Inside HPC & AI News | High-Performance Computing & Artificial Intelligence

In this video from the 2018 Rice Oil & Gas Conference, Doug Kothe from ORNL provides an update on the Exascale Computing Project. "The quest to develop a capable exascale ecosystem is a monumental effort that requires the collaboration of government, academia, and industry. Achieving exascale will have profound effects on the American people and the world—improving the nation’s economic competitiveness, advancing scientific discovery, and strengthening our national security."The post The U.S. Exascale Computing Project: Status and Plans appeared first on insideHPC.

Over at the Lenovo Blog, Dr. Bhushan Desam writes that the company just updated its LiCO tools to accelerate AI deployment and development for Enterprise and HPC implementations. "LiCO simplifies resource management and makes launching AI training jobs in clusters easy. LiCO currently supports multiple AI frameworks, including TensorFlow, Caffe, Intel Caffe, and MXNet. Additionally, multiple versions of those AI frameworks can easily be maintained and managed using Singularity containers. This consequently provides agility for IT managers to support development efforts for multiple users and applications simultaneously."The post Lenovo Updates LiCO Tools to Accelerate AI Deployment appeared first on insideHPC.

Today GIGABYTE Technology announced the availability of ThunderXStation: the industry’s first 64-bit Armv8 workstation platform based on Cavium’s flagship ThunderX2 processor. “ThunderXStation is an ideal platform for Arm software developers across networking, embedded, mobile, and IoT verticals. We are delighted to be working closely with GIGABYTE on this, and we look forward to supporting them on a number of innovative new platforms.”The post New Arm-based Workstation Opens the Doors for HPC Developers appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Penguin Computing announced that Director of Advanced Solutions, Kevin Tubbs, Ph.D., will be speaking at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) on best practices in artificial intelligence. "On the second day of the conference, Tubbs will lead the “Best Practices in Designing and Deploying End-to-End HPC and AI Solutions” session. The focus of the session will be challenges faced by organizations looking to build AI systems and the design principles and technologies that have proven successful in Penguin Computing AI deployments for customers in the Top 500."The post Penguin Computing to share AI Best Practices at GPU Technology Conference appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced new offerings to help customers ramp up, optimize and scale artificial intelligence usage across business functions to drive outcomes such as better demand forecasting, improved operational efficiency and increased sales. “HPE is best positioned to help customers make AI work for their enterprise, regardless of where they are in their AI adoption. While others provide AI components, we provide complete AI solutions from strategic advisory to purpose-built technology, operational support and a strong AI partner ecosystem to tailor the right AI solution for each organization.”The post HPE Launches Vertical AI Solutions appeared first on insideHPC.

Talia Gershon from the Thomas J. Watson Research Center gave this talk at the 2018 IBM Think conference. "There is a whole class of problems that are too difficult for even the largest and most powerful computers that exist today to solve. These exponential challenges include everything from simulating the complex interactions of atoms and molecules to optimizing supply chains. But quantum computers could enable us to solve these problems, unleashing untold opportunities for business."The post Video: IBM Quantum Computing will be “Mainstream in Five Years” appeared first on insideHPC.

Visualizing the results of a simulation can give new insight into complex scientific problems. Interactive viewing of entire datasets can lead to earlier understanding of the challenge at hand and can enhance the understanding of complex phenomena. With the release of the of HPC Visualization Containers with the NVIDIA CPU Cloud, it has become much easier to get a visualization system up and production ready much quicker than ever before.The post NVIDIA Makes Visualization Easier in the Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

"IBM's goal is to make it easier for you to build your deep learning models. Deep Learning as a Service has unique features, such as Neural Network Modeler, to lower the barrier to entry for all users, not just a few experts. The enhancements live within Watson Studio, our cloud-native, end-to-end environment for data scientists, developers, business analysts and SMEs to build and train AI models that work with structured, semi-structured and unstructured data — while maintaining an organization’s existing policy/access rules around the data."The post IBM Launches Deep Learning as a Service appeared first on insideHPC.

Mariam Kiran is using an early-career research award from DOE’s Office of Science to develop methods combining machine-learning algorithms with parallel computing to optimize such networks. "This type of science and the problems it can address can make a real impact, Kiran says. “That’s what excites me about research – that we can improve or provide solutions to real-world problems.”The post Overcoming Roadblocks in Computational Networks appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, researchers from IBM Research in Zurich describe how the new IBM Snap Machine Learning (Snap ML) software was able to achieve record performance running TesorFlow. "This training time is 46x faster than the best result that has been previously reported, which used TensorFlow on Google Cloud Platform to train the same model in 70 minutes."The post Video: IBM Sets Record TensorFlow Performance with new Snap ML Software appeared first on insideHPC.

Ahmed Hashmi from BP gave this talk at the Rice Oil & Gas conference. “The Oil and Gas High Performances Computing Conference, hosted annually at Rice University, is the premier meeting place for networking and discussion focused on computing and information technology challenges and needs in the oil and gas industry. High-end computing and information technology continues to stand out across the industry as a critical business enabler and differentiator with a relatively well understood return on investment. However, challenges such as constantly changing technology landscape, increasing focus on software and software innovation, and escalating concerns around workforce development still remain.”The post Video: High Power Algorithms, High Performance Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Univa announced a new global partnership and reseller agreement with UberCloud. Under terms of the agreement, UberCloud, a leading HPC cloud provider, will resell Univa Grid Engine and related Univa products to UberCloud's growing community of HPC customers. "By deploying packaged HPC applications in containers, and managing them with Univa Grid Engine, users become productive immediately. They can focus on their work rather than spending time troubleshooting complicated HPC software stacks."The post Univa partners with UberCloud appeared first on insideHPC.

“Optalysys has for the first time ever, applied optical processing to the highly complex and computationally demanding area of CNNs with initial accuracy rates of over 70%. Through our uniquely scalable and highly efficient optical approach, we are developing models that will offer whole new levels of capability, not only cloud-based but also opening up the extraordinary potential of CNNs to mobile systems.”The post Optalysys Speeds Deep Learning with Optical Processing appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the 2018 Rice Oil & Gas Conference, Addison Snell from Intersect360 Research leads a panel discussion on Exascale computing. "High-end computing and information technology continues to stand out across the industry as a critical business enabler and differentiator with a relatively well understood return on investment. However, challenges such as constantly changing technology landscape, increasing focus on software and software innovation, and escalating concerns around workforce development still remain."The post Panel Discussion: Delivering Exascale Computing for the Oil and Gas Industry appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Nimbus Data announced the ExaDrive DC100, the largest capacity (100 terabytes) solid state drive (SSD) ever produced. Featuring more than 3x the capacity of the closest competitor, the ExaDrive DC100 also draws 85% less power. “The ExaDrive DC100 meets these challenges for both data center and edge applications, offering unmatched capacity in an ultra-low power design.”The post Nimbus Data launches 100 Terabyte SSD appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team goes off the supercomputing rails a bit with a discussion on digital immortality. "A new company called Nectome will reportedly archive your mind for future uploading to a machine. While the price of $10K seems reasonable enough, they do have to kill you to complete the process."The post Radio Free HPC Looks at Immortality through Nectome’s Mind Archival appeared first on insideHPC.

The world of today’s HPC computing is driven by the ever-increasing generation and consumption of digital information. And the ability to analyze this rapidly growing pool of data, and extrapolate meaningful insights, gives modern businesses a competitive edge. Download the full report, “Introducing 200G HDR InfiniBand Solutions,” to learn about how Mellanox Technologies end-to-end 200G HDR InfiniBand solution is helping enable the next generation of data centers.The post What a 200G HDR InfiniBand Solution Means for Today’s Advanced Data Centers appeared first on insideHPC.

Today MathWorks rolled out Release 2018a with a range of new capabilities in MATLAB and Simulink. "R2018a includes two new products, Predictive Maintenance Toolbox for designing and testing condition monitoring and predictive maintenance algorithms, and Vehicle Dynamics Blockset for modeling and simulating vehicle dynamics in a virtual 3D environment. In addition to new features in MATLAB and Simulink, and the new products, this release also includes updates and bug fixes to 94 other products."The post MATLAB adds new capabilities with Release R2018a appeared first on insideHPC.

Wonchan Lee, Todd Warszawski, and Karthik Murthy gave this talk at the Stanford HPC Conference. "Legion is an exascale-ready parallel programming model that simplifies the mapping of a complex, large-scale simulation code on a modern heterogeneous supercomputer. Legion relieves scientists and engineers of several burdens: they no longer need to determine which tasks depend on other tasks, specify where calculations will occur, or manage the transmission of data to and from the processors. In this talk, we will focus on three aspects of the Legion programming system, namely, dynamic tracing, projection functions, and vectorization."The post Advances in the Legion Programming Model appeared first on insideHPC.

GE in San Ramon, California is seeking a Data Scientist in our Job of the Week. "We are looking for a Data Scientist to work in Deep Learning(DL) to assist and build deep learning algorithms using imaging and non-imaging data. This individual will work with customer clinical data scientists and interface with internal GE software and data science teams to deliver high quality software in a fast paced, challenging, and creative environment."The post Job of the Week: Staff Data Scientist at GE appeared first on insideHPC.

In this Let's Talk Exascale podcast, Tapasya Patki of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory dicusses ECP’s Power Steering Project. "Efficiently utilizing procured power and optimizing the performance of scientific applications at exascale under power and energy constraints are challenging for several reasons. These include the dynamic behavior of applications, processor manufacturing variability, and increasing heterogeneity of node-level components."The post Podcast: Power and Peformance Optimization at Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.

The good folks at GlobusWorld 2018 have posted their speaker agenda. The meeting takes place April 25-26 in Chicago. "Our theme for 2018 is Connecting your Research Universe. When it's easy for researchers to move and share data across any location (e.g. campus clusters, XSEDE systems, lab servers, scientific instruments, archival storage, commercial clouds), they can collaborate more successfully and get to results faster. Globus now makes this possible, with connectivity to virtually any storage location via a single, easy to use interface. It has never been simpler to connect the universe of research data to the researchers who need it."The post Agenda Posted for GlobusWorld 2018 in Chicago appeared first on insideHPC.

Michael Bauer from Sylabs gave this talk at FOSDEM'17. "This presentation will provide an in-depth look at how Singularity is able to securely run user containers on HPC systems. After a brief introduction to Singularity and its relationship to other container solutions, the details of Singularity's runtime will be explored. The way that Singularity leverages Linux features such as namespaces, bind mounts, and SUID binaries will be discussed in further detail as well."The post Singularity: The Inner Workings of Securely Running User Containers on HPC Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

In anticipation of forthcoming product announcements, Asetek today announced an ongoing collaboration with Intel to provide hot water liquid cooling for servers and datacenters. This collaboration, which includes Asetek’s ServerLSL and RackCDU D2C technologies, is focused on the liquid cooling of density-optimized Intel Compute Modules supporting high-performance Intel Xeon Scalable processors.The post Asetek Announces Ongoing Collaboration with Intel on Liquid Cooling for Servers and Datacenters appeared first on insideHPC.

Bill Magro of Intel Corporation will kick off the OpenFabrics Workshop with a keynote speech, “Software Foundation for High-Performance Fabrics in the Cloud.” The event takes place April 9-13 in Boulder, Colorado. "This talk will highlight the broadening role of OpenFabrics, in general, and the Open Fabrics Interface, in particular, to rise to the challenge of meeting the emerging requirements and become the software foundation for high-performance cloud fabrics."The post Bill Magro from Intel to Keynote OpenFabrics Workshop appeared first on insideHPC.

Today NVIDIA announced the availability of PGI 2018. "PGI is the default compiler on many of the world’s fastest computers including the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. PGI production-quality compilers are for scientists and engineers using computing systems ranging from workstations to the fastest GPU-powered supercomputers."The post NVIDIA Releases PGI 2018 Compilers and Tools appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Univa announced the contribution of its Navops Launch product to the open source community as Project Tortuga under an Apache 2.0 license. The free and open code is designed to help proliferate the transition of enterprise HPC workloads to the cloud. "Having access to more software that applies to a broad set of applications like high performance computing is key to making the transition to the cloud successful," said William Fellows, Co-Founder and VP of Research, 451 Research. "Univa's contribution of Navops Launch to the open source community will help with this process, and hopefully be an opportunity for cloud providers to contribute and use Tortuga as the on-ramp for HPC workloads."The post Univa Open Sources Project Tortuga for moving HPC Workloads to the Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

In the past, it was necessary to understand a complex programming language such as Verilog or VHDL, that was designed for a specific FPGA. "Using a familiar language such as OpenCL, developers can become more productive, sooner when deciding to use an FPGA for a specific purpose. OpenCL is portable and is designed to be used with almost any type of accelerator."The post FPGA Programming Made Easy appeared first on insideHPC.

William Hurley from Strangeworks gave this talk at SXSW 2018. "Quantum computing isn’t just a possibility, it’s an inevitable next step. During his Keynote, whurley discusses how it will forever change the computing landscape and potentially the balance of international power. Countries around the world are investing billions to become the first quantum superpower. When we say an emerging technology represents a “paradigm shift,” it’s often hyperbole. In the case of quantum computing, it’s an understatement."The post Whurley Keynotes SXSW: The Endless Impossibilities of Quantum Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Cray announced that the National Institutes for Quantum and Radiological Science and Technology (QST) selected a Cray XC50 supercomputer to be its new flagship supercomputing system. "The new system is expected to deliver peak performance of over 4 petaflops, an increase of more than 2 times the system it is replacing.The speed and integrated software environment of the Cray XC50 will enhance QST’s infrastructure and allow researchers to speed time to discovery.”The post Cray to Build 4 Petaflop Supercomputer for Fusion Research at QST in Japan appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the UC San Diego Center for Microbiome Innovation (CMI) announced that Panasas has joined CMI’s Corporate Member Board and has donated a 500TB Panasas ActiveStor high-performance storage solution to support the acceleration of microbiome research. ActiveStor drives productivity and accelerates time to results with ultrafast streaming performance, true linear scalability, enterprise-grade reliability and unparalleled ease of management. "We are grateful for the support of Panasas,” said Center Faculty Director Rob Knight. “The advanced ActiveStor data storage solution we now have at our disposal will greatly enhance the activities of the Center.”The post Panasas Donates 500 TB ActiveStore Solution to CMI Center for Microbiome Innovation appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, European officials and research scientists discuss why high performance computing is a vital component of the technologies that touch our daily lives. "I'm very pleased to see that Europe has realized that high performance computing is a cornerstone to science," said Ben Bennet from HPE. "The days of hypothesis, conjecture, experiment are long gone, as there are things you can't experiment with."The post Video: Europe’s Future in HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

The INFOCOMP 2018 Conference in Barcelona has issued its Call for Papers. The event takes place July 22-26 in Barcelona, Spain. "INFOCOMP 2018 continues a series of events dedicated to advanced communications and computing aspects, covering academic and industrial achievements and visions."The post Call for Papers: INFOCOMP 2018 in Barcelona appeared first on insideHPC.

Josh Romero from NVIDIA gave this talk at the Stanford HPC Conference. "In this session, we intend to provide guidance and techniques for porting scientific research codes to NVIDIA GPUs using CUDA Fortran. The GPU porting effort of an incompressible fluid dynamics solver using the immersed boundary method will be described. Several examples from this program will be used to illustrate available features in CUDA Fortran, from simple directive-based programming using CUF kernels to lower level programming using CUDA kernels."The post Porting Scientific Research Codes to GPUs with CUDA Fortran appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Ethernet Alliance announced its new 2018 Ethernet Roadmap. The roadmap traces Ethernet’s path from 10 Mb/s through present-day speeds of 1 to 400GbE, and looks ahead to future speeds achieving up to 1.6 terabits (TbE) and beyond. The forward-looking map also provides guidance into key underlying technologies, current and future interfaces, and the numerous application spaces where Ethernet plays a fundamental role.The post New 2018 Ethernet Roadmap Looks to Future Speeds of 1.6 Terabits/s appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Georgios Goumas the University of Athens describes how the EuroEXA project is working to develop the exascale computers in Europe. "To accomplish this, the project takes a holistic approach innovating both across the technology and the application/system software pillars. EuroEXA proposes a balanced architecture for compute and data-intensive applications, that builds on top of cost-efficient, modular-integration enabled by novel inter-die links, utilises a novel processing unit and embraces FPGA acceleration for computational, networking and storage operations."The post Video: How EuroEXA is Paving the Way to Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.

Microsoft Azure customers worldwide now gain access to Alces Flight to take advantage of the scalability, reliability and agility of Azure. With Alces Flight, it is possible for researchers to spin up any size of High-Performance Computing cluster in minutes, providing users with a fully-featured HPC environment that includes thousands of open source applications.The post Alces Flight: On Demand HPC now Available in the Azure Marketplace appeared first on insideHPC.

A new European project aims to overcome the energy efficiency challenges of heterogeneous computing architectures by developing a new software stack. "Moore´s Law is slowing down, and as consequence hardware is becoming more heterogeneous. In the LEGaTO project, we will leverage task-based programming models to provide a software ecosystem for Made-in-Europe heterogeneous hardware composed of CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and dataflow engines. Our aim is one order of magnitude energy savings from the edge to the converged cloud/high-performance computing."The post European LEGaTO Project aims to Develop Software for Energy Efficient Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

The 2018 FLOW-3D Americas Users Conference has announced their Call for Abstracts. Featuring customer presentations on validations, benchmarks, and case studies, the event takes place August 7-8 at the Warwick Hotel in Denver, CO. "The call for abstracts is now open. Share your experiences, present your success stories and obtain valuable feedback from your fellow FLOW-3D users and our technical staff. Abstracts should include a title, author and a 200 word description."The post Call for Abstracts: FLOW-3D Users Conference in Denver appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast from from SXSW 2018, Antia Lamas-Linares from TACC moderates a panel discussion on quantum computing. "Imagine a new kind of computer that can quickly solve problems that would stump even the world's most powerful supercomputers. Quantum computers are fundamentally different. They can store information as not only just ones and zeros, but in all the shades of gray in-between. Several companies and government agencies are investing billions of dollars in the field of quantum information. But what will quantum computers be used for?"The post SXSW Podcast: Quantum Computing – Science Fiction to Science Fact appeared first on insideHPC.

Today ISC 2018 announced that Maria Girone from CERN openlab will keynote the conference on Monday, June 25. “I will discuss some of the approaches we are considering to grapple with these enormous data requirements, including deploying resources through using commercial clouds, and employing new techniques, such as alternative computing architectures, advanced data analytics, and deep learning,” explains Girone. “Finally, I will present some medical applications resulting from the research at CERN.”The post Maria Girone from CERN openlab to Keynote ISC 2018 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the big three technologies of the day on the Hype curve. "This week Google unveiled their 72-Qbit Bristlecone Quantum Chip, which they claim has them on the road to Quantum Supremacy. At the same time, quantum seems to be going mainstream, as evidenced by a session this week at SXSW."The post Radio Free HPC looks at the Quest for Quantum Supremacy appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Xilinx announced the FPGA industry’s first demonstration of breakthrough 112G PAM4 electrical signaling technology for optical networks, as well as announcing the addition of 58G PAM4 transceivers to its 16nm Virtex UltraScale+ portfolio. "Xilinx has a long history of driving standards efforts and pushing performance limits in serial interconnect technology, and continues to do so with the industry’s first 112G PAM4 demo as well as with its 58G PAM4 solution, here today for customers to begin designing in with,” said Karl Freund, senior analyst, HPC and machine learning, Moor Insights & Strategy. “Today’s Xilinx announcements represent a significant leap forward for network architects who continue to be challenged to improve bandwidth performance of their optical networks.”The post Xilinx Demonstrates Breakthrough Optical Networking on the road to 7 nm appeared first on insideHPC.

Over at the NVIDIA Blog, Tonie Hansen writes that Princeton researchers are using deep learning to help establish the feasibility of delivering fusion energy in the foreseeable future. "The Princeton team has scaled up the capabilities of its FRNN software using thousands of GPUs to train deep neural networks. After successfully running on 6,000 Tesla K20 GPUs on Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Titan supercomputer, FRNN has recently demonstrated the ability to scale to 3,000 NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs on Japan’s new TSUBAME-3 supercomputer at the Tokyo Institute of Technology."The post Princeton Team using Deep Learning to develop Fusion Energy appeared first on insideHPC.

Hector Cruz from UCLV gave this talk at FOSDEM'17. "To offer supercomputing services to all Cuban institutes of higher education, research centers and industrial partners is the mission set forth by a group of ambitious young system administrators working at various universities of the lush Caribbean island of Cuba. "Thus was born "HPC Cuba" the national center for academic supercomputing. While fully depending on Free Software for their operations, HPC Cuba has also joined the global Free Software community by producing installation packages for software not yet covered by EasyBuild."The post Video: The Birth of HPC Cuba appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Colleen Heinemann, a Ph.D. student with the University of Illinois, describes how visualization makes scientific data more accessible and useful by transforming it into virtual objects you can see, touch and manipulate in 3-D space. "My research interest is in the cross section between High Performance Computing and scientific visualization. I am interested in not only presenting scientific data in an interesting way, but also in how High Performance Computing can be used to optimize the visualization process."The post Transforming Scientific Data into Immersive Visualizations appeared first on insideHPC.

Virginia Tech is seeking a Computer Science Software Scientist in our Job of the Week. "The Molecular Sciences Software Institute (MolSSI) located at Virginia Tech seeks candidates for multiple software scientist positions in the areas of computer science and software engineering. The successful candidates will be actively involved in an interdisciplinary team who will help design and develop software frameworks that will deliver new scientific advances in molecular sciences."The post Job of the Week: Computer Science Software Scientist at Virginia Tech appeared first on insideHPC.

Today PASC18 announced that this year’s Public Lecture will be held by David Bader from Georgia Tech. Dr. Bader will speak on Massive-Scale Analytics Applied to Real-World Problems. "Emerging real-world graph problems include: detecting and preventing disease in human populations; revealing community structure in large social networks; and improving the resilience of the electric power grid. Unlike traditional applications in computational science and engineering, solving these social problems at scale often raises new challenges because of the sparsity and lack of locality in the data, the need for research on scalable algorithms and development of frameworks for solving these real-world problems on high performance computers, and for improved models that capture the noise and bias inherent in the torrential data streams. This talk will discuss the opportunities and challenges in massive data-intensive computing for applications in social sciences, physical sciences, and engineering."The post David Bader from Georgia Tech Joins PASC18 Speaker Lineup appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Aquila announced delivery and installation of the first ever fixed cold plate liquid cooled Aquarius HPC system. Sandia National Laboratories has deployed the system at the NREL in order to fully study the benefits of Aquila’s fixed cold plate warm water cooling technology. "We feel their leadership will help shape the future of HPC and influence the modern data center designer towards adoption of liquid cooling. Our shared vision holds the promise of improving data center energy efficiency by as much as 50%.”The post Video: NREL Evaluates Aquarius Liquid Cooling Technology for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this TACC Podcast, Antia Lamas-Linares of the Texas Advanced Computing Center gives us a preview of her session on Quantum Computing at the SXSW conference. "Imagine a new kind of computer that can quickly solve problems that would stump even the world's most powerful supercomputers. Quantum computers are fundamentally different. They can store information as not only just ones and zeros, but in all the shades of gray in-between. Several companies and government agencies are investing billions of dollars in the field of quantum information. But what will quantum computers be used for?"The post TACC Podcast Previews SXSW Session on Quantum Computing appeared first on insideHPC.