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

The Galicia Supercomputing Center (CESGA) and Appentra Solutions will host a GPU Hackathon March 5-9 in Santiago de Compostela. "CesgaHack18 aims to help scientists and developers accelerate the execution of their scientific simulation applications using the hardware, software and a team of expert mentors in optimization, parallelization and execution of simulation programs."The post CesgaHack GPU Hackathon Returns to Spain in March appeared first on insideHPC.

Chris Gottbrath from NVIDIA gave this talk at SC17 in Denver. "This talk will introduce the TensorRT Programmable Inference Accelerator which enables high throughput and low latency inference on clusters with NVIDIA V100, P100, P4 or P40 GPUs. TensorRT is both an optimizer and runtime – users provide a trained neural network and can easily creating highly efficient inference engines that can be incorporated into larger applications and services."The post High Performance Inferencing with TensorRT appeared first on insideHPC.

Modern enterprises are being challenged to implement new technologies and produce results faster without increasing their IT budgets. This is the first a series of features exploring new resource management solutions for workload convergence, such as Bright Cluster Manager by Bright Computing.The post Successfully Managing Workload Convergence in Your Data Center appeared first on insideHPC.

Applications are now open for the PRACE Summer of HPC 2018. The Summer of HPC is a PRACE outreach and training program that offers summer placements at top HPC centers across Europe to late-stage undergraduates and early-stage postgraduate students. "Consisting of a training week and two months on placement at top HPC centers around Europe, the program offers participants the opportunity to learn and share more about PRACE and HPC, and includes accommodation, a stipend and travel."The post Apply Now for the Summer of HPC in Edinburgh appeared first on insideHPC.

Reanalysis of public genetic data using innovative computational methods has allowed the identification of new genetic markers associated with an increased risk to develop Type 2 Diabetes (T2D). "The study, led by Barcelona Supercomputing Center and published today in Nature Communications, represents a new way of exploiting preexisting genetic data to obtain new and relevant discoveries for genetics and biomedicine, highlighting the importance of data sharing initiatives and policies in science."The post Supercomputing New Risk Variants for T-2 Diabetes appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Atos announced has a contract to deliver its a 12 Petaflop supercomputer to Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany. The BullSequana X1000 machine will be Germany’s fastest supercomputer and one the most powerful computers in the world. "Among numerous other activities, the BullSequana will be used in research for the Human Brain Project, which has as its goal to improve the understanding of the processes in the human brain through simulation."The post Atos to Deploy 12 Petaflop Supercomputer at Jülich in Germany appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the recent cryptocurrency crash and why prices for these coins is so volatile. After that, we do our Catch of the Week, where the IBM Cloud is leading the company back to profitability.The post Radio Free Looks at the Cryptocurrency Crash appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC17 in Denver, Bo Ewald from D-Wave Systems hosts a Quantum Computing Seminar. "We will discuss quantum computing, the D-Wave 2000Q system and software, the growing software ecosystem, an overview of some user projects, and how quantum computing can be applied to problems in optimization, machine learning, cyber security, and sampling.”The post Video: D-Wave Systems Seminar on Quantum Computing from SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today ClusterVision announced the successful deployment of a new high performance computing GPU cluster system for the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON). "By utilizing the deep learning capabilities of the GPU cluster, the telescopes will be able to detect pulsar flashes with much greater accuracy through self-learning. In the past, ASTRON scientists had to manually detect and input pulsar patterns. With deep learning, ARTS does it for them."The post Consumer GPUs Power 2 Petaflop Deep Learning Cluster at ASTRON appeared first on insideHPC.

Richard Loft from NCAR gave this talk at the NVIDIA booth at SC17. "The objectives of NCAR's exploration of accelerator architectures for high performance computing in recent years has been to 1) speed up the rate of code optimization and porting and 2) understand how to achieve performance portability on codes in the most economical and affordable way.The post Building a GPU-enabled and Performance-portable Global Cloud-resolving Atmospheric Model appeared first on insideHPC.

In this episode of Let’s Talk Exascale, Mike Bernhardt from ECP discusses the GAMESS project with Mark Gordon from Ames Laboratory. Gordon is the principal investigator for the ECP project called General Atomic and Molecular Electronic Structure System (GAMESS), which is developing methods for computational chemistry. "Just about anything a user would want to do with computational chemistry can be done with GAMESS—everything from very high-level quantum chemistry to semi-empirical methods to classical force fields."The post Let’s Talk Exascale Podcast looks at the GAMESS Project for Computational Chemistry appeared first on insideHPC.

Graduate students and postdoctoral scholars from institutions in Canada, Europe, Japan and the United States are invited to apply for the ninth International HPC Summer School on HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences in the Czech Republic July 8-13, 2018. "Hosted by the IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Centre, the summer school in Ostrava is organized by the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE), the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science (RIKEN AICS), and the SciNet HPC Consortium."The post Apply Now for 2018 International HPC Summer School appeared first on insideHPC.

CSRA Inc. has acquired another compute expansion under its High Performance Computing contract with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. "This HPC expansion brings our compute capacity to over 50 petaFLOPS for all CSRA HPC contracts across the federal government,” said Sharon Hays, PhD., Director of CSRA’s HPC Center of Excellence. “This HPC expansion will help NASA researchers meet their mission objectives and bring a greater understanding of the earth’s climate system."The post NASA Goddard Boosts Discover Supercomputer to 5 Petaflops appeared first on insideHPC.

In this Chip Chat podcast, Mike Reed, Director of the Blockchain Program Office at Intel, joins us to discuss Intel’s blockchain journey and how Intel technologies provide unique capabilities that can improve privacy, security, scalability, and trust of distributed ledger networks. "Mike also discusses how Intel has been working to make blockchains more secure with Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX)."The post Podcast: What’s Intel up to with Blockchain? appeared first on insideHPC.

The use of new Exascale architectures and the corresponding advances in codes to fully exploit new chip capabilities will help address challenges for combustion technologies, wind power generation and hydrocarbon exploration, allowing a transition to greener and more advanced energy systems based on alternative fuels combined with renewable energy technologies. "This project has revealed the synergies between European and Brazilian researchers, and has strengthened the bilateral relationships. From the point of view of the technical results, the project has been a success, having achieved all the planned objectives."The post New HPC for Energy White Paper looks at Exascale Architectures for Greener Combustion Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

Ian Buck from NVIDIA gave this talk at SC17 in Denver. “Supercomputing has swept rapidly from the far edges of science to the heart of our everyday lives. And propelling it forward – bringing it into the mobile phone already in your pocket and the car in your driveway – is GPU acceleration."The post Accelerated Computing: The Path Forward appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the PASC18 conference announced that Marina Becoulet from CEA will be one of its keynote speakers. "The main goal of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project is the demonstration of the feasibility of future clean energy sources based on nuclear fusion in magnetically confined plasma. In the era of ITER construction, fusion plasma theory and modeling provide not only a deep understanding of a specific phenomenon, but moreover, modeling-based design is critical for ensuring active plasma control."The post Marina Becoulet from CEA to Keynote PASC18 appeared first on insideHPC.

The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) is seeking proposals for data and learning projects to help prepare for Aurora, the nation’s first exascale system scheduled for delivery in 2021. "The shift in plans for Aurora, which was initially scheduled to be a 180 petaflops supercomputer, is central to a new paradigm for scientific computing at the ALCF—the expansion from traditional simulation-based research to include data science and machine learning approaches. Aurora’s revolutionary architecture will provide advanced capabilities in the three pillars of simulation, data, and learning that will power a new era of scientific discovery and innovation."The post Call for Proposals: Aurora Early Science Program for Deep Learning appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Cray announced that the Ministry of Earth Sciences in India has deployed a pair of Cray XC40 supercomputers with Cray ClusterStor storage systems. The combined systems are the largest supercomputing resource in India, and extend Cray’s leadership position in the weather forecasting and climate research communities. "The two new Cray systems are major steps forward for MoES, and allows us to stand tall in the international weather and climate communities.”The post India’s Ministry of Earth Sciences Deploys two Cray XC40 Supercomputers appeared first on insideHPC.

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are an exciting technology that allows hardware designers to create new digital circuits through a programming environment. Compared to hardware that is designed once or software which must adhere to the hardware architecture, an FPGA allows developers to draw a circuit to solve a specific problem.The post Enabling FPGAs appeared first on insideHPC.

Jim Held from Intel Labs gave this talk at the Intel HPC Developer Conference in Denver. "Intel recently announced important progress in our research into future novel microarchitectures and device technology: neuromorphic and quantum computing. Loihi, our recently announced neuromorphic research chip, is extremely energy-efficient, uses data to learn and make inferences, gets smarter over time and does not need to be trained in the traditional way. Quantum computing offers the potential for exponentially greater performance on many algorithms that are computationally challenging on today’s computing architectures."The post Video: Leading the Evolution of Compute with Neuromorphic and Quantum Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, ANSYS 3D Physics simulations are used to predict device performance and solve biomedical-engineering challenges compressing design cycles. "With patient welfare hanging in the balance, disruptive innovation is a permanent concern and product failure is not an option in healthcare. Applying engineering simulation throughout development can make all the difference in bringing new treatments to patients while meeting safety standards and product deadlines."The post Video: Enabling Medical Device Innovation through Simulation appeared first on insideHPC.

The recently established Yale Center for Research Computing is seeking a Director of High Performance Computing (HPC). This position, under the supervision of the Executive Director of the Yale Center for Research Computing, will help create a world class HPC infrastructure to support computationally and data intensive research at Yale University.The post Job of the Week: Director of High Performance Computing at Yale appeared first on insideHPC.

Today a company called Bounded Floating Point announced a breakthrough patent in processor design, which allows representation of real numbers accurate to the last digit "for the first time in computer history." "This bounded floating point system is a game changer for the computing industry, particularly for computationally intensive functions such as weather prediction, GPS, and autonomous vehicles," said the inventor, Alan Jorgensen, PhD. “By using this system, it is possible to guarantee that the display of floating point values is accurate to plus or minus one in the last digit.”The post Has the Decades-Old Floating Point Error Problem been Solved? appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC17, Jack Dongarra, Erich Strohmaier, and Horst Simon give an Invited Talk on the history of the TOP500 list. "The TOP500 list has served as the defining yardstick for supercomputing performance since 1993. We briefly describe the project’s origins, the principles guiding data collection, and what has made the list so successful during the 25 year long transition from giga- to tera- to petascale computing. We also examine the list’s limitations."The post Video: The TOP500 Past, Present, and Future appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature from Scientific Computing World, Robert Roe looks at the role of integrators to deliver and support HPC systems. "There is an increasing propensity for organizations to buy and grow systems, so we help our customers to think ahead about the future use of their system. It is important for customers to be mindful of where they might be in three years’ time, where they are now and the path from one to the other."The post How Integrators Ensure Top Performance for HPC Clusters appeared first on insideHPC.

Dr. Joshua L. Willis from the California Institute of Technology and Dan Stanzione from TACC gave this talk at the Intel HPC Developer Conference. "These discoveries mark the beginning of gravitational wave astronomy, and in this talk we will highlight what we have learned and hope to learn in this new field, pointing out many of the ways in which high-throughput and high-performance computing have been essential to its progress."The post Gravitational Waves: The Role of Computing in Opening a New Field of Astronomy appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC17 in Denver, Dan McGuan from Red Hat describes the company's Multi-Architecture HPC capabilities with the Power9 architecture. "Red Hat and IBM have a long history of collaborating on Linux, going back more than 18 years. We laid the groundwork for supporting POWER9 processors several years ago and continue to collaborate with IBM to enable broader architecture support for IBM Power Systems across Red Hat’s portfolio."The post Red Hat steps up to POWER9 for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at European Commission’s recent move to fund exascale development with 1 Billion Euros. "While Europe already had a number of exascale initiatives under way, this is a major step forward in that it puts up the money. Under a new legal and funding structure, the Commission’s contribution will be $486 million, or roughly half of the projected EUR 1 Billion total."The post Radio Free HPC Looks at the European Union’s Big Investment in Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Rescale announced that ANSYS Elastic Licensing can now be purchased directly through Rescale’s ScaleX, a SaaS platform purpose-built for solving the world’s most challenging engineering, scientific and mathematical problems with HPC in the cloud. "Pay-per-use licenses from ANSYS have been very popular with Rescale customers since we introduced ANSYS Elastic Licensing to the platform in 2016. Now we’re delivering the additional flexibility of being able to seamlessly purchase elastic units on-demand directly through the Rescale platform."The post Rescale Offers ANSYS Software On Demand appeared first on insideHPC.

Coming up next week in Manchester, the HiPEAC 2018 conference will once again bring together the best minds in computer architecture and compilation to exploit the enormous potential of new computing paradigms. "The HiPEAC conference is the flagship networking event of our 2000-strong community of computing experts,’ says HiPEAC coordinator Koen de Bosschere of Ghent University. "This year we are very happy to have two leading European companies (ARM for mobile computing and DeepMind for deep learning) as the main sponsors of the event. They are creating the key technological components of future smart devices."The post HiPEAC18 Conference to Focus on Performance and Security Next Week in Manchester appeared first on insideHPC.

While various kernel patches are already out for the Spectre and Meltdown, the performance impact of these patches on HPC performance has been a big question. Now ClusterVision has published a timely white paper on this important topic. "These vulnerabilities have only been discovered recently, so information is still developing. Therefore, this document should not be interpreted as a complete overview of the situation but as an informative view of the potential impact on HPC."The post ClusterVision White Paper Looks at HPC Performance Impact of Spectre and Meltdown appeared first on insideHPC.

In this episode of Let’s Talk Exascale, Scott Gibson discusses the ECP Data and Visualization project with Jim Ahrens from Los Alamos National Lab. Ahrens is principal investigator for the Data and Visualization project, which is responsible for the storage and visualization aspects of the ECP and for helping its researchers understand, store, and curate scientific data.The post Podcast: The Exascale Data and Visualization project at LANL appeared first on insideHPC.

David Leutwyler from ETH Zurich gave this talk at the 2017 Chaos Communication Congress. "The representation of thunderstorms (deep convection) and rain showers in climate models represents a major challenge, as this process is usually approximated with semi-empirical parameterizations due to the lack of appropriate computational resolution. Climate simulations using kilometer-scale horizontal resolution allow explicitly resolving deep convection and thus allow for an improved representation of the water cycle. We present a set of such simulations covering Europe and global computational domains."The post Video: Weather and Climate Modeling at Convection-Resolving Resolution appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Thomas Zacharia from ORNL testifies before the House Energy and Commerce hearing on DOE Modernization. "At the OLCF, we are deploying a system that may well be the world’s most powerful supercomputer when it begins operating later this year. Summit will be at least five times as powerful as Titan. It will also be an exceptional resource for deep learning, with the potential to address challenging data analytics problems in a number of scientific domains. Summit is among the products of CORAL, the Collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne, and Livermore."The post Video: Thomas Zacharia from ORNL Testifies at House Hearing on the Need for Supercomputing appeared first on insideHPC.

D.E. Shaw Research in NYC is seeking a System Administrator for Servers, Clusters and Supercomputers for Computational Biochemistry in our Job of the Week. "Exceptional sysadmins sought to manage systems, storage, and network infrastructure for a New York–based interdisciplinary research group. Positions are available at our New York City offices, and at our data centers in Durham, NC and Endicott, NY."Exceptional sysadmins sought to manage systems, storage, and network infrastructure for a New York–based interdisciplinary research group. Positions are available at our New York City offices, and at our data centers in Durham, NC and Endicott, NY.The post Job of the Week: System Administrator at D.E. Shaw Research appeared first on insideHPC.

Registration is now open for LUG 2018. Sponsored by Globus. the 2018 Lustre User Group (LUG) conference will be held April 23-26, 2018 at Argonne National Laboratory. "As always, LUG provides technical sessions on the latest Lustre developments and best practices, while providing opportunities to share information, network, and collaborate with your peers."The post Registration Opens for LUG 2018 in April appeared first on insideHPC.

In this episode of Let's Talk Exascale, Mike Bernhardt discusses the CANDLE project for cancer research with Rick Stevens from Argonne National Lab. The CANcer Distributed Learning Environment (CANDLE) is an ECP application development project targeting new computational methods for cancer treatment with precision medicine.The post Fighting Cancer with Deep Learning at Scale with the CANDLE Project appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the DOE announced $1.87 million for seven projects to advance innovation in U.S. manufacturing through HPC. "The HPC4Mfg program leverages world-class technical expertise with high performance computing to tackle manufacturing challenges uniquely solved by computer modeling. By applying modeling, simulation, and data analytics to key manufacturing problems, the program can aid in decision-making, optimize processes and design, improve quality, predict performance and failure, reduce or eliminate testing, and shorten the time to market."The post HPC4Mfg Program Selects New Industry Projects appeared first on insideHPC.

The eight annual International Workshop on Accelerators and Hybrid Exascale Systems (AsHES) has issued its Call for Papers. Held in conjunction with the 32nd IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, the AsHES Workshop takes place May 23 in Vancouver, Canada. "This workshop focuses on understanding the implications of accelerators and heterogeneous designs on the hardware systems, porting applications, performing compiler optimizations, and developing programming environments for current and emerging systems. It seeks to ground accelerator research through studies of application kernels or whole applications on such systems, as well as tools and libraries that improve the performance and productivity of applications on these systems."The post Call for Papers: International Workshop on Accelerators and Hybrid Exascale Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

Dr. Rommie E. Amaro gave this talk at SC17. "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 Video: Molecular Simulation at the Mesoscale appeared first on insideHPC.

Today scientists from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) released their first three years of data. This first major release of data from the Survey includes information on about 400 million astronomical objects, including distant galaxies billions of light-years away as well as stars in our own galaxy. "There are all kinds of discoveries waiting to be found in the data. While DES scientists are focused on using it to learn about dark energy, we wanted to enable astronomers to explore these images in new ways, to improve our understanding of the universe," said Dark Energy Survey Data Management Project Scientist Brian Yanny of the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.The post Dark Energy Survey Releases First Three Years of Data appeared first on insideHPC.

A team of researchers from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has married artificial intelligence and high-performance computing to achieve a peak speed of 20 petaflops in the generation and training of deep learning networks on the laboratory’s Titan supercomputer.The post Using the Titan Supercomputer to Accelerate Deep Learning Networks appeared first on insideHPC.

IT operations and maintenance developers have found that just by compiling the MySQL source code with the Intel C++ Compiler and turning on its Interprocedural Optimization feature, you can improve database performance from 5 to 35% compared with other compilers. "While there may be many factors affecting MySQL performance, such as hardware and software configuration, having a thoroughly optimized MySQL package is a good place to start."The post Using the Intel C++ Compiler’s Optimization Features to Improve MySQL Performance appeared first on insideHPC.

Al Gara from gave this talk at the Intel HPC Developer Conference in Denver. "Technology visionaries architecting the future of HPC and AI will share the key challenges as well as Intel’s direction. The talk will cover the adaptation of AI into HPC workflows, along their perspective architectural developments, upcoming transitions and range of solutions, technology opportunities, and the driving forces behind them."The post Intel’s Al Gara Presents: Technology Opportunities Like Never Before appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the European Commission unveiled today its plans to invest jointly with the Member States in building a world-class European supercomputers infrastructure. "While Europe already had a number of exascale initiatives under way, this is a major step forward in that it puts up the money. Under a new legal and funding structure, the Commission's contribution will be $486 million, or roughly half of the projected EUR 1 Billion total. Before the new structure was put in place, the Commission was effectively limited to contributing only 20 percent of HPC initiatives undertaken with member states.The post European Commission to invest EUR 1 Billion in Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.

The DOE's Exascale Computing Project has launched a new podcast channel. In this episode, Danny Perez from Los Alamos National Laboratory discusses The Exascale Atomistic Capability for Accuracy, Length, and Time (EXAALT) project. EXAALT specializes in molecular dynamics simulations of materials. "We hope you enjoy the podcast, and we welcome your ideas for future episodes."The post ECP Launches “Let’s Talk Exascale” Podcast appeared first on insideHPC.

A new security bulletin from NVIDIA reveals that its GPU drivers are not immune to the Spectre and Meltdown exploits that affect nearly every modern CPU. This is bad news for HPC, where the company's Tesla GPUs are widely deployed to accelerate applications. "Most of the updates are available now, although Tesla and GRID users will have to wait until late January."The post NVIDIA races to patch GPU Drivers for Spectre and Meltdown appeared first on insideHPC.

Some 44 per cent of life science professionals are using or experimenting with AI and deep learning, while 94 per cent expect an increase in use of machine learning within two years. These are findings from a survey carried out by the Pistoia Alliance, a global, not for profit alliance that works to lower barriers to innovation in life sciences R&D. "Our survey data shows that while life science professionals are already exploring how AI, ML and NLP can be used – there are clear gaps in the knowledge, data, and skills, which will enable more pharma and biotech companies to achieve tangible results from AI."The post Survey shows how AI Could Revolutionize Life Sciences appeared first on insideHPC.

Karl Freund from Moor Insights gave this talk at SC17. "Researchers have begun putting Machine Learning to work solving problems that do not lend themselves well to traditional numerical analysis, or that require unaffordable computational capacity. This talk with discuss three primary approaches being used today, and will share some case studies that show significant promise of lower latency, improved accuracy, and lower cost."The post How AI is Reshaping HPC appeared first on insideHPC.