High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

Keren Bergman from Columbia University gave this talk at the 2017 Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing. "Exaflop machines would represent a thousand-fold improvement over the current standard, the petaflop machines that first came on line in 2008. But while exaflop computers already appear on funders' technology roadmaps, making the exaflop leap on the short timescales of those roadmaps constitutes a formidable challenge."The post Video: Silicon Photonics for Extreme Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

The Supercomputing Frontiers Europe 2018 conference has issued its Call for Papers. The conference takes place March 12 – 15, 2018 in Warsaw, Poland. "Supercomputing Frontiers is an annual international conference that provides a platform for thought leaders from both academia and industry to interact and discuss visionary ideas, important visionary trends and substantial innovations in supercomputing. Organized by ICM UW, Supercomputing Frontiers Europe 2018 will explore visionary trends and innovations in high performance computing."The post Call for Papers: Supercomputing Frontiers Europe 2018 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the HPC User Forum in Milwaukee, Brian Kucic from R-Systems describes how the company enables companies of all sizes to move their technical computing workloads to the Cloud. "R Systems provides High Performance Computer Cluster resources and technical expertise to commercial and institutional research clients through the R Systems brand and the Dell HPC Cloud Services Partnership. In addition to our industry standard solutions, R Systems Engineers assist clients in selecting the components of their optimal cluster configuration."The post Video: How R-Systems Helps Customers Move HPC to the Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

This week’s landmark discovery of gravitational and light waves generated by the collision of two neutron stars eons ago was made possible by a signal verification and analysis performed by Comet, an advanced supercomputer based at SDSC in San Diego. "LIGO researchers have so far consumed more than 2 million hours of computational time on Comet through OSG – including about 630,000 hours each to help verify LIGO’s findings in 2015 and the current neutron star collision – using Comet’s Virtual Clusters for rapid, user-friendly analysis of extreme volumes of data, according to Würthwein."The post Comet Supercomputer Assists in Latest LIGO Discovery appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the SC17 HPC Connects series, Dimitris Menemenlis from NASA JPL/Caltech describes how supercomputing enables scientists to accurately map global ocean currents. The ocean is vast and there are still a lot of unknowns. We still can’t represent all the conditions and are pushing the boundaries of current supercomputer power,” said Menemenlis. “This is an exciting time to be an oceanographer who can use satellite observations and numerical simulations to push our understanding of ocean circulation forward.”The post HPC Connects: Mapping Global Ocean Currents appeared first on insideHPC.

"Intel has been at the forefront of working with software partners to develop solutions for visualization of data that will scale in the future as many core systems such as the Intel Xeon Phi processor scale. The Intel Xeon Phi processor is extremely capable of producing visualizations that allow scientists and engineers to interactively view massive amounts of data."The post Visualization in Software using Intel Xeon Phi processors appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre announced plans to allocate 475 million core hours of its supercomputer MareNostrum to 17 research projects as part of the PRACE initiative. Of all the nations participating in PRACE's recent Call for Proposals, Spain is now the leading contributor of compute hours to European research.The post MareNostrum Supercomputer to contribute 475 million core hours to European Research appeared first on insideHPC.

Phil Carns from Argonne gave this talk at the 2017 Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing. "Darshan is a scalable HPC I/O characterization tool. It captures an accurate but concise picture of application I/O behavior with minimum overhead. Darshan was originally developed on the IBM Blue Gene series of computers deployed at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, but it is portable across a wide variety of platforms include the Cray XE6, Cray XC30, and Linux clusters. Darshan routinely instruments jobs using up to 786,432 compute cores on the Mira system at ALCF."The post HPC I/O for Computational Scientists appeared first on insideHPC.

A cumulative effort over several years to scale the training of deep-learning neural networks has resulted in the first demonstration of petascale deep-learning training performance, and further to deliver this performance when solving real science problems. The result reflects the combined efforts of NERSC (National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center), Stanford and Intel to solve real world use cases rather than simply report on performance benchmarks.The post 1000x Faster Deep-Learning at Petascale Using Intel Xeon Phi Processors appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Jeremy Thomas from Lawrence Livermore National Lab writes that exascale computing will be a vital boost to the U.S. manufacturing industry. “This is much bigger than any one company or any one industry. If you consider any industry, exascale is truly going to have a sizeable impact, and if a country like ours is going to be a leader in industrial design, engineering and manufacturing, we need exascale to keep the innovation edge.”The post How Manufacturing will Leap Forward with Exascale Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

Intel's Naveen Rao writes that Intel will soon be shipping the world’s first family of processors designed from the ground up for artificial intelligence. As announced today, the new chip will be the company's first step towards it goal of achieving 100 times greater AI performance by 2020. "The goal of this new architecture is to provide the needed flexibility to support all deep learning primitives while making core hardware components as efficient as possible."The post Podcast: Intel to Ship Neural Network Processor by end of year appeared first on insideHPC.

The Science DMZ architecture developed for moving large data sets quick and securely could be adapted to meet the needs of the medical research community. "Like other sciences, medical research is generating increasingly large datasets as doctors track health trends, the spread of diseases, genetic causes of illness and the like. Effectively using this data for efforts ranging from stopping the spread of deadly viruses to creating precision medicine treatments for individuals will be greatly accelerated by the secure sharing of the data, while also protecting individual privacy."The post ESnet’s Science DMZ Could Help Transfer and Protect Medical Research Data appeared first on insideHPC.

The PEARC18 Conference has issued its Call for Contributions. The conference takes place June 22-27 in Pittsburgh. "The Practice & Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC) annual conference series fosters the creation of a dynamic and connected community of advanced research computing professionals who advance leading practices at the frontiers of research, scholarship and teaching, and industry application."The post Call for Contributions: PEARC18 in Pittsburgh appeared first on insideHPC.

Today ACM and IEEE Computer Society named Jesús Labarta of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center as the recipient of the 2017 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award. Labarta is recognized for his seminal contributions to programming models and performance analysis tools for high performance computing. The award will be presented at SC17.The post Jesús Labarta from BSC to receive Ken Kennedy Award appeared first on insideHPC.

Michael Garris from NIST gave this talk at the HPC User Forum. "AI must be developed in a trustworthy manner to ensure reliability and safety. NIST cultivates trust in AI technology by developing and deploying standards, tests and metrics that make technology more secure, usable, interoperable and reliable, and by strengthening measurement science. This work is critically relevant to building the public trust of rapidly evolving AI technologies."The post Video: The AI Initiative at NIST appeared first on insideHPC.

OpenSFS today announced the first Long Term Support (LTS) maintenance release of Lustre 2.10.1. "This latest advance, in effect, fulfills a commitment made by Intel last April to align its efforts and support around the community release, including efforts to design and release a maintenance version. This transition enables growth in the adoption and rate of innovation for Lustre."The post OpenSFS Announces Maintenance Release 2.10.1 for Lustre appeared first on insideHPC.

More than 200 researchers at the University of Pisa use high performance computing (HPC) systems in their quantum chemistry, nanophysics, genome sequencing, engineering simulations and areas such as big data analysis. The University's IT Center has moved to a pre-integrated HPC software stack designed to simplify software installation and maintenance. This sponsored post from Intel shows how a pre-integrated, validated and supported HPC software stack allows the University of Pisa to focus on research.The post HPC Software Stacks: Making High Performance Computing More Accessible appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, Peter Nugent from Berkeley Lab explains how scientists confirmed the first-ever measurement of the merger of two neutron stars and its explosive aftermath. "Simulations succeeded in modeling what would happen in an incredibly complex phenomenon like a neutron star merger. Without the models, we all probably all would have been mystified by exactly what we were seeing in the sky.”The post Video: Supercomputing Models Enable Detection of a Cosmic Cataclysm appeared first on insideHPC.

Intel field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are now powering the Acceleration-as-a-Service of Alibaba Cloud. "Intel FPGAs offer us a more cost-effective way to accelerate cloud-based application performance for our customers who are running business applications and demanding data and scientific workloads,” said Jin Li, vice president of Alibaba Cloud. “Another key value of FPGAs is that they provide high performance at low power, and the flexibility for managing diverse computing workloads.”The post Intel FPGAs Power Acceleration-as-a-Service for Alibaba Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

ISC 2018 has issued their Call for Tutorials and Workshops. The conference takes place June 24-28 in Frankfurt, Germany. "If you possess knowledge and skills in a particular field in high performance computing, and enjoy sharing them, the ISC 2018 Tutorials Committee looks forward to hearing from you. Along the same lines, the ISC 2018 Workshops Committee also calls on the HPC community members to send in their proposals for workshops."The post ISC 2018 Issues Call For Tutorials and Workshops appeared first on insideHPC.

Tomorrow's exascale supercomputers will enable researchers to accurately simulate the ground motions of regional earthquakes quickly and in unprecedented detail. "Simulations of high frequency earthquakes are more computationally demanding and will require exascale computers," said David McCallen, who leads the ECP-supported effort. "Ultimately, we’d like to get to a much larger domain, higher frequency resolution and speed up our simulation time."The post Supercomputing Earthquakes in the Age of Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at Henry Newman’s recent proposal to use Blockchain as a way to combat Fake News. Henry shares that this rant result from what he saw as an egregious story that was going around that could have been easily quashed.The post Radio Free HPC Looks at how How Blockchain Could Prevent Fake News appeared first on insideHPC.

While most of the fundamental HPC system software building blocks are now open source, dealing with the sheer number of components and their inherently complex interdependencies has created a barrier to adoption of HPC for many organizations. This is the first article in a four-part series that explores using Intel HPC Orchestrator to solve HPC software stack management challenges.The post Simplifying HPC Software Stack Management appeared first on insideHPC.

Rupak Biswas from NASA gave this talk at the Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing. "High performance computing is now integral to NASA’s portfolio of missions to pioneer the future of space exploration, accelerate scientific discovery, and enable aeronautics research. Anchored by the Pleiades supercomputer at NASA Ames Research Center, the High End Computing Capability (HECC) Project provides a fully integrated environment to satisfy NASA’s diverse modeling, simulation, and analysis needs."The post Video: NASA Advanced Computing Environment for Science & Engineering appeared first on insideHPC.

NREL in Golden, Colorado is seeking a Scientific Computing Senior Engineer in our Job of the Week. "We have an immediate opening for a Systems Engineer (Job Req #R2314). This senior position is responsible for implementing and operating CSC systems and infrastructure in support of Science and Technical computing in support of NREL’s mission."The post Job of the Week: Scientific Computing Senior Engineer at NREL in Colorado appeared first on insideHPC.

As nuclear physicists delve ever deeper into the heart of matter, they require the tools to reveal the next layer of nature's secrets. Nowhere is that more true than in computational nuclear physics. A new research effort led by theorists at DOE's Jefferson Lab is now preparing for the next big leap forward in their studies thanks to funding under the 2017 SciDAC Awards for Computational Nuclear Physics.The post SciDAC funding to Move Quantum Chromodynamics forward at Jefferson Lab appeared first on insideHPC.

John Gustafson from A*STAR will host a BoF on Posit arithmetic at SC17. Entitled, "Improving Numerical Computation with Practical Tools and Novel Computer Arithmetic," this BOF will be co-hosted by Mike Lam with discussions on tools for measuring floating point accuracy. "This approach obtains more accurate answers than floating-point arithmetic yet uses fewer bits in many cases, saving memory, bandwidth, energy, and power."The post John Gustafson to host BoF on Posit Arithmetic at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

A team at Berkeley Lab are using innovative computational methods to enable new X-ray science. "The creation of XFEL facilities, including the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) and the European X-FEL, have created opportunities for conducting new experiments which can overcome the limitations of traditional crystallography."The post Supercomputing Virus Structures at Nanoscale with XFEL appeared first on insideHPC.

The PASC18 Organizing Team has posted their Call for Submissions. Proposals are now being accepted for minisymposium, papers, and posters. The conference takes place July 2-4 in Basel, Switzerland (the week after ISC 2018 in Frankfurt). We look forward to receiving your submissions through the online submission portal. Please note that the November 26th deadline for […]The post Call for Submissions: PASC18 in Basel appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Jesús Labarta from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center describes the POP (Performance Optimization and Productivity) Centre of Excellence led by BSC. According to Labarta, POP’s performance analysis results in performance improvements ranging from 10-15% to more than 10 times. Best of all, the POP services are free of charge to organizations / SMEs / ISVs / companies in the EU!The post How the POP Performance Optimization Centre at BSC is Speeding up HPC in Europe appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC17, Katrin Amunts from Jülich highlights how the massive European-based Human Brain Project (HBP), comprising a veritable orchestra of scientists, collaborates to deliver the most exquisitely detailed human brain models ever created. "We have to create an ‘atlas’ (of the brain) that has a very large size in terms and bits and bytes,” Amunts said.The post HPC Connects: How Supercomputers Are Unraveling the Mystery of the Human Brain appeared first on insideHPC.

The Intel HPC Developer conference at SC17 has posted its Session Agenda. The conference takes place Nov. 11-12 in Denver. "The Intel HPC Developer Conference is the premier technical training event to meet and hear from Intel architecture experts and connect with HPC industry leaders. Join in to learn what's next in HPC, attend technical sessions, hands-on tutorials, and poster chats that cover parallel programming, high productivity languages, artificial intelligence, systems, enterprise, visualization development and much more."The post Agenda Posted for Intel HPC Developer Conference at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

The recent Tapia Conference on Diversity in Computing in Atlanta brought together some 1,200 undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, researchers and professionals in computing from diverse backgrounds and ethnicities to learn from leading thinkers, present innovative ideas and network with peers.The post NERSC lends a hand to 2017 Tapia Conference on Diversity in Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

A new peer-reviewed paper is reportedly causing a stir in the climatology community. "The best hope for reducing long-standing global climate model biases, is through increasing the resolution to the kilometer scale. Here we present results from an ultra-high resolution non-hydrostatic climate model for a near-global setup running on the full Piz Daint supercomputer on 4888 GPUs."The post GPUs Power Near-global Climate Simulation at 1 km Resolution appeared first on insideHPC.

"The European Extreme Data & Computing Initiative (EXDCI) objective is to support the development and implementation of a common strategy for the European HPC Ecosystem. One of the main goals of the meeting in Bologna was to set up a roadmap for future developments, and for other parties who would like to participate in HPC research."The post Introducing the European EXDCI initiative for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Intel® Cluster Checker, distributed as part of Intel® Parallel Studio XE 2018 Cluster Edition, provides a set of system diagnostics and analysis methods in a single tool to assist managing clusters of any size. "Think of Intel Cluster Checker as a clinical system that detects signs that issues affecting the health of the cluster exist, diagnoses those issues, and suggests remedies. Using common diagnostic tools signs that may indicate symptoms leading to a diagnosis and a possible solution."The post Diagnose Cluster Health with Intel® Cluster Checker appeared first on insideHPC.

"LTO-8 tape technology doubles the capacity of LTO-7 to an astonishing 30 TB compressed (12TB native) per cartridge, and improves performance by 20 percent, up to 360Mbps. The additional capacity equates to fewer tape cartridges required to store the same amount of data while the performance boost translates into the need for fewer tape drives to do the same amount of work. In addition, the new LTO-8 drives are backward compatible with LTO-7 tape media, allowing users to read/write any LTO-7 media."The post Spectra Logic Launches LTO-8 Pre-Purchase Program appeared first on insideHPC.

Jason Knight from Intel writes that the company has joined Microsoft, Facebook, and others to participate in the Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) project. "By joining the project, we plan to further expand the choices developers have on top of frameworks powered by the Intel Nervana Graph library and deployment through our Deep Learning Deployment Toolkit. Developers should have the freedom to choose the best software and hardware to build their artificial intelligence model and not be locked into one solution based on a framework. Deep learning is better when developers can move models from framework to framework and use the best hardware platform for the job."The post Intel Joins Open Neural Network Exchange appeared first on insideHPC.

Today, Intel announced the delivery of a 17-qubit superconducting test chip for quantum computing to QuTech, Intel’s quantum research partner in the Netherlands. The new chip was fabricated by Intel and features a unique design to achieve improved yield and performance. "Our quantum research has progressed to the point where our partner QuTech is simulating quantum algorithm workloads, and Intel is fabricating new qubit test chips on a regular basis in our leading-edge manufacturing facilities."The post Intel Delivers 17-Qubit Superconducting Chip with Advanced Packaging to QuTech appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from HPE, researchers describe how Exascale will advance science and improve the quality of life for all. "Why is the U.S. government throwing down this gauntlet? Many countries are engaged in what has been referred to as a race to exascale. But getting there isn’t just for national bragging rights. Getting to exascale means reaching a new frontier for humanity, and the opportunity to potentially solve humanity’s most pressing problems."The post Exascale: The Movie appeared first on insideHPC.

Ruud van der Pas from Oracle has co-authored a new book on OpenMP. It covers the OpenMP 4.5 specifications, with a focus on the practical usage of the language features and constructs. "We start where the specifications end and explain the rationale behind the features. In particular the functionality and how a feature may be used in an application."The post New Book: Using OpenMP – The Next Step appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, future HPC professionals discuss their participation in the ISC Student Cluster Competition. "Now in its seventh year, the Student Cluster Competition enables international teams to take part in a real-time contest focused on advancing STEM disciplines and HPC skills development. To take home top honors, the teams will have to showcase systems of their own design, adhering to strict power constraints and achieve the highest performance across a series of standard HPC benchmarks and applications."The post Video: Why your school should enter the ISC Student Cluster Competition appeared first on insideHPC.

Today TYAN showcased their latest GPU-optimized platforms that target the high performance computing and artificial intelligence sectors at the GPU Technology Conference in Munich. "TYAN’s new GPU computing platforms are designed to provide efficient parallel computing for the analytics of vast amounts of data. By incorporating NVIDIA's latest Tesla V100 GPU accelerators, TYAN provides our customers with the power to accelerate both high performance and cognitive computing workloads” said Danny Hsu, Vice President of MiTAC Computing Technology Corporation's TYAN Business Unit.The post NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs Power New TYAN Server appeared first on insideHPC.

Ed Seidel from the University of Illinois gave this talk at the 2017 Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing. The theme of his talk centers around the need for interdisciplinary research. "Interdisciplinary research (IDR) is a mode of research by teams or individuals that integrates information, data, techniques, tools, perspectives, concepts, and/or theories from two or more disciplines or bodies of specialized knowledge to advance fundamental understanding or to solve problems whose solutions are beyond the scope of a single discipline or area of research practice."The post Video: Revolution in Computer and Data-enabled Science and Engineering appeared first on insideHPC.

At GTC Europe this week, One Stop Systems (OSS) will exhibit two of the most powerful GPU accelerators for data scientists and deep learning researchers, the CA16010 and SCA8000. NVIDIA GPU computing is helping researchers and engineers take on some the world's hardest challenges,” said Paresh Kharya, group product marketing manager of Accelerated Computing at NVIDIA. “One Stop Systems' customers can now tap into the power of our Volta architecture to accelerate their deep learning and high performance computing workloads.”The post OSS Showcases New HDCA Platforms with Volta GPUs at GTC Europe appeared first on insideHPC.

Google Compute Engine now offers new VMs with the most Skylake vCPUs of any cloud provider. "Skylake in turn provides up to 20% faster compute performance, 82% faster HPC performance, and almost 2X the memory bandwidth compared with the previous generation Xeon. Need even more compute power or memory? We’re also working on a range of new, even larger VMs, with up to 4TB of memory."The post Google Compute Engine offers VMs with 96 Skylake CPUs and 624GB of Memory appeared first on insideHPC.

In the pharmaceutical industry, drug discovery is a long and expensive process. This sponsored post from Nvidia explores how the University of Florida and University of North Carolina developed an anakin-me neural network engine to produce computationally fast quantum mechanical simulations with high accuracy at a very low cost to speed drug discovery and exploration.The post Accelerating Quantum Chemistry for Drug Discovery appeared first on insideHPC.

"Intel OPA, part of Intel Scalable System Framework, is a high-performance fabric enabling the responsiveness, throughput, and scalability required by today's and tomorrow's most-demanding high performance computing workloads. In this interview, Misage talks about market uptake in Intel OPA's first year of availability, reports on some of the first HPC deployments using the Intel Xeon Scalable platform and Intel OPA, and gives a sneak peek of what Intel OPA will be talking about at SC17."The post Podcast: Intel Omni-Path adds Performance and Scalalability appeared first on insideHPC.

Over at ALCF, Andrea Manning writes that the recent Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing brought together HPC practitioners from around the world. "You can’t get this material out of a textbook,” said Eric Nielsen, a research scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center. Added Johann Dahm of IBM Research, “I haven’t had this material presented to me in this sort of way ever.”The post Future HPC Leaders Gather at Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the European PRACE initiative announced that 46 Awards from their recent 15th Call for Proposals total up to nearly 1.7 thousand million core hours. The 46 awarded projects are led by principal investigators from 12 different European countries. "Of local interest this time around, the awarded projects involve co-investigators from the USA (7) and Russia (2). All information and the abstracts of the projects awarded under the 15th PRACE Call for Proposals are now available online."The post PRACE Awards 1.7 Thousand Million Core Hours for Research Projects in Europe appeared first on insideHPC.