High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

"Lenovo is an interesting company in that they started in China and the founders realized they need to become diverse in culture and every other way. So what we've found is that they've become a multi-cultural company very, very quickly. Now, we've seen studies that show that a high level of diversity in all sorts of different ways gives us better business results. What we find is, without Gender Diversity, we're not reflecting our customers."The post Fostering Diversity in HPC at Lenovo appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Advanced Clustering Technologies announced new systems based on the new Intel Xeon Scalable processors. "Integrating this new breakthrough generation of Intel Xeon processors into our systems means we can provide our customers with a powerful platform that has been designed specifically to deliver advanced HPC capabilities,” said Advanced Clustering Technologies President Kyle Sheumaker. “Researchers and data scientists will be able to unlock data and scientific insights faster than ever before because of the advancements Intel Xeon Scalable processors bring across compute, storage, memory and I/O.”The post Intel Xeon Scalable Processors Power New Servers from Advanced Clustering Technologies appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Peter Maas from Supermicro gives us a tour of the company's exhibit at ISC 2017. "Supermicro offers the industry’s broadest selection of HPC Solutions in the industry, including 1U, 2U, 3U, 4U SuperServers, FatTwin, SuperWorkstations and SuperBlade platforms. Now, the HPC community can build even higher density compute clusters to deliver maximum parallel computing performance per watt, per dollar, and per square foot. Look to Supermicro HPC Servers and Solutions to deliver the performance, scalability and reliability needed to solve the most complex computing challenges of our time."The post Video: Supermicro Showcases HPC Solutions at ISC 2017 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at why the Alan Turing Institute is focusing on Graph Computing with their acquisition of a Cray Urika-GX supercomputer. After that, they cover a series of IT developments that go to Infinity and Beyond.The post Radio Free HPC Looks at Big News in Graph Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

"Shrinking the feature sizes of wires and transistors has been the driver for Moore’s Law for the past 5 decades, but what might lie beyond the end of current lithographic roadmaps and how will it affect computing as we know it? Moore’s Law is an economic theory after all, and any option that can make future computing more capable each new generation (by some measure) could continue Moore’s economic theory well into the future." The goal of this panel session is to communicate the options for extending computing beyond the end of our current silicon lithography roadmaps.The post Panel Discussion: Beyond Moore’s Law appeared first on insideHPC.

In this MacObserver podcast, John Martellaro discusses the evolution of HPC with John Gustafson, Visiting Professor at NUS in Singapore. “Known by many as the father of Gustafson's Law, Dr. John Gustafson is a professor of computer science, now at The National University of Singapore. Listen in as John describes his career arc and offers some great advice for young scientists just getting started.”The post Interview: John Gustafson on the Evolution of Supercomputing appeared first on insideHPC.

Over at ALCF, Joan Koka writes that researchers at the National Cancer Institute are using Argonne supercomputers to advance disease studies by enhancing our understanding of RNA, biological polymers that are fundamentally involved in health and disease. “Getting the real functional structure, which is the 3-D structure, is very difficult to do experimentally, because the RNA polymer is too flexible,” he said. “This is why we rely on computational simulation. Simulations can be used to explore hundreds or thousands of possible conformational states that would eventually lead us to the most likely 3-D structure.”The post Supercomputing RNA Structure at Argonne appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Asetek announced an order from a new European OEM customer to service demand for an HPC (High Performance Computing) installation. "The order is for Asetek’s RackCDU D2C (Direct-to-Chip) liquid cooling solution and is valued at $32,000 USD with delivery scheduled for Q3 2017."The post Asetek Announces Regional OEM HPC installation appeared first on insideHPC.

"We present the open meta data format openPMD for data format agnostic markup of particle-mesh data. Based on a minimal kernel of meta information and enriched with domain-specific extensions, we develop an open ecosystem of interoperable simulations and data processing frameworks from the domains of laser-plasma interaction, X-ray photon sciences, astrophysics up to systems biology. This poster presents our efforts to enable & establish workflows suitable to frictionless transposition between those domains, using highly scalable I/O methods (e.g. ADIOS BP or HDF5), a truly self-describing data markup and peer reviewed participation."The post Open Science with OpenPMD appeared first on insideHPC.

"The Second Annual HPC Systems Professionals Workshop will bring together systems administrators, systems architects, and systems analysts in order to share best practices, discuss cutting­-edge technologies, and advance the state­ of ­the ­practice for HPC systems. Submissions are encouraged that discuss all aspects of HPC systems design, implementation, maintenance, and security."The post Call for Papers: HPC Systems Professionals Workshop appeared first on insideHPC.

“The signature of this collaboration agreement between two of the largest producers of science data on the planet shows that we are really entering a new era of science worldwide”, said Prof. Philip Diamond, SKA Director-General. “Both CERN and SKA are and will be pushing the limits of what is possible technologically, and by working together and with industry, we are ensuring that we are ready to make the most of this upcoming data and computing surge.”The post SKA and CERN Sign Big Data Agreement appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from ISC 2017, Bill Nitzberg from Altair demonstrates how easy it is to launch jobs with PBS Pro. "Altair’s PBS Works workload management suite is used by thousands of organizations worldwide to simplify the administration and use of HPC clusters, clouds and supercomputing environments."The post How PBS Works Makes HPC Easy to Use appeared first on insideHPC.

Today OpenSFS announced that the Lustre 2.10.0 release has been declared GA and is available download. "Thanks to all those who have contributed to the creation of this release. This is the first release of the 2.10.x LTS release stream. A freely available Lustre 2.10.1 should become available in the coming weeks."The post Lustre 2.10.0 Released appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Teradata announced the acquisition of StackIQ, developers of one of the industry’s fastest bare metal software provisioning platforms which has managed the deployment of cloud and analytics software at millions of servers in data centers around the globe. The deal will leverage StackIQ’s expertise in open source software and large cluster provisioning to simplify and automate the deployment of Teradata Everywhere. Offering customers the speed and flexibility to deploy Teradata solutions across hybrid cloud environments, allows them to innovate quickly and build new analytical applications for their business. "Teradata prides itself on building and investing in solutions that make life easier for our customers,” said Oliver Ratzesberger, Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer for Teradata. “Only the best, most innovative and applicable technology is added to our ecosystem, and StackIQ delivers with products that excel in their field. Adding StackIQ technology to IntelliFlex, IntelliBase and IntelliCloud will strengthen our capabilities and enable Teradata to redefine how systems are deployed and managed globally.”The post Teradata Acquires StackIQ appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from ISC 2017, Lara Kisielewska moderates a panel discussion on Diversity in HPC. "Through collaboration and networking, the Women in HPC community strives to bring together women in HPC and technical computing while encouraging women to engage in outreach activities and improve the visibility of inspirational role models."The post Panel Looks at Improving Diversity in HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Today WekaIO, a venture backed high-performance cloud storage software company, today emerged from stealth to introduce the industry's first cloud-native scalable file system that delivers unprecedented performance to applications, scaling to Exabytes of data in a single namespace. Headquartered in San Jose, CA, WekaIO has developed the first software platform that harnesses flash technology to create a high-performance parallel scale out file storage solution for both on-premises servers and public clouds.

"There are large efforts towards refining the horizontal resolution of climate models to O(1 km) with the intent to represent convective clouds explicitly rather than using semi-empirical parameterizations. This refinement would move the governing equations closer to first principles and is expected to reduce the uncertainties of climate models. However, the output volume of climate simulations would dramatically grow, and storing it for later analysis would likely become impractical, due to limited I/O bandwidth and mass-storage capacity. In this presentation we discuss possible solutions to this challenge."The post Interview: Dr. Christoph Schär on Escaping the Data Avalanche for Climate Modeling appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Cray announced the Company will provide a Cray Urika-GX system to the Alan Turing Institute. “The rise of data-intensive computing – where big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and supercomputing converge – has opened up a new domain of real-world, complex analytics applications, and the Cray Urika-GX gives our customers a powerful platform for solving this new class of data-intensive problems.”The post Alan Turing Institute to Acquire Cray Urika-GX Graph Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

To compare how one version of a part of the code is running to another version, since this is a ratio, it is important to keep one of the values constant in order to understand if the optimization is working. If more cpu cycles are being used, but more instructions are being executed, then the ratio could be the same, but this measure will not show any improvement. The goal is to lower the CPI in certain parts of the code as well as the overall application.The post Cycles Per Instruction – Why it matters appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the 2017 DDN User Group meeting at ISC, James Coomer from DDN presents: IME Update - I/O Profiling of applications. "DDN’s Infinite Memory Engine (IME) is a scale-out, flash-native, software-defined, storage cache that streamlines the data path for application IO. IME interfaces directly to applications and secures IO via a data path that eliminates file system bottlenecks."The post IO Management with DDN IME 1.1 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at why Drive Writes Per Day are such an important metric for acquiring the right kind of SSD for your particular workload. "Drive writes per day (DWPD) is an endurance rating that manufacturers of NAND flash storage provide their customers. ... DWPD will vary, depending upon whether the storage is intended for consumer or enterprise use. Consumer use solid state drives (SSDs) have a fixed endurance rating and capacity."The post Radio Free HPC Optimizes Drive Writes Per Day for SSDs appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Silicon Mechanics announced immediate availability of Intel's new family of processors, the Intel Xeon Scalable platform, formerly code-named Purley. Intel's newest processing platform features a selection of Intel Xeon processors designed to scale with a business as it grows, from an entry-level Bronze processor to the Intel Xeon Platinum processor for maximum performance, hardware-enhanced security, and advanced RAS (reliability, availability, and serviceability). "As a long-term Strategic OEM partner with Intel, we are excited to bring the Intel Xeon Scalable platform to our customers on day one," said Silicon Mechanics Chief Marketing Officer Sue Lewis. "Our customers have been excited about the expected improvements in memory bandwidth and performance, and through our close-working partnership with Intel, we are ready to help them deploy systems based on the new processors now."The post Silicon Mechanics steps up with Intel Xeon Scalable Processors appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from ISC 2017, Keith Morris from NVIDIA describes how the company's next-generation Volta GPU technology will drive HPC and AI applications to new levels of performance. "GV100 not only builds upon the advances of its predecessor, the Pascal GP100 GPU, it significantly improves performance and scalability, and adds many new features that improve programmability. These advances will supercharge HPC, data center, supercomputer, and deep learning systems and applications."The post Nvidia Volta GPUs Power HPC & AI at ISC 2017 appeared first on insideHPC.

Intel outlines the highlights and features of the company's new Intel Xeon Scalable processors designed to accelerate HPC systems. The Intel Xeon processor Scalable Family, the newest Intel Xeon processors, are optimized to address today’s most demanding high-performance computing challenges.The post New Intel Xeon Scalable Processors Accelerate HPC Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

The new Intel Xeon Scalable Processors provide up to a 2x FLOPs/clock improvement1 with Intel AVX-512 as well as integrated Intel Omni-Path Architecture ports, delivering improved compute capability, I/O flexibility and memory bandwidth to accelerate discovery and innovation.The post New Intel Xeon Scalable Processors Boost HPC Performance appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Rajeev Thakur from Argonne describes why Exascale would be a daunting software challenge even if we had the hardware today. “The scale makes it complicated. And we don’t have a system that large to test things on right now.” Indeed, no such system exists yet, the hardware is changing, and a final vendor or possibly multiple vendors to build the first exascale systems have not yet been selected."The post Developing a Software Stack for Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Penguin Computing announced completion of the company’s major technology transition to the Intel Xeon Scalable platform for all Penguin Computing product lines. "Penguin Computing’s server solution offers an unrivaled array of compute and storage form factors, in standard 19” EIA, Open Compute and Tundra Extreme Scale platform,” said William Wu, Director of Product Management, Penguin Computing. “We are excited to introduce Intel Xeon Scalable platform based solutions into our versatile Relion and Tundra product lines to tackle today’s computing challenges. Organizations looking to deploy across Data Centers, Cloud Computing, hyper-scale HPC and Deep Learning will find Penguin Computing’s unique and expanding solutions to meet their needs.”The post Penguin Computing Announces Transition to Intel Xeon Scalable Processors appeared first on insideHPC.

Nicola Marzari from EPFL gave this public lecture at PASC17. "The talk offers a perspective on the current state-of-the-art in the field, its power and limitations, and on the role and opportunities for novel models of doing computational science - leveraging big data or artificial intelligence - to conclude with some examples on how quantum simulations are accelerating our quest for novel materials and functionalities."The post Video: Computational Discovery in the 21st Century appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from PASC17, Maria Grazia Giuffreda (ETH Zurich / CSCS, Switzerland) moderates a Flash Poster Session. "The aim of this session is to allow poster presenters to introduce the topic of their poster and motivate the audience to visit them at the evening poster session. Authors will be strictly limited to 40 seconds each - after this time the presentation will be stopped automatically."The post Video: Flash Poster Session at PASC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this RCE Podcast, Brock Palen and Jeff Squyres speak with Shane Canon and Doug Jacobsen from NERSC, the authors of Shifter. "Shifter is a prototype implementation that NERSC is developing and experimenting with as a scalable way of deploying containers in an HPC environment. It works by converting user or staff generated images in Docker, Virtual Machines, or CHOS (another method for delivering flexible environments) to a common format."The post RCE Podcast Looks at Shifter Containers for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from ISC 2017, Gaétan Didier Head of CFD, Sahara Force India Formula One Racing Team describes how he uses Univa software to manage CFD workloads that simply cannot be done in a wind tunnel. After that, Bill Bryce from Univa describes how the company's software powers simulation for everything from Formula 1 racing to manufacturing and life sciences.The post Univa Powers Formula One and More at ISC 2017 appeared first on insideHPC.

"The von Neumann design has also led computing to its current limits in efficiency and cooling. As engineers built increasingly complex chips to carry out sequential operations faster and faster, the speedier chips have also been producing more waste heat. Recognizing that modern computing cannot continue on this trajectory, a number of companies are looking to the brain for inspiration and developing “neuromorphic” chips that process data the way our minds do. One such technology is IBM's TrueNorth Neurosynaptic System."The post Testing Brain-Inspired Chips for Big Data Problems at Berkeley Lab appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from ISC 2017, Sunita Chandrasekaran and Michael Wolfe present an overview of OpenACC and a preview of upcoming GPU Hackathon events. "OpenACC is a user-driven directive-based performance-portable parallel programming model designed for scientists and engineers interested in porting their codes to a wide-variety of heterogeneous HPC hardware platforms and architectures with significantly less programming effort than required with a low-level model."The post Video: OpenACC Update from ISC 2017 appeared first on insideHPC.

This year the ISC conference dedicated an entire day to deep learning, Wednesday, June 21, to discuss the recent advances in artificial intelligence based on deep learning technology. However it, not just the conference where deep learning was dominating the conversation as the showfloor of the exhibition hosted many new products dedicated to optimizing HPC hardware for use in deep learning and AI workloads.The post Deep Learning in the Spotlight at ISC appeared first on insideHPC.

Katrin Heitmann from the University of Chicago presented this talk at PASC17. "In this talk I will introduce HACC, the Hardware/Hybrid Accelerated Cosmology Code, which is being developed to combat the tremendous computational challenge to simulate our Universe." After the talk, she discusses Dark Matter with Rich Brueckner from insideHPC.The post Video: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Universe with Supercomputers appeared first on insideHPC.

This position will specifically focus on management and support of an HPC cluster and multipetabyte storage platform that provides essential infrastructure for Stanford’s growing bioinformatics and genomics communities.The post Job of the Week: HPC System Administrator at Stanford appeared first on insideHPC.

"We decided to use a slightly more interesting use case of solving for Captcha because it not only highlights the power of deep learning to be a useful tool create models to recognize and classify unwieldy data, such as distorted characters, grainy images and overlapping characters, but it also demonstrates that it is possible for this powerful technology to be used in less positive ways, such as solving for security or privacy. Realizing that everyone has access to the tools we use to move society forward, we need to be aware of the possible mis-use, especially as it becomes more pervasive across industry, healthcare, financial services, and the like."The post Deep Learning Comes to the Student Cluster Competition appeared first on insideHPC.

"Given the importance of the precise sparsity pattern, and even the actual matrix data, which decides the effective fill-in upon multiplication, the tests are performed within the CP2K package with application benchmarks. Results show a substantial boost in performance for the RMA based 2.5D algorithm, up to 1.80x, which is observed to increase with the number of processes involved in the parallelization."The post Video: Increasing Efficiency of Sparse Matrix-Matrix Multiplication appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Rescale announced that it has become a full member of the Automotive Simulation Center Stuttgart, or asc(s. The asc(s is a non-profit organization promoting high-performance simulation in virtual vehicle development. It consists of automotive OEMs and suppliers, software and hardware manufacturers, engineering service providers, and research institutes. "Rescale is delighted to be accepted as a member of asc(s,” said Wolfgang Dreyer, Rescale’s EMEA General Manager. “asc(s provides a forum for simulation innovation across the European automotive sector and Rescale is enabling scalable, turnkey on-demand high-performance computing, all pivotal for making automotive simulation cost-effective, fast, and efficient. We look forward to working with the members of the association to better understand industry requirements and trends and to push the boundaries of automotive simulation.”The post Automotive Simulation Center Stuttgart teams with Rescale appeared first on insideHPC.

Aaron Dubrow writes that researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch are exploring DNA folding and cellular packing with supercomputing power from TACC. "In the field of molecular biology, there's a wonderful interplay between theory, experiment and simulation," Pettitt said. "We take parameters of experiments and see if they agree with the simulations and theories. This becomes the scientific method for how we now advance our hypotheses."The post Supercomputing DNA Packing in Nuclei at TACC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from ISC 2017, Mateo Valero from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center describes the innovations behind MareNostrum 4, the #13 supercomputer on the TOP500. "MareNostrum 4, hosted by Barcelona Supercomputing Center, is entirely aimed at generating scientific knowledge and its computer architecture has been called ‘the most diverse and interesting in the world’ by international experts. Equipped with Intel's latest processing and networking technologies, MareNostrum provides 11.1 Petaflops of processing power to scientific production."The post Mateo Valero on how the MareNostrum 4 Supercomputer will Advance Science appeared first on insideHPC.

"Spectrum-2 Open Ethernet switch enables our customers and partners to meet the voracious demands of data speed, data processing and real time data analytics, and to gain competitive advantages,” said Gilad Shainer, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “With 10 times better scalability, 1.3 times better power efficiency, full programmability and flexibility, and the capability to seamlessly migrate to 200G and 400G data speeds, Spectrum-2 provides data centers with the ability to maximize return on investment and future proof their investment.”The post Mellanox Unveils Spectrum-2 400 Gigabit Open Ethernet Switch appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from ISC 2017, Mike Vildibill describes how Hewlett Packard Enterprise describes why we need Exascale and how the company is pushing forward with Memory-Driven Computing. "At the heart of HPE’s exascale reference design is Memory-Driven Computing, an architecture that puts memory, not processing, at the center of the computing platform to realize a new level of performance and efficiency gains. HPE’s Memory-Driven Computing architecture is a scalable portfolio of technologies that Hewlett Packard Labs developed via The Machine research project. On May 16, 2017, HPE unveiled the latest prototype from this project, the world’s largest single memory computer."The post How HPE is Approaching Exascale with Memory-Driven Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks back at the recent ISC 2017 conference and summarizes results from the Student Cluster Competition. "Eleven student teams were on the show floor this year, vying against each other for the top honors in the sixth annual ISC Student Cluster Competition. Tsinghua University from China emerged as the Overall Competition Winner, thus marking their third win in the contest."The post Radio Free HPC Looks at Results from the ISC 2017 Student Cluster Competition appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Yan Fisher from Red Hat describes the company's multi-architecture solutions that were on display at ISC 2017. "Historically, HPC workloads have had to rely on custom-built software stacks, most of which relied on proprietary software and overly-specialized hardware. Red Hat is bringing change to the supercomputing arena, from the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform tailored for HPC workloads to massively scalable, fully open cloud infrastructure, along with the management and automation technologies needed to keep these deployments running smoothly."The post Red Hat Debuts Multi-Architecture Solutions for HPC at ISC 2017 appeared first on insideHPC.

PSSC Labs recently announced the deployment of a powerful, turn-key HPC Cluster for the University of Dayton’s Intelligent Optics Laboratory. "It was important for us to select a vendor familiar with the systems requirements of this type of advanced research, that can simultaneously offer the processing power we need while staying within the budget permitted by our research grants,” said Morris Maynard, Sr. Software Engineer at UD. “PSSC offered the best combination of price, software and support available to help advance our research goals.”The post PSSC Labs Powers University of Dayton Atmospheric Optics Research appeared first on insideHPC.

Some of Europe’s leading supercomputing centers have joined forces to create a buyers group that will enable joint public procurement of new HPC systems. "The new partnership of four public HPC centers (BSC, CINECA, JSC, and GENCI), located in four different countries (Spain, Italy, Germany, and France) means that new supercomputers can be procured through a market consultation for the purchase of HPC systems. This group will operate under as part of the Public Procurement of Innovative Solutions for High-Performance Computing (PPI4HPC) project."The post European Supercomputing Centers Adopt Joint Procurement Process appeared first on insideHPC.

"There is real excitement about new technologies like Quantum Computing, however many things are needed to help users learn how to program and use Quantum computers," said Earl Joseph, CEO at Hyperion Research. "By providing universities, research institutes and both large and small businesses across the world access to its QLM, Atos is enabling organizations to experiment with Quantum computing and prepare for this potential revolution in computing."The post Atos Launches World’s Fastest Quantum Simulator appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Maxeler Technologies announced it is now on the G-Cloud 9 framework and can offer its world class accelerated compute performance to the entire UK Public Sector. "I am delighted we can support all parts of the UK Public Sector with our advanced technology," said Oskar Mencer, CEO & CTO of Maxeler. "We look forward to bringing our expertise in working with large data sets in Financial Services and Scientific computing to the UK Government.”The post Maxeler Technologies Accelerates Analytics on UK G-Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.