zacharia from ORNL Testifies at House Hearing on the Need for Supercomputing appeared first on insideHPC.

D.E. Shaw Research in NYC is seeking a System Administrator for Servers, Clusters and Supercomputers for Computational Biochemistry in our Job of the Week. "Exceptional sysadmins sought to manage systems, storage, and network infrastructure for a New York–based interdisciplinary research group. Positions are available at our New York City offices, and at our data centers in Durham, NC and Endicott, NY."Exceptional sysadmins sought to manage systems, storage, and network infrastructure for a New York–based interdisciplinary research group. Positions are available at our New York City offices, and at our data centers in Durham, NC and Endicott, NY.The post Job of the Week: System Administrator at D.E. Shaw Research appeared first on insideHPC.

Registration is now open for LUG 2018. Sponsored by Globus. the 2018 Lustre User Group (LUG) conference will be held April 23-26, 2018 at Argonne National Laboratory. "As always, LUG provides technical sessions on the latest Lustre developments and best practices, while providing opportunities to share information, network, and collaborate with your peers."The post Registration Opens for LUG 2018 in April appeared first on insideHPC.

In this episode of Let's Talk Exascale, Mike Bernhardt discusses the CANDLE project for cancer research with Rick Stevens from Argonne National Lab. The CANcer Distributed Learning Environment (CANDLE) is an ECP application development project targeting new computational methods for cancer treatment with precision medicine.The post Fighting Cancer with Deep Learning at Scale with the CANDLE Project appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the DOE announced $1.87 million for seven projects to advance innovation in U.S. manufacturing through HPC. "The HPC4Mfg program leverages world-class technical expertise with high performance computing to tackle manufacturing challenges uniquely solved by computer modeling. By applying modeling, simulation, and data analytics to key manufacturing problems, the program can aid in decision-making, optimize processes and design, improve quality, predict performance and failure, reduce or eliminate testing, and shorten the time to market."The post HPC4Mfg Program Selects New Industry Projects appeared first on insideHPC.

The eight annual International Workshop on Accelerators and Hybrid Exascale Systems (AsHES) has issued its Call for Papers. Held in conjunction with the 32nd IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, the AsHES Workshop takes place May 23 in Vancouver, Canada. "This workshop focuses on understanding the implications of accelerators and heterogeneous designs on the hardware systems, porting applications, performing compiler optimizations, and developing programming environments for current and emerging systems. It seeks to ground accelerator research through studies of application kernels or whole applications on such systems, as well as tools and libraries that improve the performance and productivity of applications on these systems."The post Call for Papers: International Workshop on Accelerators and Hybrid Exascale Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

Dr. Rommie E. Amaro gave this talk at SC17. "We are developing new capabilities for multi-scale dynamic simulations that cross spatial scales from the molecular (angstrom) to cellular ultrastructure (near micron), and temporal scales from the picoseconds of macromolecular dynamics to the physiologically important time scales of organelles and cells (milliseconds to seconds)."The post Video: Molecular Simulation at the Mesoscale appeared first on insideHPC.

Today scientists from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) released their first three years of data. This first major release of data from the Survey includes information on about 400 million astronomical objects, including distant galaxies billions of light-years away as well as stars in our own galaxy. "There are all kinds of discoveries waiting to be found in the data. While DES scientists are focused on using it to learn about dark energy, we wanted to enable astronomers to explore these images in new ways, to improve our understanding of the universe," said Dark Energy Survey Data Management Project Scientist Brian Yanny of the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.The post Dark Energy Survey Releases First Three Years of Data appeared first on insideHPC.

A team of researchers from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has married artificial intelligence and high-performance computing to achieve a peak speed of 20 petaflops in the generation and training of deep learning networks on the laboratory’s Titan supercomputer.The post Using the Titan Supercomputer to Accelerate Deep Learning Networks appeared first on insideHPC.

IT operations and maintenance developers have found that just by compiling the MySQL source code with the Intel C++ Compiler and turning on its Interprocedural Optimization feature, you can improve database performance from 5 to 35% compared with other compilers. "While there may be many factors affecting MySQL performance, such as hardware and software configuration, having a thoroughly optimized MySQL package is a good place to start."The post Using the Intel C++ Compiler’s Optimization Features to Improve MySQL Performance appeared first on insideHPC.

Al Gara from gave this talk at the Intel HPC Developer Conference in Denver. "Technology visionaries architecting the future of HPC and AI will share the key challenges as well as Intel’s direction. The talk will cover the adaptation of AI into HPC workflows, along their perspective architectural developments, upcoming transitions and range of solutions, technology opportunities, and the driving forces behind them."The post Intel’s Al Gara Presents: Technology Opportunities Like Never Before appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the European Commission unveiled today its plans to invest jointly with the Member States in building a world-class European supercomputers infrastructure. "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. Before the new structure was put in place, the Commission was effectively limited to contributing only 20 percent of HPC initiatives undertaken with member states.The post European Commission to invest EUR 1 Billion in Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.

The DOE's Exascale Computing Project has launched a new podcast channel. In this episode, Danny Perez from Los Alamos National Laboratory discusses The Exascale Atomistic Capability for Accuracy, Length, and Time (EXAALT) project. EXAALT specializes in molecular dynamics simulations of materials. "We hope you enjoy the podcast, and we welcome your ideas for future episodes."The post ECP Launches “Let’s Talk Exascale” Podcast appeared first on insideHPC.

A new security bulletin from NVIDIA reveals that its GPU drivers are not immune to the Spectre and Meltdown exploits that affect nearly every modern CPU. This is bad news for HPC, where the company's Tesla GPUs are widely deployed to accelerate applications. "Most of the updates are available now, although Tesla and GRID users will have to wait until late January."The post NVIDIA races to patch GPU Drivers for Spectre and Meltdown appeared first on insideHPC.

Some 44 per cent of life science professionals are using or experimenting with AI and deep learning, while 94 per cent expect an increase in use of machine learning within two years. These are findings from a survey carried out by the Pistoia Alliance, a global, not for profit alliance that works to lower barriers to innovation in life sciences R&D. "Our survey data shows that while life science professionals are already exploring how AI, ML and NLP can be used – there are clear gaps in the knowledge, data, and skills, which will enable more pharma and biotech companies to achieve tangible results from AI."The post Survey shows how AI Could Revolutionize Life Sciences appeared first on insideHPC.

Karl Freund from Moor Insights gave this talk at SC17. "Researchers have begun putting Machine Learning to work solving problems that do not lend themselves well to traditional numerical analysis, or that require unaffordable computational capacity. This talk with discuss three primary approaches being used today, and will share some case studies that show significant promise of lower latency, improved accuracy, and lower cost."The post How AI is Reshaping HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Balance ratios are key to understanding the plethora of AI hardware solutions that are being developed or are soon to become available. This post from an insideHPC Special Report explores AI hardware options to support the growing artificial intelligence software ecosystem.The post AI Hardware to Support the Artificial Intelligence Software Ecosystem appeared first on insideHPC.

Two Berkeley Lab-led projects—Celeste and Galactos—were honored with Hyperion Research’s 2017 HPC Innovation Excellence Awards for "the outstanding application of HPC for business and scientific achievements." The HPC Innovation Excellence awards are designed to showcase return on investment and success stories involving HPC; to help other users better understand the benefits of adopting HPC; and to help justify HPC investments, including for small and medium-size enterprises.The post Berkeley Lab-led Collaborations win HPC Innovation Awards appeared first on insideHPC.

The PEARC18 Conference has announced its lineup of Keynote Speakers. The event takes place July 22-27 in Pittsburgh. "PEARC18 is for everyone who works to realize the promise of advanced computing as the enabler of seamless creativity. Scientists and engineers, scholars and planners, artists and makers, students and teachers all depend on the efficiency, security, reliability and sustainability of increasingly complex and powerful digital infrastructure systems. If your work addresses these challenges in any way, PEARC18 is the forum to share, learn and inspire progress."The post PEARC18 Conference Announces lineup of Keynote Speakers appeared first on insideHPC.

Today NOAA announced to plans for a major upgrade to its supercomputing capabilities. The upgrade adds 2.8 petaflops of computational power, enabling NOAA’s National Weather Service to implement the next generation Global Forecast System, known as the “American Model,” next year. “Having more computing speed and capacity positions us to collect and process even more data from our newest satellites — GOES-East, NOAA-20 and GOES-S — to meet the growing information and decision-support needs of our emergency management partners, the weather industry and the public.”The post NOAA Looks to Dell for Massive Supercomputing Upgrade appeared first on insideHPC.

RAID Incorporated has joined OpenSFS (Open Scalable File Systems, Inc.). OpenSFS is a non-profit organization that supports the vendor-neutral development of Lustre. Since 2010, OpenSFS has utilized working groups, events, and funding initiatives to encourage the growth and stability of the Lustre community, as well as facilitate collaborative benefits of its members, to ensure Lustre remains open, free, and flourishing. "RAID Incorporated undoubtedly brings great value to OpenSFS and will aid in boosting the continued innovation and advancements of the Lustre file system," said OpenSFS President Sarp Oral.The post RAID Inc. Joins OpenSFS to Support the Lustre File System appeared first on insideHPC.

Steve Oberlin from NVIDIA gave this talk at SC17 in Denver. "HPC is a fundamental pillar of modern science. From predicting weather to discovering drugs to finding new energy sources, researchers use large computing systems to simulate and predict our world. AI extends traditional HPC by letting researchers analyze massive amounts of data faster and more effectively. It’s a transformational new tool for gaining insights where simulation alone cannot fully predict the real world."The post Steve Oberlin from NVIDIA Presents: HPC Exascale & AI appeared first on insideHPC.

Today NVIDIA and Baidu today that they are creating a production-ready AI autonomous vehicle platform designed for China, the world’s largest automotive market. "NVIDIA and Baidu have pioneered significant advances in deep learning and AI together over the last several years,” said Huang. “Now, together with ZF, we have created the first AI autonomous vehicle computing platform for China.”The post NVIDIA and Baidu Announce Autonomous Car project with 30 Deep earning TOPS (trillions of operations per second) appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC17, Jon Masters from Red Hat describes the company's Multi-Architecture HPC capabilities, including the new ARM-powered Apollo 70 server from HPE. "At SC17, you will also have an opportunity to see the power and flexibility of Red Hat Enterprise Linux across multiple architectures, including Arm v8-A, x86_64 and IBM POWER Little Endian."The post Video: Red Hat Showcases ARM Support for HPC at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Micron and Intel announced an update to their successful NAND memory joint development partnership that has helped the companies develop and deliver industry-leading NAND technologies to market. "The companies have agreed to complete development of their third-generation of 3D NAND technology, which will be delivered toward the end of this year and extending into early 2019. Beyond that technology node, both companies will develop 3D NAND independently in order to better optimize the technology and products for their individual business needs."The post Micron and Intel to continue joint development of 3D NAND Memory through 2019 appeared first on insideHPC.

Can you afford to lose a third of your compute real estate? If not, you need to pre-empt the impact of Meltdown and Spectre. "Meltdown and Spectre are quickly becoming household names and not just in the HPC space. The severe design flaws in Intel microprocessors that could allow sensitive data to be stolen and the fixes are likely to be bad news for any I/O intensive applications such as those often used in HPC. Ellexus Ltd, the I/O profiling company, has released a white paper: How the Meltdown and Spectre bugs work and what you can do to prevent a performance plummet."The post New Whitepaper on Meltdown and Spectre fixes for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the performance ramifications of the Spectre and Meltdown exploits that affect processors from Intel, AMD, and many others. While patches are on the way, the performance hit from these patches could be as high as twenty or thirty percent in some cases.The post Radio Free HPC Looks at Spectre and Meltdown Exploits appeared first on insideHPC.

The Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce has named Pointwise a finalist for 2018 Small Business of the Year award. Pointwise, Inc. is solving the top problem facing computational fluid dynamics (CFD) today – reliably generating high-fidelity meshes. The company's Pointwise software generates structured, unstructured, overset and hybrid meshes; interfaces with CFD solvers such as ANSYS FLUENT, STAR-CCM+, OpenFOAM, and SU2 as well as many neutral formats, such as CGNS; runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac, and has a scripting language, Glyph, that can automate CFD meshing.The post Pointwise ISV is Finalist for Small Business of the Year appeared first on insideHPC.

Travis Johnston from ORNL gave this talk at SC17. "Multi-node evolutionary neural networks for deep learning (MENNDL) is an evolutionary approach to performing this search. MENNDL is capable of evolving not only the numeric hyper-parameters, but is also capable of evolving the arrangement of layers within the network. The second approach is implemented using Apache Spark at scale on Titan. The technique we present is an improvement over hyper-parameter sweeps because we don't require assumptions about independence of parameters and is more computationally feasible than grid-search."The post Adapting Deep Learning to New Data Using ORNL’s Titan Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

Gadi Singer gave this talk at the Intel HPC Developer Conference in Denver. "Technology visionaries architecting the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence (AI) will share the key challenges as well as Intel’s direction. The talk will cover the adaptation of AI into HPC workflows, along their perspective architectural developments, upcoming transitions and range of solutions, technology opportunities, and the driving forces behind them."The post The AI Future is Closer than it Seems appeared first on insideHPC.

Baidu USA in Silicon Valley is seeking a Computer Systems Researcher in our Job of the Week. "Baidu's research mission is to develop hard AI technologies that will reach and impact hundreds of millions of users. Our Silicon Valley Artificial Intelligence Lab (SVAIL) develops state-of-the-art AI technologies that require bleeding-edge systems to improve accuracy, scale, and performance. Our systems researchers address the many and new systems challenges that arise as we extend the AI state-of-the-art."The post Job of the Week: Computer Systems Researcher at Baidu USA appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Mellanox announced the first shipments of its BlueField system-on-chip (SoC) platforms and SmartNIC adapters to major data center, hyperscale and OEM customers. Mellanox BlueField dual-port 100Gb/s SoC is ideal for cloud, Web 2.0, Big Data, storage, enterprise, high-performance computing, and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) applications. "We are excited to ship BlueField systems and SmartNIC adapters to our major customers and partners, enabling them to build the next generation of storage, cloud, security and other platforms and to gain a competitive advantage,” said Yael Shenhav, vice president of products at Mellanox Technologies. “BlueField products achieve new performance records, delivering industry-leading NVMe over Fabrics and networking throughput. We are proud of our world-class team for delivering these innovative products, designed to meet the ever growing needs of current and future data centers.”The post Mellanox Ships BlueField SoCs and SmartNICs appeared first on insideHPC.

Peter Messmer from NVIDIA gave this talk at SC17. "This talk is a summary about the ongoing HPC visualization activities, as well as a description of the technologies behind the developer-zone shown in the booth." Messmer is a principal software engineer in NVIDIA's Developer Technology organization, working with clients to accelerate their scientific discovery process with GPUs.The post Visualization on GPU Accelerated Supercomputers appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team reviews their list of things Not Invited Back in 2018. Along the way, they share some of their New Year Resolutions.The post Radio Free HPC does their List of Things Not Invited Back in 2018 appeared first on insideHPC.

Prabhat from NERSC and Michael F. Wehner from LBNL gave this talk at the Intel HPC Developer Conference in Denver. "Deep Learning has revolutionized the fields of computer vision, speech recognition and control systems. Can Deep Learning (DL) work for scientific problems? This talk will explore a variety of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s applications that are currently benefiting from DL."The post Video: Deep Learning for Science appeared first on insideHPC.

Intel reports that company has developed and is rapidly issuing updates for all types of Intel-based computer systems — including personal computers and servers — that render those systems immune from both exploits (referred to as “Spectre” and “Meltdown”) reported by Google Project Zero. "By the end of next week, Intel expects to have issued updates for more than 90 percent of processor products introduced within the past five years."The post Intel Deploying Updates for Spectre and Meltdown Exploits appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC17 in Denver, Pascale Bruner from Atos describes the company's innovative ARM-HPC technologies developed as part of the Mont-Blanc Project. "Atos will showcase our Dibona prototype for ARM-based HPC. Named after the Dibona peak in the French Alps, the new prototype is part of the Phase 3 of Mont-Blanc and is based on 64 bit ThunderX2 processors from Cavium, relying on the ARM v8 instruction set."The post Video: A Closer Look at the Atos Dibona Prototype for ARM-based HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

ESI Group has announced the release of SimulationX 3.9, a software platform for multiphysics system simulation. Designed for many industries – from automotive, energy, and mining to industrial machinery, railways, aerospace and aeronautics – SimulationX has proven to be one of the most reliable and customer-friendly solutions on the market.The post ESI Releases SimulationX 3.9 for Manufacturing appeared first on insideHPC.

The UK OpenMP User Conference has issued its Call for Sessions. The event takes place May 21-22 at St Catherine's College in Oxford. "This inaugural event is intended to become the annual meeting of the growing UK-based community of developers who use OpenMP."The post Call for Sessions: UK OpenMP User Conference appeared first on insideHPC.

Satoshi Matsuoka from the Tokyo Institute of Technology gave this talk at the NVIDIA booth at SC17. "TSUBAME3 embodies various BYTES-oriented features to allow for HPC to BD/AI convergence at scale, including significant scalable horizontal bandwidth as well as support for deep memory hierarchy and capacity, along with high flops in low precision arithmetic for deep learning."The post Converging HPC, Big Data, and AI at the Tokyo Institute of Technology appeared first on insideHPC.

In this slidecast, Joe Yaworski from Intel describes the Intel Omni-Path architecture and how it scales performance for a wide range of HPC applications. He also shows why recently published benchmarks have not reflected the real performance story.The post Intel Omni-Path Architecture: The Real Numbers appeared first on insideHPC.

The HPC User Forum has posted their Preliminary Agenda for their upcoming meeting in France. Free to attend, the event takes place March 6-7 near Paris at the Teratec campus in Bruyères-le-Châtel. "We have developed an exciting agenda with prominent speakers who will discuss the HPC strategies for Europe, Japan and the USA," said Earl Joseph, CEO of Hyperion Research. "We will also have talks on new HPC technologies, applications and markets; and the proliferation of HPC in industrial and commercial environments."The post Preliminary Agenda Posted for March HPC User Forum in France appeared first on insideHPC.

Over at the Microsoft Blog, Jason Zander writes that the company is acquiring Avere Systems. "By bringing together Avere’s storage expertise with the power of Microsoft’s cloud, customers will benefit from industry-leading innovations that enable the largest, most complex high-performance workloads to run in Microsoft Azure. We are excited to welcome Avere to Microsoft, and look forward to the impact their technology and the team will have on Azure and the customer experience."The post Microsoft to acquire Avere Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

Many of the top 10 2017 HPC white papers deal with the next steps in the HPC journey, including moving to the cloud, and discovering the potential of machine learning and AI. The most downloaded reports of the year were written with industry partners such as Red Hat, Dell EMC, Intel, HPE and more.The post Top 10 HPC White Papers for 2017: Machine Learning, AI, the Cloud & More appeared first on insideHPC.

Intel recently announced the availability of the Intel Stratix 10 MX FPGA, the industry’s first field programmable gate array (FPGA) with integrated HBM2. By integrating the FPGA and the HBM2, Intel Stratix 10 MX FPGAs offer up to 10 times the memory bandwidth when compared when compared to standard DDR 2400 DIMM.The post Intel tackles FPGA HPC Memory Bottleneck appeared first on insideHPC.