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

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at HPE's new CEO, Antonio Neri, a longtime HPE executive who previously served as President of the company. As the number 1 server vendor in the HPC space, this change will be one to watch as we transition to the exascale era in the next five years or so. "This transistion comes at an interesting time for HPE, as one of their main competitors, Dell Technologies, is reportedly looking at an IPO or reverse acquisition by VMware."The post Radio Free HPC looks at New Leadership at HPE appeared first on insideHPC.

It has been said that artificial intelligence will create the next industrial revolution, the fourth industrial revolution that modern-day society has experienced since the dawn of mechanical production and steam power energy documented in 1784. In this guest article, Mellanox Technologies' Scot Schultz explores how artificial intelligence is shaping up to launch the next big wave of innovation.The post Artificial Intelligence: The Next Industrial Revolution appeared first on insideHPC.

Carlos Thomaz from DDN gave this talk at LAD'17 in Paris. "With the first set of Arm-based HPC servers debuting at SC17 in Denver, the platform is being evaluated for Lustre performance by a number of other organizations including Cray, DDN, and ORNL."The post Video: Lustre File System on ARM appeared first on insideHPC.

Virginia Tech is seeking a Computational Scientist in our Job of the Week. "In this faculty role, you will develop and teach science and engineering educational programs; workshops, lecture series, and for credit courses, for Virginia Tech faculty and students. Pursue a research agenda and collaborate with other Virginia Tech science, engineering, and outside discipline faculty to create opportunities and projects for external grants."The post Job of the Week: Computational Scientist at Virginia Tech appeared first on insideHPC.

The HPC User Forum has posted their speaker agenda for their upcoming meeting in Tucson. Hosted by Hyperion Research, the event takes place April 16-18 at Loews Ventana Canyon. "The April meeting will explore the status and prospects for quantum computing and HPC use of HPC for environmental research, especially natural disasters such as earthquakes and the recent California wildfires. As always, the meeting will also look at new developments in HPDA-AI, cloud computing and other areas of continuing interest to the HPC community. A special session will look at the growing field of processors and accelerators supporting HPC systems."The post Agenda Posted for April HPC User Forum in Tucson appeared first on insideHPC.

In this Let's Talk Exascale podcast, Suren Byna of LBNL and Quincey Koziol of the NERSC describe ExaHDF5, an I/O platform for exascale data. "One milestone that we have achieved so far is a feature called Data Elevator. The Data Elevator, as it says, is an elevator between different stages of memory hierarchy. It moves the data more transparently so that applications just have to use HDF5 API and internally we take over how to move the data between the layers, so that is one of the features."The post Let’s Talk Exascale Podcast looks at Parallel I/O with ExaHDF5 appeared first on insideHPC.

EOFS chairman Frank Baetke writes that he has left HPE. As the long-time liason to the HP-CAST user community, Mr. Baetke played a key role in bringing together HPC thought leaders at worldwide events for many years. The good news is that Frank will continue to be active in High Performance Computing.The post Frank Baetke Leaves HPE, Stays on as EOFS Chairman appeared first on insideHPC.

JISC in the UK is upgrading its Janet Network to world-leading 400Gbit/s connectivity, making it one of the most digitally-advanced national research and education networks globally in terms of scale, automation and network intelligence. "Our vision is for the UK to be at the forefront of scientific research," said Jeremy Sharp, network infrastructure director for Jisc. "To make that happen, we must have a highly robust network powered with industry-leading technology that can scale to support bandwidth-intensive applications like genome editing and the Square Kilometre Array.The post Janet Network upgrades to 400Gbit/s for Global Research appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Optalysys announced the formation of its first Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) comprising experts in AI/machine learning, bioinformatics/genomics and optical pattern recognition. The inaugural SAB members include Professor Douglas Kell of The University of Manchester, Professor Timothy Wilkinson of University of Cambridge and ex-senior NASA scientist, Dr. Richard Juday. "Collectively, these experts have deep knowledge in areas most critical to our long-term success,” said Dr. Nick New, founder and director, Optalysys. “We’re excited to work closely with them through the process of bringing to market our unique optical approach to super-fast, low-power computing to enable more tech innovators and scientists to create a better world.”The post Optalysys Appoints Scientific Advisory Board for Optical Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Bright Computing released version 8.1 of the Bright product portfolio with new capabilities for cluster workload accounting, cloud bursting, OpenStack private clouds, deep learning, AMD accelerators, Kubernetes, Ceph, and a new lightweight daemon for monitoring VMs and non-Bright clustered nodes. "The response to our last major release, 8.0, has been tremendous," said Martijn de Vries, Chief Technology Officer of Bright Computing. "Version 8.1 adds many new features that our customers have asked for, such as better insight into cluster utilization and performance, cloud bursting, and more flexibility with machine learning package deployment.”The post Bright Computing Release 8.1 adds new features for Deep Learning, Kubernetes, and Ceph appeared first on insideHPC.

Stephen Jones from NVIDIA gave this talk at SC17. "The NVIDIA Volta architecture powers the world’s most advanced data center GPU for AI, HPC, and Graphics. Features like Independent Thread Scheduling and game-changing Tensor Cores enable Volta to simultaneously deliver the fastest and most accessible performance of any comparable processor. Join us for a tour of the features that will make Volta the platform for your next innovation in AI and HPC supercomputing."The post Video: Inside Volta GPUs appeared first on insideHPC.

Data analytics deals with making observations with various data sets, and trying to make sense of the data. When dealing with very large data sets, automated tools must be used to find patterns and relationships. One of the most important tasks from large data sets is to find an outlier, which is defined as a sample or event that is very inconsistent with the rest of the data set.The post Outliers – Why So Important for Data Analytics? appeared first on insideHPC.

Today ThinkParQ announced the appointment of Frank Herold as CEO. While the company enjoyed a record-setting year in 2017, the move sets the stage for further growth of the BeeGFS file system for high performance computing. "Frank has a long history in the field of large scale enterprise file systems and is well experienced in expansion into new markets, which is exactly our strategic focus for the years ahead. With his strong technical and management background, I trust that he is the ideal person to manage the company based on a deep understanding of customer and market demands.” says Sven Breuner, former CEO of ThinkParQ.The post ThinkParQ Welcomes New CEO as BeeGFS Continues Record Growth appeared first on insideHPC.

The Department of Energy is seeking industry proposals for public/private projects aimed at applying high performance computing to industry challenges for the advancement of energy innovation. “We are seeing some significant successes with orders of magnitude reduction in simulation times and higher fidelity simulations that more closely match the reality of the manufacturing process. With this solicitation we plan to continue to expand the reach of our program to new companies to help solve new and different problems.”The post HPC4Manufacturing Program Seeks Industry Proposals appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the PASC18 conference announced that Nils P. Wedi from ECMWF will be one of its keynote speakers. "This talk will illustrate the need for and practicality of producing ensembles of km-scale simulations, summarize progress on accelerating state-of-the-art global weather and climate predictions, and discuss outstanding issues and future directions on producing and analysing big weather data while balancing time-critical customer needs with energy- and time-to-solution."The post PASC18 Keynote to Focus on Kilometre-Scale Earth System Simulations appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from Disruptive Technologies exhibit at SC17, Theodore Omtzigt describes the mission of a new Startup called Posit Research. "Posit Research is a fabless semi designing and marketing posit-based computational solutions for the artificial intelligence and high-performance computing markets. We are creating a new type of artificial intelligence supercomputer that adapts to the application. It uses a new number system called posit."The post A New Way of Supercomputing with Posit Research appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Adaptive Computing announced Moab/NODUS Cloud Bursting, making HPC cloud strategies more accessible than ever before. "Considering that public cloud bursting is usually extremely challenging, the Moab/NODUS Cloud Bursting Solution is brilliant in its ability to integrate seamlessly with existing management infrastructure,” said Art Allen, President, Adaptive Computing Enterprises, Inc.The post Adaptive Computing Launches Moab/NODUS for HPC Cloud Bursting appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the iRODS Consortium announced that the University of Groningen (UG) Center for Information Technology (CIT) is its newest member. The iRODS Consortium is a membership-based organization that leads efforts to develop, support, and sustain the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS). "For years there was a need for technical solutions for various problems in the field of research data management that researchers are running into,” said Jonas Bulthuis, IT consultant at the CIT. “iRODS offers building blocks with which we can offer solutions for managing research data.”The post University of Groningen joins iRODS Consortium appeared first on insideHPC.

In this Let's Talk Exascale podcast, David Richard from LLNL discussed the Proxy Apps project, which is curating a collection of proxy apps that will represent the real applications of importance to the ECP. "In this Let's Talk Exascale podcast, David Richard from LLNL discussed the Proxy Apps project, which is curating a collection of proxy apps that will represent the real applications of importance to the ECP."The post Podcast: Proxy Apps set the stage for Exascale Computing Project appeared first on insideHPC.

This video features highlights from the first day at the HiPEAC conference, which took place last week in Manchester. HiPEAC is the premier European forum for experts in computer architecture, programming models, compilers and operating systems for embedded and general-purpose systems. "HiPEAC Coordinator Koen De Bosschere tells us what's been going on, including a great keynote talk from Maria Girone at CERN. Meanwhile, Arm's John Goodacre tells us why Manchester is a great location for the conference and why it's important for companies like Arm to be involved in HiPEAC."The post Video: HiPEAC Conference Looks at Innovations in Computer Architecture appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Parks Fields and Paul Grun from the OpenFabrics Alliance write that the upcoming OFA Workshop in Boulder is an excellent opportunity to collaborate on the next generation of network fabrics. "Come join the community in Boulder this year to lend your voice to shaping the direction of fabric technology in big ways or small, or perhaps just to listen and learn about the latest trends coming down the pike, or to pick up tips and tricks to make you more effective in your daily job."The post OpenFabrics Alliance Workshop 2018 – An Emphasis on Fabric Community Collaboration appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Dell Technologies released a research report that examines the future of human machine partnerships and reveals that business leaders are divided regarding the future. "Half of the 3,800 global business leaders surveyed forecast that automated systems will free up their time, while the other 50% believe otherwise."The post Research Report Reveals Divided Vision of Future Human-Machine Partnership appeared first on insideHPC.

The Stanford HPC Conference has posted it Preliminary Agenda. The two-day event takes place Feb. 20-21 at Stanford University in California. "Join the Stanford High Performance Computing Center, HPC Advisory Council, its members and experts from all over the world for two days of invited and contributed talks and immersive tutorials on topics of great societal impact and responsibility! February's open forum brings industry luminaries and leading subject matter experts together to examine emerging and major domains and share in-depth insights on AI, Data Sciences, HPC, Machine Learning and more."The post Stanford HPC Conference Posts Preliminary Agenda appeared first on insideHPC.

Today HPC Cloud provider Verne Global announced that Analytic Engineering of Germany is moving their GPU infrastructure to Iceland. "At Verne Global’s campus, we can grow our business faster and apply more compute resources to our programs than at any other data center that we evaluated,” said Tobias Seifert, Co-CEO at Analytic Engineering. “This is a critical competitive advantage to us, as we look to deliver highly complex software solutions that enable our customers to iterate faster through applications driven by AI and Machine Learning.”The post Analytic Engineering Moves AI GPU Infrastructure to Verne Global in Iceland appeared first on insideHPC.

Adrian Reber from Red Hat gave this talk at DefConf 2018. "Software provisioning is a common task repeated at many high performance computing sites to provide the local users with scientific applications and libraries. As the effort to compile HPC software is known to be duplicated by many HPC sites, the idea to collaborate in a community led to the creation of the OpenHPC project. In this talk I want to provide an introduction to OpenHPC, its community efforts and how it can help HPC sites."The post Video: OpenHPC Introduction appeared first on insideHPC.

We continue our insideHPC series of features exploring new resource management solutions for workload convergence, such as Bright Cluster Manager by Bright Computing. This article focuses on how clustering servers and utilizing cloud computing can help your enterprise achieve more flexibility and speed — as well as improve HPC systems management.The post Clusters & Cloud Computing: Speeding up HPC Systems Management appeared first on insideHPC.

Engineers from ESnet and the Globus team have designed a new approach that makes data sharing faster, more reliable, and more secure. As described in a new report, the "Science DMZ" provides a new architecture to meet increasing demands for accessing shared data.The post Engineering a Better Portal for Scientific Discovery appeared first on insideHPC.

PSSC Labs is offering HPC clusters solutions for Weather Modeling and Wildfire Analysis in collaboration with Atmospheric Data Solutions (ADS). "The solutions ADS are developing use a comprehensive blend of predictors that are important to large wildfire potential including dead fuel and live fuel moisture, near-surface atmospheric moisture and temperature, wind speed and gusts."The post PSSC Labs offers HPC Solutions for Weather Modeling and Wildfire Analysis appeared first on insideHPC.

Eni in Italy has launched its new HPC4 supercomputer. With a peak performance of 18.6 Petaflops, the HPC4 cluster from Hewlett Packard Enterprise quadruples the Company’s computing power, making it the world’s most powerful industrial system. "With HPC4 we are tracing the path for the use of exascale supercomputers in the energy sector that could revolutionize the way in which oil&gas activities are managed."The post Eni in Italy Launches 18.6 Petaflop HPC4 Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at NVIDIA’s new EULA GeForce Software user license, which prohibits the use of consumer GPUs in the datacenter. We are not looking to beat up on anyone, but our focus is on what these kind of limitations might mean for the industry.

Building upon the success of Intel Cluster Ready and Intel Scalable System Framework (Intel SSF), Intel is facilitating the deployment of computing resources to non-traditional HPC users with the recently announced Intel Select Solutions for HPC. The following guest article from Intel explores how Intel Select Solutions is working to enable and simplify HPC for a broader set of users.The post Intel Select Solutions: Enabling HPC for a Broader Set of Users appeared first on insideHPC.

The Xinhua news service reports that prototype for China's new-generation exascale supercomputer is set for launch in 2018. "China's ongoing efforts in HPC are evident in the recent TOP500 list, where the nation has the two fastest supercomputers in the world. In fact, China has overtaken the US in the total number of ranked systems by a margin of 202 to 143."The post China Readies Exascale Prototype appeared first on insideHPC.

In this slidecast from the POP Centre of Excellence in Barcelona, Jon Gibson from NAG presents: How to Improve the Performance of Parallel Codes. As part of the EU-funded Performance Optimization and Productivity (POP) Centre of Excellence, NAG offers HPC expertise to organizations who want help to understand and improve the performance of parallel software.The post Slidecast: How to Improve the Performance of Parallel Codes appeared first on insideHPC.

HPC vendor One Stop Systems has announced plans to raise $20 million in an initial public offering (IPO) on Wednesday, January 31. Founded in 1998, the company plans to issue 2,900,000 shares at a price of $6.00-$8.00 per share. "OSS designs, manufactures and markets high-end systems for high performance computing applications. We combine state-of-the art components from major technology providers to design and manufacture purpose-built systems that allow our customers to exploit Big Data opportunities faster and more efficiently."The post One Stop Systems Plans for IPO appeared first on insideHPC.

Eric Nielsen from NASA gave this talk at SC17 in Denver. "In the field of computational fluid dynamics, the Navier-Stokes equations are often solved using an unstructured-grid approach to accommodate geometric complexity. Furthermore, turbulent flows encountered in aerospace applications generally require highly anisotropic meshes, driving the need for implicit solution methodologies to efficiently solve the discrete equations. To prepare NASA Langley Research Center's FUN3D CFD solver for the future HPC landscape, we port two representative kernels to NVIDIA Pascal and Volta GPUs and present performance comparisons with a common multi-core CPU benchmark."The post Unstructured-Grid CFD Algorithms at NASA on Volta GPUs appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Robert Roe reports from the SC17 conference keynote. "Philip Diamond, director general of SKA and Rosie Bolton, SKA regional centre project scientist and project scientist for the international engineering consortium designing the high performance computing systems used in the project, took to the stage to highlight the huge requirements for computation and data processing required by the SKA project."The post SC17 Keynote Looks at the SKA Telescope: Life, the Universe, and Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

Adel El-Hallack from IBM gave this talk at SC17 in Denver. "The era of AI is here, but realizing business value with deep learning can have its challenges. See how IBM is making it easy to have enterprise-ready deep learning through a combination of high performance hardware and software."The post Video: Enterprise Ready Deep Learning from IBM appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the European Union announced that the Czech Republic is the 14th country to sign the European declaration on high-performance computing. The initiative aims at building European supercomputers that would rank among the world's top three by 2022-2023. "We are prepared to provide the Czech national HPC capacities and capabilities for this joint mission and contribute to accomplish it successfully."The post Czech Republic joins EuroHPC Initiative appeared first on insideHPC.

Scientists at NCSA have pioneered the use of GPU-accelerated deep learning for rapid detection and characterization of gravitational waves. This new approach will enable astronomers to study gravitational waves using minimal computational resources, reducing time to discovery and increasing the scientific reach of gravitational wave astrophysics.The post Video: Deep Learning for Real-Time Gravitational Wave Discovery appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Netlist, Nyriad, and HPC Systems announced their joint collaboration to deliver superior throughput, IOPs and resilience for high performance Lustre storage solutions for large and small files targeted at large-scale cluster computing. "This collaboration is one of the exciting revolutions in high performance computing where larger scale solutions result in a leap in efficiency," said Teppei Ono, President of HPC Systems. "With Nyriad's NSULATE technology, we get higher performance and resilience the more drives we add to a node. At larger storage scales with higher throughput, we can dispense with RAID controllers and use NVDIMM's from Netlist to achieve millions of IOPs for large and small file transactions."The post Nyriad to Accelerate Persistent Memory and GPUs for Storage appeared first on insideHPC.

The Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) is one of the three national supercomputing centres in Germany. It is partnering with leading technology providers on co-design hardware architectures for future supercomputers. In this context we research on current and future ARM-based architectures for high-performance computing. The research will be performed within the European project "MB2020".The post Job of the Week: Research Scientist specializing in HPC Processor Architectures at Jülich appeared first on insideHPC.

Certain applications, such as automated driving, require low latency small matrix-matrix multiplication in real time. They use specialized libraries that can be customized for small matrix operations. Recompiling and linking those libraries with the highly optimized DGEMM routine in the Intel® Math Kernel Library 2018 can give speedups many times over native libraries.The post Intel MKL Speeds Up Small Matrix-Matrix Multiplication for Automatic Driving appeared first on insideHPC.

Doug Miles from NVIDIA gave this talk at SC17. "CUDA Unified Memory for NVIDIA Tesla GPUs offers programmers a unified view of memory on GPU-accelerated compute nodes. The CPUs can access GPU high-bandwidth memory directly, the GPUs can access CPU main memory directly, and memory pages migrate automatically between the two when the CUDA Unified Memory manager determines it is performance-profitable. PGI OpenACC compilers now leverage this capability on allocatable data to dramatically simplify parallelization and incremental optimization of HPC applications for GPUs."The post Accelerating HPC Programmer Productivity with OpenACC and CUDA Unified Memory appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the CloudLightning project released a new report entitled: The Future of HPC in the Cloud. "Based upon the critical issues and problems identified through this research, industry, researchers and policymakers can more accurately design a roadmap and strategy to increase the adoption of HPC in the Cloud."The post CloudLightning Project Report: The Future of HPC in the Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

Jason Bond from Auburn University gave this talk at SC17 in Denver. "The Tree of Life Web Project (ToL) is a collaborative effort of biologists and nature enthusiasts from around the world. On more than 10,000 World Wide Web pages, the project provides information about biodiversity, the characteristics of different groups of organisms, and their evolutionary history (phylogeny)."The post Video: HPC and the Tree of Life Project appeared first on insideHPC.

Today CESNET announced the research community's first deployment of Ciena´s Waveserver Ai platform. The Czech research organization has interconnected GÉANT´s high-capacity routers using a 300 Gbps alien wavelength over 530km of CESNET network with Czech Light Open Line System. "Our network is designed to support the transfer of extremely large data sets and dedicated photonic services among geographically dispersed locations."The post CESNET Deploys Ciena Waveserver AI for Research appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Asetek announced a new order from OEM partner Fujitsu for the Institute of Fluid Science at Tohoku University in Japan. The supercomputing system will consist of multiple computational sub-systems using the latest liquid-cooled Fujitsu PRIMERGY x86 servers, and is planned to deliver a peak theoretical performance exceeding 2.7 petaflops.The post Tohoku University Liquid Cools HPC Systems with Asetek appeared first on insideHPC.

In this Let's Talk Exascale podcast, Kenny Roche from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory describes the ECP’s Application Assessment Project. "With Productivity, we’re aiming to coordinate how to improve software productivity of the code teams and to sustain that performance and development progress to the completion of each ECP application code project."The post Let’s Talk Exascale Podcast: ECP’s Application Assessment Project appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the CloudLightning project announced a free open online course on High Performance Computing in the Cloud. "Developed in collaboration with the Irish Centre for Cloud Computing and Commerce (IC4) and Dublin City University, the course provides an advanced graduate-level introduction to using cloud computing for high-performance computing workloads. It will cover a wide range of topics from cloud architecture and infrastructure supporting HPC to the business opportunities that are enabled by HPC in the cloud."The post FutureLearn Offers Free Course on HPC in the Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

NEC has deployed a new supercomputer at the ONERA center in France to power aerospace research. Called SATOR, the 667 Teraflop machine features Intel Broadwell E5-2680v4 processors and the Intel Omni-Path interconnect. "According to NEC, ONERA plans to upgrade the machine to 1.14 Petaflops peak sometime later this year."The post NEC Deploys Sator Supercomputer at ONERA in France appeared first on insideHPC.