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

At SC17 in Denver, AMD and its ecosystem partners announced at SC17 immediate availability of a suite of new, high performance systems powered by AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Radeon Instinct GPUs to accelerate innovation in supercomputing. "Target workloads for AMD solutions include machine learning, weather modeling, computational fluid dynamics, simulation and crash analysis in aviation and automotive manufacturing, oil and gas exploration, and more."The post AMD Delivers ‘Supercomputing for All’ at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Cray announced that Samsung has purchased a Cray CS-Storm accelerated cluster supercomputer. The Samsung Strategy & Innovation Center (SSIC) procured the system for use in its research into Artificial Intelligence and deep learning workloads, including systems for connected cars and autonomous technologies.The post Cray to Power AI Innovation at Samsung appeared first on insideHPC.

Today at SC17, Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced new high-density compute and storage solutions that enable enterprises to harness the power of high performance computing and artificial intelligence applications. “Today, HPE is augmenting its proven supercomputing and large commercial HPC and AI capabilities with new high-density compute and storage solutions to accelerate market adoption by enabling organizations of all sizes to address challenges in HPC, big data, object storage and AI with more choice and flexibility.”The post HPE Steps Up with AI Innovation at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

"The Bright Computing and SUSE partnership was first announced in 2009, enabling customers to deploy, manage, and monitor SUSE Linux Enterprise Server clusters using the Bright interface. Since then, the companies have collaborated many times to provide cutting edge infrastructure management solutions to significant strategic companies around the world, including Boeing in North America and CSIRO in Australia."The post Bright Computing and SUSE Collaborate at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

This week at SC17, One Stop Systems is showcasing all-new "HPC composable infrastructure solutions" designed for data scientists requiring flexible high performance infrastructure across multiple nodes. "By adding NVIDIA GPU and NVMe expansion, customers can add unlimited flexibility to their HPC architecture by decoupling the latest innovations in CPU capabilities, NVIDIA GPU performance, and NVMe storage into a system called “composable HPC infrastructure.”The post One Stop Systems Rolls Out Composable Infrastructure Solutions at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

At SC17, Intel is reinforcing its ongoing commitment to HPC and AI technologies. If you want to learn more about Intel’s investment in Artificial Intelligence, and the convergence with HPC, then be sure to catch the future-focused presentation on "Artificial Intelligence and The Virtuous Cycle of Compute" by Pradeep Dubey, Intel Fellow, and Director of Parallel Computing Lab.The post Catch Today’s ‘Artificial Intelligence and The Virtuous Cycle of Compute’ Presentation by Intel appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Pradeep Dubey from Intel Labs describes his upcoming SC17 Invited Talk on Artificial Intelligence. "Dubey will discuss how the convergence of AI, Big Data, HPC systems, and algorithmic advances are transforming the relationship between computers and humans, disrupting past notions of a partnership where humans made all the “intelligent” decisions."The post SC17 Preview: Artificial Intelligence and The Virtuous Cycle of Compute appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Kim McMahon offers up her annual Top 10 list of things she's looking forward to as SC17 this week. "It’s that time of year we all look forward to! We have been waiting for it all year, preparing, and holding our excitement until it starts! It’s not vacation, it’s not the holidays, it's Supercomputing!"The post Top 10 Things to Look Forward to at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Ellexus released versions of its flagship I/O profiling products Breeze, Healthcheck and Mistral, all based on the Arm v8-A architecture. The move comes as part of the company’s strategy to provide cross-platform support that gives engineers a uniform tooling experience across different hardware platforms. "As the high-performance computing industry targets new compute architectures and cloud infrastructures, it’s never been more important to optimise the way programs access large data sets," said Dr Rosemary Francis, CEO of Ellexus, on the decision to release versions based on Arm. "Bad I/O patterns can harm shared storage and will limit application performance, wasting millions in lost engineering time. We are extremely excited to announce the integration of our tools with the Arm tool suite. Together we will be able to help more organizations to get the most out of their compute clusters.”The post Ellexus Releases I/O Profiling Tool Suites Based for Arm Architecture appeared first on insideHPC.

The JURECA supercomputer in Germany just got a major upgrade with help from Dell EMC. "Thanks to the additional 5 petaflops, the Jülich supercomputer now appears as one of the fastest computers in Europe on the TOP500 list of the fastest computers in the world. This is the first time that a supercomputer with an innovative modular architecture has gone into productive operation worldwide."The post Jülich Supercomputer Adds 5 Petaflop Booster Upgrade from Dell EMC appeared first on insideHPC.

We are very excited to present this live keynote presentation on the SKA Telescope Project live from SC17. It all starts here Tuesday, Nov 14 at 8:30am Mountain Time. "Professor Diamond, accompanied by Dr. Rosie Bolton, SKA Regional Centre Project Scientist, will take SC17 attendees around the globe and out into the deepest reaches of the observable universe as they describe the SKA’s international partnership that will map and study the entire sky in greater detail than ever before."The post Video Replay: SC17 Keynote Presentation on the SKA Telescope Project appeared first on insideHPC.

The demand for performant and scalable AI solutions has stimulated a convergence of science, algorithm development, and affordable technologies to create a software ecosystem designed to support the data scientist. "It is very important to understand that time-to-model and the accuracy of the resulting model are really the only performance metrics that matter when training because the goal is to quickly develop a model that represents the training data with high accuracy."The post An Overview of AI in the HPC Landscape appeared first on insideHPC.

We are very pleased to bring you this livestream of the SC17 Plenary session on Smart Cities. It starts right here Nov 13 at 5:30pm Mountain Time. "The Smart Cities initiative looks to improve the quality of life for residents using urban informatics and other technologies to improve the efficiency of services."The post Video: SC17 Plenary on Smart Cities appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the Intel HPC Developer Conference, Gadi Singer from Intel describes how the company is moving forward with Artificial Intelligence. "We are deeply committed to unlocking the promise of AI: conducting research on neuromorphic computing, exploring new architectures and learning paradigms."The post Intel and the Coming AI Revolution appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the Intel HPC Developer Conference, Prabhat from NERSC describes how AI applies to science. "Looking ahead, Prabhat sees broad applications for deep learning in scientific research beyond climate science—especially in astronomy, cosmology, neuroscience, material science, and physics."The post Video: Applying AI to Science appeared first on 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.