High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

Today Verne Global in Iceland announced hpcDIRECT, a powerful, agile and efficient HPC-as-a-service (HPCaaS) platform. hpcDIRECT provides a fully scalable, bare metal service with the ability to rapidly provision the full performance of HPC servers uncontended and in a secure manner.“With hpcDIRECT, we take the complexity and capital costs out of scaling HPC and bring greater accessibility and more agility in terms of how IT architects plan and schedule their workloads.”The post Verne Global Launches hpcDIRECT, an HPC as a Service Platform appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, David Warberg gives us a quick tour of the Intel booth at SC17. "Intel unveiled new HPC advancements for optimized workloads, including the the addition of a new family of HPC solutions to the Intel Select Solutions program. Built on the latest Intel Xeon Scalable platforms, Intel Select Solutions are verified configurations designed to speed and simplify the evaluation and deployment of data center infrastructure while meeting a high performance threshold."The post Intel SC17 Booth Tour: Driving Innovation in HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Mellanox announced in collaboration with NEC Corporation support for the newly announced SX-Aurora TSUBASA systems with Mellanox ConnectX InfiniBand adapters. "We appreciate the performance, efficiency and scalability advantages that Mellanox interconnect solutions bring to our platform,” said Shigeyuki Aino, assistant general manager system platform business unit, IT platform division, NEC Corporation. “The in-network computing and PeerDirect capabilities of InfiniBand are the perfect complement to the unique vector processing engine architecture we have designed for our SX-Aurora TSUBASA platform.”The post Mellanox and NEC Partner to Deliver High-Performance Artificial Intelligence Platforms appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC17 in Denver, James Coomer from DDN describes how the company is driving high performance storage for HPC. For more than 15 years, DDN has designed, developed, deployed, and optimized systems, software, and solutions that enable enterprises, service providers, universities, and government agencies to generate more value and accelerate time to insight from their data and information, on premise and in the cloud.The post DDN Simplifies High Performance Storage at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

New benchmarks from Computer Simulation Technology on their recently optimized 3D electromagnetic field simulation tools compare the performance of the new Intel Xeon Scalable processors with previous generation Intel Xeon processors. "Our team works with the customers in terms of testing of models and configuration settings to make good recommendations for customers so they get a well performing system and the best performance when running the models.”The post Benchmarking Optimized 3D Electromagnetic Simulation Tools appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC17 in Denver, Rich Kanadjian from Kingston describes the company's wide array server memory and NVMe PCIe Flash solutions for HPC. "Today’s supercomputing installations are capable of doing billions of calculations per second and managing data in enormous volume and velocity. Kingston continues to provide top data solutions with reliability and predictable performance for the world’s most powerful HPC and enterprise big data applications, while also laying the groundwork for future innovation in data center efficiency.”The post Kingston NVMe Technologies Speed Up HPC at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today NVIDIA announced that hundreds of thousands of AI researchers using desktop GPUs can now tap into the power of NVIDIA GPU Cloud. “With GPU-optimized software now available to hundreds of thousands of researchers using NVIDIA desktop GPUs, NGC will be a catalyst for AI breakthroughs and a go-to resource for developers worldwide.”The post Consumer GPUs come to NVIDIA GPU Cloud for AI Research appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Florina Ciorba from University of Basel describes the theme of the upcoming PASC18 conference. With a focus on the convergence of Big Data and Computation, the conference takes place from July 2-4, 2018 in Basel, Switzerland. "PASC18 is the fifth edition of the PASC Conference series, an international platform for the exchange of competences in scientific computing and computational science, with a strong focus on methods, tools, algorithms, application challenges, and novel techniques and usage of high performance computing."The post Video: PASC18 to Focus on Big Data & Computation appeared first on insideHPC.

"On the November 2017 TOP500 list, Intel-powered supercomputers accounted for six of the top 10 systems and a record high of 471 out of 500 systems. Intel Omni-Path Architecture (Intel OPA) gained momentum, delivering a majority of the petaFLOPS of systems using 100Gb fabric delivering over 80 petaFLOPS, an almost 20 percent increase compared with the June 2017 Top500 list. In addition, Intel OPA now connects almost 60 percent of nodes using 100Gb fabrics on the Top500 list. Also, Intel powered all 137 new systems added to the November list."The post Intel Omni Path Gains Momentum at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at a controversy stirred up by the recent Irish Supercomputing List.The 9th Irish Supercomputer List was released this week. For the first time, Ireland has four computers ranked on the Top500. "Since the publication of the List, a third party called the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) has expressed concerns that the press release issued by the Irish Supercomputing List is misleading. You can read their opinion here."The post Radio Free HPC Looks at a Controversy in the Irish Supercomputing List appeared first on insideHPC.

In this RCE Podcast, Brock Palen and Jeff Squyres discuss PMIx with Ralph Castain from Intel. "The Process Management Interface (PMI) has been used for quite some time as a means of exchanging wireup information needed for interprocess communication. While PMI-2 demonstrates better scaling properties than its PMI-1 predecessor, attaining rapid launch and wireup of the roughly 1M processes executing across 100k nodes expected for exascale operations remains challenging."The post RCE Podcast Looks at PMIx Process Management Interface for Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.

Tim Pugh from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology gave this talk at the DDN User Group in Denver. "The Bureau of Meteorology, Australia’s national weather, climate and water agency, relies on DDN’s GRIDScaler Enterprise NAS storage appliance to handle its massive volumes of research data to deliver reliable forecasts, warnings, monitoring and advice spanning the Australian region and Antarctic territory."The post Video: Australian Bureau of Meteorology moves to a new Data Production Service appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from AWS Reinvent, Anthony Liguori from Amazon presents: Nitro Hypervisor - the Evolution of Amazon EC2 Virtualization. "The new Nitro hypervisor for Amazon EC2, introduced with the launch of C5 instances, is a component that primarily provides CPU and memory isolation for C5 instances. VPC networking, and EBS storage resources are implemented by dedicated hardware components that are part of all current generation EC2 instance families. It is built on core Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) technology, but does not include general purpose operating system components.The post Video: Introducing the Nitro Hypervisor – the Evolution of Amazon EC2 Virtualization appeared first on insideHPC.

Computational scientists now have the opportunity to apply for the upcoming Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing (ATPESC). The event takes place from July 29-August 10, 2018 in greater Chicago. "With the challenges posed by the architecture and software environments of today’s most powerful supercomputers, and even greater complexity on the horizon from next-generation and exascale systems, there is a critical need for specialized, in-depth training for the computational scientists poised to facilitate breakthrough science and engineering using these amazing resources."The post Apply now for Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing 2018 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC17, Sunita Chandrasekaran from OpenACC.org and Stan Posey from NVIDIA describe how OpenACC eases GPU programming for HPC. "At SC17, OpenACC.org announced milestones highlighting OpenACC’s broad adoption in weather and climate models that simulate the Earth’s atmosphere, including one of this year’s Gordon Bell finalist. Additionally, the organization announced their hackathon momentum and the new OpenACC 2.6 specification."The post Video: OpenACC Eases GPU Programming for HPC at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

Hyperion Research recently announced the newest recipients of the HPC Innovation Excellence Awards. "High performance computing contributes enormously to scientific progress, economic competitiveness, national security and the quality of human life," said Bob Sorensen, Hyperion Research vice president of research and technology. "The winners of these awards have been judged to be among the world's best at exploiting HPC to achieve important real-world innovations."The post Hyperion Research Announces HPC Innovation Excellence Award Winners appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Akira Sano provides a tour of the Supermicro booth at SC17 in Denver. "Supermicro offers the best selection of leading HPC optimized servers in the industry as evidenced by the recent selection of our twin architecture by the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS)."The post Supermicro Booth Tour Showcases HPC Innovation at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

New York University is seeking an HPC Specialist in our Job of the Week. "The HPC Specialist will provide technical leadership in design, development, installation and maintenance of hardware and software for the central High-Performance Computing systems and/or research computing services at New York University."The post Job of the Week: HPC Specialist at New York University appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the Intel HPC Developer Conference in Denver, Michael Strickland describes how Intel FPGAs are powering new levels of performance and datacenter efficiency with FPGAs. "Altera and Intel offers a broad range of FPGA devices - from the high performaning Stratix series to the flexible MAX 10 - so you can find a device that best meets your business needs."The post Intel Steps up to HPC & the Enterprise with FPGAs appeared first on insideHPC.

Dr. Stephan Schenk from BASF gave this talk at the DDN User Group at SC17. "With 1.75 petaflops, our supercomputer QURIOSITY offers around 10 times the computing power that BASF currently has dedicated to scientific computing. In the ranking of the 500 largest computing systems in the world, the BASF supercomputer is currently number 71.”The post Video: A Petascale HPC System at BASF appeared first on insideHPC.

The European HPC Summit Week 2018 conference has released their Call for Workshops. The event takes place place May 28 - June 1 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. "This call for workshops is addressed to all possible participants interested in including a session or workshop in the EHPCSW18. The procedure is to send an expression of interest to have a session/workshop and agree on a joint programme for this week. If you are an HPC project, initiative or company and you want to include a workshop or session in the European HPC Summit Week, please send the document attached before December 18, 2017."The post Call for Workshops: European HPC Summit Week 2018 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC17 in Denver, Michael Klemm from the OpenMP ARB describes how the OpenMP programming community is moving forward to new levels of scalable performance. The OpenMP Architecture Review Board (ARB) is seeking feedback on the newly released Technical Report 6.The post OpenMP ARB Releases New Technical Report and Asks for Feedback appeared first on insideHPC.

A valuable feature of Intel Advisor is its Roofline Analysis Chart, which provides an intuitive and powerful visualization of actual performance measured against hardware-imposed performance ceilings. Intel Advisor's vector parallelism optimization analysis and memory-versus-compute roofline analysis, working together, offer a powerful tool for visualizing an application’s complete current and potential performance profile on a given platform.The post A New Way to Visualize Performance Optimization Tradeoffs appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Jay Breakstone and Sumit Puri from Liqid describe the company's innovative composable infrastructure technology for HPC. "Liqid Grid enables once-static infrastructure to scale on demand to effectively manage the explosion of data associated with cloud, enterprise, HPC and AI, as well as other emerging, high-value, data-intensive applications."The post Liqid steps up with Composable Infrastructure for HPC at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

At SC17 in Denver, Cavium showcased a wide variety of ThunderX2 Arm-based server platforms for high performance computing. "ThunderX2 server SoC integrates fully out-of-order, high-performance custom cores supporting single and dual-socket configurations. It is optimized to drive high computational performance delivering outstanding memory bandwidth and memory capacity. The new line of ThunderX2 processors includes multiple SKUs for both scale up and scale out applications and is fully compliant with Armv8-A architecture specifications as well as the Arm Server Base System Architecture and Arm Server Base Boot Requirements standards."The post Cavium Showcases ThunderX2 Arm-based Server Platforms for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC17, Molly Presley from Quantum describes how the company's high performance storage systems power HPC. "So why have an autonomous car at a Supercomputing show? The answer is Big Data. The Autonomous Stuff vehicle in this video is actually a rolling software development platform equipped with sensors that generate a whopping 30 Terabytes of data per day. Now just imagine if there were millions of vehicles on the road generating this kind of data. Only HPC could deal with that problem at scale. Companies like Quantum are stepping up to help solve this big data problem, both in the vehicle, on the edge, and in the datacenter."The post Quantum Drives High Performance Storage at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

The IEEE Cluster 2018 conference has issued it Call for Papers. The event takes place September 10-14, 2018 in Belfast UK. "Following the successes of previous IEEE Cluster conferences, for IEEE Cluster 2018, which will be held September 10-14, 2018 in Belfast UK, we again solicit high-quality original work that advances the state-of-the-art in clusters and closely related fields. All papers will be rigorously peer-reviewed for their originality, technical depth and correctness, potential impact, relevance to the conference, and quality of presentation."The post Call for Papers: IEEE Cluster 2018 in Belfast appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the Intel HPC Developer Conference, Erik Lindahl from Stockholm University describes the challenges of cryo-EM, a technique that fires beams of electrons at proteins that have been frozen in solution, to deduce the biomolecules’ structure. "Structural biology is going through a revolution where cryo-EM now determine 3D structures from 100,000s of noisy images, but it relies on very large computations. I will present our work with Intel to accelerate the RELION program with x86 SIMD, TBB, and MKL to provide outstanding performance."The post Accelerating Cryo-EM with Intel Technologies appeared first on insideHPC.

The 9th Irish Supercomputer List was released today. For the first time, Ireland has four computers ranked on the Top500 and Ireland is now ranked number one globally in terms of number of Top500 supercomputers per capita.The post Ireland Reaches #1 in TOP500 Supercomputers per capita appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC17, Ken King describes how new Power9 compute nodes will power the next generation of the world's most powerful Coral supercomputers at ORNL and LLNL. "We’re pleased to announce that we are delivering on our project, with our next-generation IBM Power Systems with NVIDIA Volta GPUs being deployed at Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore National Labs."The post IBM Readies Power9 Coral Supercomputers at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

The popularity of “better than human” classification on tasks that people do well (such as recognizing faces, Internet image search, self-driving cars, etcetera) has reached a mass audience. "What has been lacking is coverage that machine learning is also fantastic at performing tasks that humans tend to do poorly."The post AI and HPC: Inferencing, Platforms & Infrastructure appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Jeff Kuehn from LANL, Pavel Shamis from ARM, and Gilad Shainer from Mellanox describe progress on the new UCF consortium, a collaboration between industry, laboratories, and academia to create an open-source production grade communication framework for data centric and high-performance applications.The post UCX and UCF Projects for Exascale Move Forward at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

Researchers are using HPC systems at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center to predict potential threats to air traffic posed by Antarctic volcanoes. "Antarctic volcanoes might pose a higher threat than previously considered. A research focused on the potential impacts of ash dispersal and fallout from Deception Island highlights how ash clouds entrapped in circumpolar upper-level winds have the potential to reach lower latitudes and disrupt Austral hemisphere air traffic. The study has been published today in the Nature group journal, Scientific Reports."The post Video: BSC Simulations Predict Air Traffic Disruption from Antarctic Volcanic Ash appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Gilad Shainer from Mellanox describes the company's advanced interconnect technologies that were on display at SC17 in Denver. "Mellanox is leading industry innovation by providing the highest throughput and lowest latency HDR 200Gb/s InfiniBand and Ethernet solutions available today, with a clear roadmap for tomorrow."The post Video: Mellanox Takes HPC Interconnects to the Next Level at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today HPE announced a collaboration with the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge to accelerate new discoveries in the mathematical sciences. This includes partnering with Stephen Hawking’s Centre for Theoretical Cosmology (COSMOS) to understand the origins and structure of the universe. Leveraging the HPE Superdome Flex in-memory computing platform, the COSMOS group will search for clues hiding in massive data sets—spanning 14 billion years of information—that could unlock the secrets of the early universe and black holes.The post HPE Superdome Flex to power Stephen Hawking’s COSMOS Research Group appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC17 in Denver, Brian Gold from Pure Storage describes how the company's innovative FlashBlade Systems speed up I/O for AI & HPC workloads. "From scientific research and movie rendering to artificial intelligence, applications push the limits on thousands of GPU cores or thousands of CPU servers. Parallel compute demands parallel storage. FlashBlade is the industry’s first all-flash storage purpose-built for modern analytics – architected from the ground-up to deliver a powerful cloud-era data platform that’s fast, big, and simple."The post Video: Pure Storage Speeds I/O for AI & HPC Workloads at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

To meet some of the biggest HPC software challenges, representatives from more than 25 academic, research, and commercial organizations formed a community project at the end of 2015: OpenHPC. This is the third article in a four-part series that explores going beyond OpenHPC with Intel HPC Orchestrator. Download the full insideHPC Special Report.The post Exploring the OpenHPC Solution for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team goes over the results of the SC17 Student Cluster Competition. This year, Nanyang Technological University from Singapore took the Top Prize. "In this competition, student teams design and build small clusters, with hardware and software vendor partners, learn designated scientific applications, apply optimization techniques for their chosen architectures, and compete in a non-stop, 48-hour challenge, at the SC conference."The post Radio Free HPC wraps up the SC17 Student Cluster Competition appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Nuance Communications announced that they are working together to bring the power of machine learning to radiologists and data scientists working across the entire healthcare system. "We stand on the edge of a new age in radiology, where artificial intelligence and machine learning will become a necessity in every radiologist's essential toolkit,” said Dr. Luciano Prevedello, Division Chief of Medical Imaging Informatics at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. “It is critical for the state of AI adoption and its potential to improve patient outcomes and operations that AI-based tools are more than just available – they must be valuable, validated and valued by the institution of radiology.”The post NVIDIA and Nuance to Advance AI for Radiology appeared first on insideHPC.

Argonne National Laboratory is collaborating with HPE to provide system software expertise and a development ecosystem for a future high-performance computing system based on 64-bit ARM processors. "Argonne is working with HPE to evaluate early versions of chipmaker Cavium ARM ThunderX2 64-bit processors for the ARM ecosystem. Argonne is interested in evaluating the ARM ecosystem as a cost-effective and power-effective alternative to x86 architectures based on Intel CPUs, which currently dominate the high-performance computing market."The post Argonne to Install Comanche System to Explore ARM Technology for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC17, Josh Mora describes how the new AMD EPYC Processors deliver huge memory bandwidth and application performance for HPC. "EPYC strikes the perfect balance of cores/threads, memory, I/O bandwidth and security to deliver excellent performance for many High Performance Computing (HPC) workloads. AMD’s state-of-the-art GPUs combined with EPYC provide excellent solutions for your most demanding HPC applications."The post AMD steps up with EPYC Processors for HPC at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Bill Mannel gives a booth tour that highlights some of the amazing HPC innovations on display in the HPE booth at SC17. "HPE’s first ARM-based HPC system brings more choice and flexibility to HPC customers. The Apollo 70, using Cavium’s 64-bit ARMv8-A ThunderX2 Server Processor, is purpose-built for memory intensive HPC workloads and delivers up to 33 percent more memory bandwidth than today’s industry standard servers."The post Video: HPE Showcases Innovation for HPC at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory describe Sierra, LLNL’s next-generation supercomputer. "The IBM-built advanced technology high-performance system is projected to provide four to six times the sustained performance and be at least seven times more powerful than LLNL’s current most advanced system, Sequoia, with a 125 petaFLOP/s peak. At approximately 11 megawatts, Sierra will also be about five times more power efficient than Sequoia."The post Video: Introducing the 125 Petaflop Sierra Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the International Workshop on Advanced Computing and Analysis Techniques in Physics Research, Dr. Colin P. Williams from D-Wave Systems presents: Quantum Computing for the Real World Today. His focus for the talk centers around using quantum computing for machine learning. "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 Video: Quantum Computing for the Real World Today appeared first on insideHPC.

Penguin Computing has announced plans to deploy more than 11,500 cores of the latest Intel Xeon Scalable processor in their Penguin Computing On-Demand HPC cloud. “The latest Intel Xeon Scalable processor expansion will provide an ideal compute environment for MPI workloads that can leverage thousands of cores for computation. We have significant customer demand for POD HPC cloud in applicable areas like high-resolution weather forecasting and computational fluid dynamics, including solutions from software partners like ANSYS, Flow Science and CD-adapco.”The post Intel Xeon Scalable Processors come to Penguin on Demand HPC Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC17 in Denver, Dan Reed moderates a panel discussion on HPC Software for Energy Efficiency. "This panel will explore what HPC software capabilities were most helpful over the past years in improving HPC system energy efficiency? It will then look forward; asking in what layers of the software stack should a priority be put on introducing energy-awareness; e.g., runtime, scheduling, applications? What is needed moving forward? Who is responsible for that forward momentum?"The post SC17 Panel: Energy Efficiency Gains From Software appeared first on insideHPC.

Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland is seeking an IT Engineer in our Job of the Week. "The IT Engineer will serve as lead architect to manage, develop and design high-level systems. The position shares responsibility for the research computing services provided to the university community, which leverages the university's investment in cyberinfrastructure. This includes identifying appropriate computational platforms (locally and externally) for research projects and diagnosing and resolving issues in the configuration, installation, tuning, and management of very large distributed and tightly coupled computer systems, based on the Linux OS."The post Job of the Week: IT Engineer at Case Western Reserve University appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Excelero announced that SciNet, Canada's largest supercomputer center, has deployed Excelero's NVMesh server SAN for the highly efficient, cost-effective storage behind a new supercomputer at the University of Toronto. "For SciNet, NVMesh is an extremely cost-effective method of achieving unheard-of burst buffer bandwidth," said Dr. Daniel Gruner, chief technical officer, SciNet High Performance Computing Consortium. "By adding commodity flash drives and NVMesh software to compute nodes, and to a low-latency network fabric that was already provided for the supercomputer itself, NVMesh provides redundancy without impacting target CPUs. This enables standard servers to go beyond their usual role in acting as block targets – the servers now can also act as file servers."The post Excelero NVMesh powers Canada’s new SciNet Petascale Storage Facility appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC17 in Denver, Steve Branton from Asetek describes the company's wide array of liquid cooling solutions for HPC. At the Asetek booth, the company displayed liquid cooling from recently announced OEMs and channel partners in addition to cooling solutions for the latest Intel, Nvidia and IBM CPUs, accelerators and GPUs. “We are seeing higher wattage HPC nodes that require liquid cooling as they cannot be cooled with air. Wattage density is only going to get higher with the inclusion of machine learning and AI across the HPC spectrum.”The post Asetek Rides the Wave of Liquid Cooling for HPC at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

Last week at SC17, Univa announced its Univa Grid Engine distributed resource management system is powering the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics’ (WHG) high performance computing environment. WHG is a research institute within the Nuffield Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford. The Centre is an international leader in genetics, genomics, statistics and structural biology with more than 400 researchers and 70 administrative and support personnel. WHG’s mission is to advance the understanding of genetically-related conditions through a broad range of multi-disciplinary research.The post Univa Grid Engine Powers University of Oxford Human Genetics Centre appeared first on insideHPC.