High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

Today D-Wave Systems announced major upgrades coming to the D-Wave 2000Q quantum computer in the first quarter of 2018. Two of the most powerful new capabilities are reverse annealing and virtual graphs. These features enable significant performance improvements over the current D-Wave 2000Q system by giving users increased control of the quantum processing unit (QPU). "The new capabilities will greatly benefit our customers by giving them new ways to exploit the power of the D-Wave 2000Q quantum computer,” said Jeremy Hilton, SVP Systems, D-Wave. “We continue to deliver rapid advances in quantum hardware, software, and other system components that our growing user base can leverage for application development.”The post D-Wave Announces Upgrades to D-Wave 2000Q Quantum Computer appeared first on insideHPC.

CoolIT Systems is showcasing their innovative liquid cooling solutions at SC17 in Denver this week. "As the most popular integration partner for OEM server manufacturers, CoolIT will showcase liquid-enabled servers from Intel, Dell EMC, HPE, and Huawei. Combined with the broadest range of heat exchangers and supporting liquid infrastructure, CoolIT and their OEM partners are delivering the most complete and robust liquid cooling solutions to the HPC market."The post CoolIT Systems Showcases Liquid Cooling Innovations at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

We are excited to bring our readers this special livestream from NVIDIA at SC17 in Denver. Tune in right here for a live presentation from NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang entitled, "Accelerated Computing: The Path Forward." It all starts at Monday at 3:00pm Mountain time.The post SC17 Livestream: Jensen Huang from NVIDIA on the AI Revolution in HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team reviews the latest TOP500 list in front of a live audience in Denver at SC17. "The fiftieth TOP500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world has China overtaking the US in the total number of ranked systems by a margin of 202 to 144. It is the largest number of supercomputers China has ever claimed on the TOP500 ranking, with the US presence shrinking to its lowest level since the list’s inception 25 years ago."The post Live! Radio Free HPC does the Latest TOP500 List appeared first on insideHPC.

"With the integration of Arm processors into our flagship Cray XC50 systems, we will offer our customers the world’s most flexible supercomputers,” said Fred Kohout, Cray’s senior vice president of products and chief marketing officer. “Adding Arm processors complements our system’s ability to support a variety of host processors, and gives customers a unique, leadership-class supercomputer for compute, simulation, big data analytics, and deep learning. Our software engineers built the industry’s best Arm toolset to maximize customer value from the system, which is representative of the R&D work we do every day to build on our leadership position in supercomputing.”The post Cray Helps Propels ARM processors into HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

SC17 exhibitors are invited to participate in two “blow the doors off the network” events next week to demonstrate the power of SCinet, the high-capacity network built to support the revolutionary applications and experiments that are a hallmark of the SC conference. "Exhibitors with 100 GB connections to their booths are invited to blast peak traffic to and from the exhibit hall floor to illustrate the power of SCinet connectivity within the Colorado Convention Center and to other sites around the world. The events are scheduled 10-11 a.m. Monday, Nov. 13, and 12-1 p.m. Thursday Nov. 16."The post SCinet to “Blow the Doors off the Network” at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

“The Ethernet Alliance SC17 demo shows the next Ethernet era is here, bringing with it technologies supporting today’s supercomputing needs, and laying out a roadmap for not just tomorrow, but tomorrow’s tomorrow.”The post Ethernet Alliance SC17 Demo Highlights Rich Solutions Portfolio For HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Moonshot Research and Providentia Worldwide announced an agreement to jointly offer business and technical services and consulting in the areas of high-performance computing and big data services. The Moonshot/Providentia team brings expertise in driving ROI in enterprise computing by focusing on best practices in HPC, cloud and enterprise IT. "I am absolutely delighted to work with the world’s experts in using HPC to achieve real-time analytics. Speed has become the ultimate competitive advantage in the world of technology-enabled products and services," said Merle Giles, CEO of Moonshot Research.The post Moonshot Research Teams with Providentia Worldwide for HPC and Big Data Services for Industry appeared first on insideHPC.

SC17 will continue its HPC Matters Plenary session series this year with a talk on The Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer, which is currently #1 on the TOP500. "This talk will first introduce and discuss design philosophy about the approach to integrate these 10 million cores at both the processor and the system level. Based on such a system design, we will then talk about the efforts and the challenges as we see in the process of utilizing the 10 million cores to push forward the frontiers of science in domains such as climate, seismology, material, bioinformatics, and big data analytics."The post SC17 Preview: Lessons on Utilizing 10 Million Cores of Sunway TaihuLight appeared first on insideHPC.

In this time-lapse video from SC17, a team of volunteers build the high-speed SCinet network for the conference in 30 seconds flat. "Check out this behind-the-scenes look at the well-orchestrated frenzy that is SCinet staging week. Jim Stewart, JP Velders and Lance Hutchinson explain how more than 100 volunteers dedicated a week to staging the SCinet NOC prior to its installation on the exhibit floor at the Colorado Convention Center."The post Time-Lapse Video: Building SCinet at SC17 in 30 seconds appeared first on insideHPC.

SC17 will continue its HPC Matters Plenary session series this year a talk on Molecular Simulation at the Mesoscale. "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 SC17 Preview: Molecular Simulation at the Mesoscale appeared first on insideHPC.

"Over the next year, IBM Q scientists will continue to work to improve its devices including the quality of qubits, circuit connectivity, and error rates of operations. For example, within six months, the IBM team was able to extend the coherence times for the 20 qubit processor to be twice that of the publically available 5 and 16 qubit systems on the IBM Q experience."The post Quantum Computing Ecosystem moves forward with IBM Q Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

Today CoolIT Systems announced their new AHx2 Heat Exchange Module. This compact Liquid-to-Air heat exchanger makes it possible for Direct Contact Liquid Cooling (DCLC) enabled servers to be thermally tested during the factory burn-in process, without additional liquid cooling infrastructure.The post CoolIT Systems Unveils AHx2 Heat Exchange Module appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Rescale announced that it will support HPE and SGI servers on its HPC platform, allowing HPE customers to seamlessly access and manage a hybrid environment of cloud and on-premises HPC systems in a single unified platform solution. "Rescale is very excited to offer hybrid HPC access to the largest hardware user community worldwide,” said Gabriel Broner, VP and GM of HPC at Rescale. “Rescale has expertise working with multi-cloud and multi-architecture technology, and the ScaleX Enterprise platform is ideally suited to managing various hardware resources and providing a hybrid path to cloud expansion for HPE and SGI users."The post Rescale Cloud adds HPE and SGI Server Capability appeared first on insideHPC.

"Developed by Stanford University, Legion is a data-centric programming model for writing high-performance applications for distributed heterogeneous architectures. Legion provides a common framework for implementing applications which can achieve portable performance across a range of architectures. The target class of users dictates that productivity in Legion will always be a second-class design constraint behind performance. Instead Legion is designed to be extensible and to support higher-level productivity languages and libraries."The post Video: The Legion Programming Model appeared first on insideHPC.

Today WekaIO announced a partnership with HPE to deliver integrated flash-based parallel file system capabilities that can significantly accelerate compute-intensive workloads. The WekaIO Matrix software-defined storage solution is validated for deployment within HPE environments – including the HPE Apollo Gen10 System platform that delivers rich capabilities for high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) use cases.The post WekaIO Partners with HPE to Develop All-Flash Storage for HPC and AI appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the SC17 HPC Connects series, David Paez-Espino from the Joint Genome Institute describes how researchers are using supercomputing to search for elusive proteins that perform gene editing. "This revolutionary work requires petaflops of computing power to sift through billions of DNA sequences in the JGI data portals to identify proteins like Cas9 that, combined with the Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR), can “edit” a genome."The post HPC Connects: The Search for Elusive Proteins that perform Gene Editing appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Toshiba Memory America announced plans to demonstrate High Performance Computing NVM Express over Fabrics at SC17 in Denver. "NVMe-oF brings direct-connect NVMe SSD performance to the storage fabric with the flexibility of disaggregated storage. It provides scale-out, cloud data centers with software-defined, NVMe-oF storage that centralizes and virtualizes NVMe SSDs across the network, making them highly available to compute nodes at near direct-attached storage (DAS) performance."The post Toshiba to Demo NVMe Over Fabrics at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Gidel launched their Proc10S family of high performance, scalable compute acceleration boards. The devices are based on the Stratix 10 FPGA, which was released by Intel in late 2016. "Gidel’s newest acceleration board was designed with high density Big Data and HPC applications in mind. “The Proc10S is a heavy-duty FPGA and thus opens new markets in HPC for Gidel, such as Deep Learning and Big Data analytics,” says Ofer Pravda, VP Marketing and Sales at Gidel. “Gidel’s long history in algorithm acceleration utilizing FPGA technology has resulted in an enormous wealth of product knowledge that provides us with an advantage in certain HPC and Vision arenas.”The post Gidel Launches Acceleration Boards Based on Intel Stratix 10 FPGAs appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Japanese HPC Cloud Startup XTREME Design announced the completion of a $2.75M financing agreement in Series-A round funding led by World Innovation Lab (WiL). "XTREME Design provides access to supercomputing resources for companies that didn’t previously have it, and has tremendous growth potential right now within High Performance Technical Computing and beyond.”The post Japanese HPC Cloud Startup XTREME Design Raises $2.75M appeared first on insideHPC.

Today CoolIT Systems unveiled their new AHx10 Heat Exchange Module. This latest member of the CoolIT lineup is a rack mounted Liquid-to- Air heat exchanger that enables dramatic increases in server density without the need for any facility water. "Data centers struggling to manage the heat from high density racks now have a solution with the AHx10 that requires no facility modification,” said CoolIT Systems VP of Product Marketing, Pat McGinn. “The plug and play characteristics of the AHx10 make it a high flexible, simple to install solution that delivers the great benefits of liquid cooling immediately.”The post CoolIT Systems AHx10 Heat Exchanger Delivers Rack Level Cooling without Facility Water appeared first on insideHPC.

Today DDN announced that Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Western Australia has deployed a pair of DDN GRIDScaler parallel file system appliances to help deliver the first colored panoramic view of the universe. "The GRIDScaler solution comprises 5PBs of storage as well as an additional 2PBs of DDN capacity to support diverse research, simulations and visualizations in radio astronomy, renewable energy and geosciences, among several other scientific disciplines. At Pawsey, DDN’s GRIDScaler delivers the performance and stability needed to address 50 large data collections and contribute towards scientific outcomes for some of the thousand scientists who benefit from Pawsey services."The post DDN Powers Radio Astronomy at Pawsey Centre in Australia appeared first on insideHPC.

In HPC we talk a lot about performance, and vendors are constantly striving to increase the performance of their components, but who out there is making sure that customers get the performance that they’re paying for? Well, according to their recently published ebook, a company called RedLine Performance Solutions has adopted that role with gusto.The post All about Baselining: RedLine Explains HPC Performance Methodology appeared first on insideHPC.

Intel® Integrated Performance Primitives (Intel IPP) is a highly optimized, production-ready, library for lossless data compression/decompression targeting image, signal, and data processing, and cryptography applications. Intel IPP includes more than 2,500 image processing, 1,300 signal processing, 500 computer vision, and 300 cryptography optimized functions for creating digital media, enterprise data, embedded, communications, and scientific, technical, and security applications.The post Building Fast Data Compression Code with Intel Integrated Performance Primitives (Intel IPP) 2018 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Rescale announced a partnership with X-ISS to offer professional services to enterprises migrating HPC workloads to the cloud. "At X-ISS, we are very excited to partner with Rescale to eliminate the compute ceilings and queuing wait times that our customers sometimes deal with. Together, X-ISS and Rescale will provide a comprehensive HPC solution and services that will delight our joint customers,” said Deepak Khosla at X-ISS.The post Rescale & X-ISS offer Professional Services for HPC Cloud Migration appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Gidel announced the availability of new development tools that take advantage of Intel’s HLS, producing a speed increase of 5x over prior development options. Intel’s High Level Synthesis (HLS) compiler turns untimed C++ into Register Transfer Level (RTL) — a low- level FPGA code. Gidel’s development tools map board resources to application needs, and provide the glue between the host computer and the FPGA logic by building an Application Support Package (ASP). Gidel’s tools provide access for software developers to be able to work with HLS, and simplify integration of new IP that may utilize HLS into existing designs.The post Gidel FPGA Tools Speed Development with Intel’s HLS appeared first on insideHPC.

To open up opportunities to attend the conference, SC17 set up a new “Inclusivity Travel Grant” with the goal of helping individuals with demonstrated interest and passion for HPC that would not otherwise have close to a chance of participating in the conference. "This year, the winner Umesh Upadhyaya comes all the way from Nepal."The post Announcing the SC17 Inaugural Inclusivity Travel Grant appeared first on insideHPC.

The ISC High Performance 2018 contributed program is now open for submissions. As the largest HPC conference and exhibition in Europe, ISC 2018 takes place June 24 – 28, 2018, in Frankfurt, Germany "We welcome submissions for the following sessions - birds of a feather, research posters, project posters and the PhD forum. ISC 2018 also calls on regional and international STEM undergraduate and graduate students interested in the field of high performance computing to volunteer as helpers at the five-day conference."The post Call for Submissions: ISC 2018 Contributed Program appeared first on insideHPC.

Today DDN announced it has entered into a partnership with global high-performance computing leader Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Under the agreement, HPE will integrate DDN’s parallel file system storage and flash storage cache technology with HPE’s HPC platforms. The focus of the partnership is to accelerate and simplify customers’ workflows in technical computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning environments. “With this partnership, two trusted leaders in the high-performance computing market have come together to deliver high value solutions as well as a wealth of technical field expertise for customers with data intensive needs,” said Paul Bloch, president, DDN.The post HPE Teams up with DDN for High Speed Storage appeared first on insideHPC.

We've updated our Denver Pub Crawl for 2017. "Denver has great bars and entertainment in store for your visit to the Mile-High City. You’ll find that most of the fun places are in the LoDo area of Downtown. It’s a bit of a hike from the convention center, but you can hop on the free 16th Street Mall Shuttle and get off on Blake Street to catch the action."The post SC17 Pub Crawl – Locals’ Guide to Bars and Entertainment in Denver appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team previews the SC17 Student Cluster Competition. "Dan’s got the inside scoop on all the new wrinkles of the competition this year, where 16 international student teams will go head-to-head. There’s an all high school squad from Indiana, returning champs from China, and an all-new cloud computing component utilizing Cycle Computing on Azure."The post Radio Free HPC Previews the SC17 Student Cluster Competition appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Cavium announced a new partnership that will position the University of Michigan as a leader in data-intensive scientific research by creating a powerful Big Data computing cluster using dual socket servers powered by Cavium’s ThunderX ARMv8-A workload optimized processors. The cluster consists of 40 servers each containing 96 ARMv8 cores and 512 GB of RAM per server.The post Cavium ThunderX Cluster to Crunch Big Data at University of Michigan appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Panasas introduced the next generation of its ActiveStor scaleout NAS solution, capable of scaling capacity to 57PB and delivering 360GB/s of bandwidth. This flexible system doubles metadata performance to cut data access time in half, scales performance and capacity independently, and seamlessly adapts to new technology advancements.The post Panasas Doubles Metadata Performance on ActiveStor Scaleout NAS appeared first on insideHPC.

Today, Amazon Web Services announced the availability of C5 instances, the next generation of compute optimized instances for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Designed for compute-heavy applications like batch processing, distributed analytics, and HPC, C5 instances feature 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Skylake-SP) up to 72 vCPUs, and 144 GiB of memory—twice the vCPUs and memory of previous generation C4 instances—providing the best price-performance of any Amazon EC2 instance.The post Intel Xeon Scalable Processors power new AWS C5 Instances for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Supermicro announced that the company has partnered with the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) to expand advanced computing and data analytics used to study the Earth, solar system and universe. Based on the combination of density, system performance and optimized cost, the Supermicro FatTwin-based solution brings an additional 1.56 PetaFlops to NASA researchers. The Rack Scale solution is factory integrated at Supermicro's Silicon Valley headquarters to deliver optimal reliability and efficiency.The post Supermicro Powers Advanced Analytics at NASA NCCS appeared first on insideHPC.

In this TACC podcast, Cosmos code developer Chris Fragile joins host Jorge Salazar for a discussion on how researchers are using supercomputers to simulate the inner workings of Black holes. "For this simulation, the manycore architecture of KNL presents new challenges for researchers trying to get the best compute performance. This is a computer chip that has lots of cores compared to some of the other chips one might have interacted with on other systems," McDougall explained. "More attention needs to be paid to the design of software to run effectively on those types of chips."The post Podcast: Optimizing Cosmos Code on Intel Xeon Phi appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Bright Computing, a global leader in cluster and cloud infrastructure automation software, is proud to announce that the University of North Texas (UNT) has integrated Bright Cluster Manager into its HPC environment for research support. The University uses this 350-node cluster to optimize efficiency for researchers working on groundbreaking discoveries in a variety of domains material science, engineering, chemistry, and physics. Bright Cluster Manager helps UNT’s University Information Technology department successfully provision, monitor and manage heterogeneous clusters.The post University of North Texas turns to Bright Computing for Efficient Cluster Management appeared first on insideHPC.

Composable infrastructure allows any number of CPU nodes to dynamically map the optimum number of GPU and NVMe storage resources to each node required to complete a specific task. In this sponsored post, Katie Rivera of One Stop Systems, explores the power of GPUs and the potential benefits of composable infrastructure for HPC.The post Composable Infrastructure: Composing Greater HPC Breakthroughs appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced the HPE Superdome Flex, "the world’s most scalable and modular in-memory computing platform." The platform enables enterprises of any size to process and analyze massive amounts of data and turn it into real-time business insights. "HPE’s latest mission critical in-memory computing platform combines the reliability of HPE Integrity Superdome X with the scalable technology for high performance data analytics that HPE gained with its acquisition of SGI."The post HPE brings SGI in-memory Technology to Superdome Flex System appeared first on insideHPC.

Since its early days, the OLCF has consistently delivered supercomputers of unprecedented capability to the scientific community on behalf of DOE—contributing to a rapid evolution in scientific computing that has produced a millionfold increase in computing power. This rise has included the launch of the first teraflop system for open science, the science community’s first petaflop system, and two top-ranked machines on the TOP500 list. The next chapter in the OLCF’s legacy is set to begin with the deployment of Summit, a pre-exascale system capable of more than five times the performance of Titan."The post Video: 25 Years of Supercomputing at Oak Ridge appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Mellanox announced the Innova-2 product family of FPGA-based smart network adapters. Innova-2 is the industry leading programmable adapter designed for a wide range of applications, including security, cloud, Big Data, deep learning, NFV and high performance computing. "Xilinx is pleased that our All Programmable UltraScale FPGAs are accelerating Mellanox’s Innova network adaptors,” said Manish Muthal, vice president of Data Center Business at Xilinx. “Our combined technology enables the rapid deployment of customized acceleration for emerging data center and high performance computing workloads.”The post Mellanox Announces Innova-2 FPGA-Based Programmable Adapters appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Oklahoma State University announced that Advanced Clustering Technologies has been contracted to build and install its newest supercomputer to support a broad range of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. "The new supercomputer, which will be named after the university’s mascot, Pistol Pete, will serve as a campus-wide shared resource, available at no charge to all OSU faculty, staff, postdocs, graduate students and undergraduates, as well as to researchers and educators across Oklahoma."The post Advanced Clustering Technologies to build “Pistol Pete” Supercomputer at Oklahoma State appeared first on insideHPC.

This year at SC17, Intel offers many opportunities to learn about the newest technologies, emerging fields like Artificial Intelligence, and the ways organizations are applying those capabilities for real-world applications."The post Intel at SC17: Showcasing HPC technologies, luminary speakers, and a virtual motorsports experience appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Shared Services Canada (SSC) dedicated a pair of Cray supercomputers in Quebec. The new HPC systems will be used by the Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) to improve the accuracy and timeliness of weather warnings and forecasts. "Accurate and timely weather forecasting helps us protect our homes and businesses in the face of extreme storms and tornadoes, which are getting worse due to climate change. By supporting quality weather forecasts and warnings, the new High Performance Computers will help protect Canadians for years to come."The post Cray Deploys Pair of Supercomputers in Canada for Weather Forecasting appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC teams discusses performance optimization with Carolyn Pasti and Don Avart from Red Line Performance Solutions. The company is partnering with Radio Free HPC on Project Cyclops, an effort to build the world’s fastest single node on the HPCG benchmark. Listen in as Don and Carolyn share their methodology for workload performance optimization and what it takes to make clusters really perform up their potential in the real world.The post Radio Free HPC Talks Optimization with RedLine Performance Solutions appeared first on insideHPC.

For the first time, a team high school of high schoolers will compete in the Student Cluster Competition next week at SC17 in Denver. The team hails from Harrison High School in West Lafayette, Indiana. "In this real-time, non-stop, 48-hour challenge, teams of undergraduate and/or high school students assemble a small cluster on the exhibit floor and race to complete a real-world workload across a series of applications and impress HPC industry judges."The post High School Team to Compete in SC17 Student Cluster Competition appeared first on insideHPC.

Wayne State University is seeking a Senior Systems Software Engineer in our Job of the Week. "This position will utilize a specialized knowledge of Linux/CentOS to assist with installing, configuring, and troubleshooting software, compilers, libraries, build tools, and updating and maintaining respective modules for research applications for WSU affiliated researchers and students. Candidates will also help deploy and manage OpenHPC systems software across the Grid and related systems on campus."The post Job of the Week: Senior Systems Software Engineer at Wayne State University appeared first on insideHPC.

The ARM HPC User Group has posted their Agenda for their SC17 Meetup. The event takes place Monday, Nov. 13 from 1:30 - 6:30pm at the Grand Hyatt in Denver. "Join us for Arm’s third annual HPC User Group session held during SC17 in Denver, CO. Sessions will feature presentations by Arm ecosystem leads, end-users, and ecosystem partners involved in the deployment of Arm servers for HPC."The post Agenda Posted for ARM HPC User Group at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Univa announced the integration of UberCloud parallel application containers with Univa Grid Engine. In May of last year, Univa, a leading innovator of workload management products, announced the availability of Docker software container support with its Grid Engine 8.4.0 product, enabling enterprises to automatically dispatch and run jobs in Docker containers, from a user specified Docker image, on a Univa Grid Engine cluster.The post Univa Grid Engine adds UberCloud Parallel MPI to Docker Containers appeared first on insideHPC.

At SC17 in Denver, volunteers have already started the installation of SCinet, the high-capacity network that supports the revolutionary applications and experiments that are a hallmark of the SC conference. SCinet takes one year to plan, and those efforts culminate in a month-long period of staging, setup and operation of the network during the conference.The post Volunteers Ready High Speed SCinet for SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.