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

Today Versity Software announced the addition of Meghan McClelland as Vice President of Product. “ Versity is the only independent provider of advanced, scalable, high throughput software defined archiving storage technology products. Meghan shares our vision for delivering hardware agnostic, open, scalable, customer friendly large storage solutions."The post Versity names Meghan McClelland VP of Product appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Green Revolution Cooling announced the latest installation of its liquid immersion computing system at John Paul Catholic University (JPCU) in San Diego. The high density cluster made up of industry standard servers optimized for immersion, and built in partnership with Supermicro, exploit the enhanced performance and compelling economic value inherent with GRC liquid immersion technology. "Virtually limitless cooling, industry leading efficiency, and lower upfront cost, made it an absolute no brainer for us,” said Kevin Meziere, VP of Technology at JPCU “the ability to cool over 100kW [per rack] effectively and efficiently, gives us the ability to be more responsive to future technology trends and adopt more powerful hardware without concerns of cooling capacity and costs. Being a downtown campus every square inch counts, so the ability more densely pack equipment is a huge win.”The post JPCU Deploys Immersion-cooled Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

Today NEC Corporation launched their new high-end HPC product line, the SX-Aurora TSUBASA. "Utilizing cutting-edge chip integration technology, the new product features a complete multi-core vector processor in the form of a card-type Vector Engine (VE), which is developed based on NEC’s high-density interface technology and efficient cooling technology."The post Vectors are Back: The new NEC SX-Aurora TSUBASA Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature from Scientific Computing World, Nox Moyake describes the process of entrenching and developing HPC in South Africa. "The CHPC currently has about 1,000 users; most are in academia and others in industry. The centre supports research from across a number of domains and participates in a number of grand international projects such at the CERN and the SKA projects."The post Firing up a Continent with HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced new purpose-built platforms and services capabilities to help companies simplify the adoption of Artificial Intelligence, with an initial focus on a key subset of AI known as deep learning. “HPE’s infrastructure and software solutions are designed for ease-of-use and promise to play an important role in driving AI adoption into enterprises and other organizations in the next few years.”The post HPE Unveils a Set Artificial Intelligence Platforms and Services appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video. the House Subcommittee on Research & Technology and Subcommittee on Energy holds a hearing on American Leadership in Quantum Technology. "Quantum technology can completely transform many areas of science and a wide array of technologies, including sensors, lasers, materials science, GPS, and much more. Quantum computers have the potential to solve complex problems that are beyond the scope of today’s most powerful supercomputers. Quantum-enabled data analytics can revolutionize the development of new medicines and materials and assure security for sensitive information."The post Video: House Hearing on American Leadership in Quantum Technology appeared first on insideHPC.

Spectra Logic announced today that Spectra Certified LTO-8 Type M media along with LTO-8 drives and all supported media are now available for order. An industry first offering, LTO-8 Type M media provides a 50 percent increase in capacity from 6TB to 9TB using new LTO-7 media.The post LTO-8 Type M Tape Boosts Storage Capacity from Spectra Logic appeared first on insideHPC.

“I think for the first time we have shown a proof of concept for embedded cooling for Department of Defense and potential commercial applications,” Garimella said. “This transformative approach has great promise for use in radar electronics, as well as in high-performance supercomputers. In this paper, we have demonstrated the technology and the unprecedented performance it provides.”The post Purdue Develops Intrachip Micro-cooling for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Over at Argonne, Charlie Catlett describes how the advent of Exascale computing will enable Smart Cities designed to improve the quality of life for urban dwellers. Catlett will moderate a panel discussion on Smart Cities at the SC17 Plenary session, which kicks off the conference on Monday, Nov. 13 in Denver.The post Exascale to Enable Smart Cities appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, Dan Olds from OrionX describes Project Cyclops - a benchmarking quest to build the world's fastest single node. "We’ve done more than 150 podcasts talking about topics in high performance computing,” said Dan Olds, partner at OrionX.net Research. “It was time we actually put something together and take a run at some of these benchmarks.”The post Radio Free HPC Announces Project Cyclops for World’s Fastest Node appeared first on insideHPC.

The Beowulf Bash is returning to Denver for SC17. The event takes place at the Lucky Strike bowling alley on Monday, Nov. 13 from 9pm to 12 midnight. "Got an urge to try something new? Lucky Strike Denver has you covered. With a tantalizing menu of chef driven cuisine, hand-crafted cocktails, and live local DJs, Lucky Strike Denver breathes new life into the typical bowling experience with chic modern decor and a one-of-a-kind atmosphere."The post Beowulf Bash Returns to Denver for SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Nicolas Loubet from IBM Research describes how IBM's new 5 nanometer transistors will provide huge power savings that could enable mobile devices to run for days without a charge. "The resulting increase in performance will help accelerate cognitive computing, the Internet of Things (IoT) and other data-intensive applications delivered in the cloud."The post Video: What IBM’s 5 Nanometer Transistors Mean for You appeared first on insideHPC.

Researchers from MIT, Intel, and ETH Zurich have developed a new cache-management scheme that improves the data rate of in-package DRAM caches by 33 to 50 percent. "The bandwidth in this in-package DRAM can be five times higher than off-package DRAM,” says Xiangyao Yu, a postdoc in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and first author on the new paper. “But it turns out that previous schemes spend too much traffic accessing metadata or moving data between in- and off-package DRAM, not really accessing data, and they waste a lot of bandwidth. The performance is not the best you can get from this new technology.”The post Banshee Makes DRAM Cache up to 50 percent more efficient appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Fujitsu announced the deployment of a immersion-cooled cluster at the Japan Automobile Research Institute (JARI). The new system will be used simulate automobile collisions. "Going forward, Fujitsu has plans to offer the liquid immersion cooling system worldwide as a product for cooling IT devices in non-conductive fluid."The post Fujitsu Deploys immersion-cooled x86 Cluster for JARI in Japan appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Cray announced a partnership with Microsoft to offer dedicated Cray supercomputing systems in Microsoft Azure. Under the partnership agreement, Microsoft and Cray will jointly engage with customers to offer dedicated Cray supercomputing systems in Microsoft Azure datacenters to enable customers to run AI, advanced analytics, and modeling and simulation workloads at unprecedented scale, seamlessly connected to the Azure cloud.The post Cray Supercomputing Comes to Microsoft Azure appeared first on insideHPC.

Powerful technologies today fuel tomorrow’s HPC and High-Performance Data Analytics innovations and help organizations accelerate toward discoveries. Get ahead of the curve at the Intel HPC Developer Conference 2017 in Denver, Colorado on November 11-12.The post Register Now For the Intel HPC Developer Conference 2017 appeared first on insideHPC.

The HPC system software stack tends to be complicated, assembled out of a diverse mix of somewhat compatible open source and commercial components. This is the second article in a four-part series that explores using Intel HPC Orchestrator to solve HPC software stack management challenges. Download the full insideHPC Special Report.The post Challenges to Managing an HPC Software Stack appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Radio Free HPC podcast team announced announced plans to build what they hope will be the “fastest single-node supercomputer in the world" for the High Performance Conjugate Gradients Benchmark (HPCG). "Codenamed “Project Cyclops”, the single-node supercomputer demonstrates the computational power that individual scientists, engineers, artificial intelligence practitioners, and data scientists can deploy in their offices."The post Single Node “Cyclops” Supercomputer Looks to Set Records appeared first on insideHPC.

Pavel Shamis from ARM gave this talk at the MVAPICH User Group. "With the emerging availability HPC solutions based on ARM CPU architecture, it is important to understand how ARM integrates with the RDMA hardware and HPC network software stack. In this talk, we will overview ARM architecture and system software stack. We will discuss how ARM CPU interacts with network devices and accelerators. In addition, we will share our experience in enabling RDMA software stack and one-sided communication libraries (Open UCX, OpenSHMEM/SHMEM) on ARM and share preliminary evaluation results."The post HPC Network Stack on ARM appeared first on insideHPC.

The StartupHPC Community will host their annual meetup at SC17 in Denver next month. StartupHPC is a grass roots community for STEM- and HPC-inspired entrepreneurs, corporations, venture capital firms, academia, government agencies, and support organizations. "If you can provide informal help or formal services to the startup community, let us know and we will include you in a leaflet given out at the meetup. If you are interested in entrepreneurship or are trying to grow a startup, stop by and see who can help you accelerate your progress."The post StartupHPC Meetup Coming to Denver at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

Cleve Moler from MathWorks gave this talk at the 2017 Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing. "MATLAB is a high-performance language for technical computing. It integrates computation, visualization, and programming in an easy-to-use environment where problems and solutions are expressed in familiar mathematical notation. Typical uses include: Data analysis, exploration, and visualization."The post Video: Evolution of MATLAB appeared first on insideHPC.

D.E. Shaw Research in New York is seeking HPC System Administrators in our Job of the Week. "Our research effort is aimed at achieving major scientific advances in the field of biochemistry and fundamentally transforming the process of drug discovery. 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: HPC System Administrators at D.E. Shaw Research in New York appeared first on insideHPC.

SC17 has announced the finalists for the Gordon Bell Prize in High Performance Computing. The $10,000 prize will be presented to the winner at the conference in Denver next month. "The Gordon Bell Prize recognizes the extraordinary progress made each year in the innovative application of parallel computing to challenges in science, engineering, and large-scale data analytics. Prizes may be awarded for peak performance or special achievements in scalability and time-to-solution on important science and engineering problems."The post Gordon Bell Prize Finalists to Present their work at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

There is still time to participate in our insideHPC Survey on the intersection HPC & AI. In return, we'll send you a free report with the results and enter your name in a drawing to win one of two Echo Show devices with Alexa technology. "The Smart Home is here today. With the Echo Show, you can use your own voice to control a wide array of smart connected devices."The post There is still time to participate in our HPC & AI Survey appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Jim Mellon from Sygenta describes how the company's partnership with NCSA is helping the company answer the agricultural challenges of the future. "Together, we’re solving some of the toughest issues in agriculture today, like how to feed our rapidly growing population knowing that the amount of land we have for growing crops is finite. NCSA Industry provides the HPC resources that Syngenta’s scientists need to solve these issues, as well as an industry focus on security, performance, and availability, with the consultancy to better understand how to maximize these resources."The post HPC in Agriculture: NCSA and Syngenta’s Dynamic Partnership appeared first on insideHPC.

Scientists at the University of Basel are using the Piz Daint supercomputer at CSCS to discover interrelationships in the human genome that might simplify the search for “memory molecules” and eventually lead to more effective medical treatment for people with diseases that are accompanied by memory disturbance. "Until now, searching for genes related to memory capacity has been comparable to seeking out the proverbial needle in a haystack.”The post Searching for Human Brain Memory Molecules with the Piz Daint Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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