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

Rick Stevens gave this talk at the recent ATPESC training program. "The ATPESC program provides intensive, two weeks of training on the key skills, approaches, and tools to design, implement, and execute computational science and engineering applications on current high-end computing systems and the leadership-class computing systems of the future. As a bridge to that future, this two-week program fills the gap that exists in the training computational scientists typically receive through formal education or other shorter courses."The post A Vision for Exascale: Simulation, Data and Learning appeared first on insideHPC.

High Performance Computing is extending its reach into new areas. Not only are modeling and simulation being used more widely, but deep learning and other high performance data analytics (HPDA) applications are becoming essential tools across many disciplines. This sponsored post from Intel explores how Plymouth University's High Performance Computer Centre (HPCC) used Intel HPC Orchestrator to support diverse workloads as it recently deployed a new 1,500-core cluster.The post Supporting Diverse HPC Workloads on a Single Cluster appeared first on insideHPC.

Today, Intel announced a comprehensive hardware and software platform solution to enable faster deployment of customized field programmable gate array (FPGA)-based acceleration of networking, storage and computing workloads. "Intel is making it easier for server equipment makers such as Dell EMC to exploit FPGA technology for data acceleration as a ready-to-use platform,” said Dan McNamara, corporate vice president and general manager of Intel’s Programmable Solutions Group. “With our ecosystem partners, we are enabling the industry with point solutions with a substantial boost in performance while preserving power and cost budgets.”The post FPGAs Power New Intel Programmable Acceleration Cards appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Jon Bashor from LBNL writes that Exascale computing will accelerate the push toward clean fusion energy. "Turning this from a promising technology into a mainstream scientific tool depends critically on high-performance, high-fidelity modeling of complex processes that develop over a wide range of space and time scales."The post Exascale Computing to Accelerate Clean Fusion Energy appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the IEEE Computer Society announced the winners of the IEEE-CS Technical Consortium on HPC Award for Excellence for Early Career Researchers in High Performance Computing. The TCHPC Award recognizes up to three individuals who have made outstanding, influential, and potentially long-lasting contributions in the field of high performance computing within five years of receiving their PhD degree as of January 1 of the year of the award.The post IEEE Recognizes Three Early Career Researchers in HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Rosemary Dr Rosemary Francis from Ellexus describes why the customized nature of HPC is not a sustainable path forward for the next generation. "The downside is that many of our systems and tools are inaccessible to non-expert users. For example, deep learning is bringing more and more scientists closer towards HPC, but while they bring their knowledge, they also bring their high expectations for what they believe IT can do and not necessarily an understanding of how it works."The post How Can We Bring Apps to Racks? appeared first on insideHPC.

"This talk will explain the motivation behind dataflow computing to escape the end of frequency scaling in the push to exascale machines, introduce the Maxeler dataflow ecosystem including MaxJ code and DFE hardware, and demonstrate the application of dataflow principles to a specific HPC software package (Quantum ESPRESSO)."The post Multiscale Dataflow Computing: Competitive Advantage at the Exascale Frontier appeared first on insideHPC.

Vijay Nagarajan from the University of Edinburgh gave this talk at the ARM Research Summit. "The second annual Arm Research Summit is an academic summit to discuss future trends and disruptive technologies across all sectors of computing. The Summit includes talks from the leaders in their research fields, demonstrations, networking opportunities and the chance to interact and discuss projects with members of Arm Research."The post Scaling Up and Out with ARM Architectures appeared first on insideHPC.

The High Performance Computing for Manufacturing (HPC4Mfg) program in the Energy Department’s Advanced Manufacturing Office (AMO) announced today their intent to issue their fifth solicitation in January 2018 to fund projects that allow manufacturers to use high-performance computing resources at the Department of Energy’s national laboratories to tackle major manufacturing challenges.The post HPC4Mfg Program Seeks New Projects appeared first on insideHPC.

"Computing is one of the least diverse science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, with an under-representation of women and minorities, including African Americans and Hispanics. Leveraging this largely untapped talent pool will help address our nation’s growing demand for data scientists. Computational approaches for extracting insights from big data require the creativity, innovation, and collaboration of a diverse workforce."The post Bringing Diversity to Computational Science appeared first on insideHPC.

Karl Schulz from Intel gave this talk at the MVAPICH User Group. "There is a growing sense within the HPC community for the need to have an open community effort to more efficiently build, test, and deliver integrated HPC software components and tools. To address this need, OpenHPC launched as a Linux Foundation collaborative project in 2016 with combined participation from academia, national labs, and industry. The project's mission is to provide a reference collection of open-source HPC software components and best practices in order to lower barriers to deployment and advance the use of modern HPC methods and tools."The post OpenHPC: Project Overview and Updates appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Bright Computing announced a reseller agreement with San Diego-based SingleParticle.com. The company specializes in turn-key HPC infrastructure designed for high performance and low total cost of ownership (TCO), serving the global research community of cryo-electron microscopy (cryoEM). "With Bright, the management of an HPC cluster becomes very straightforward, empowering end users to administer their workloads, rather than relying on HPC experts," said Dr. Clara Cai, Manager at SingleParticle.com. "We are confident that with Bright’s technology, our customers can maintain our turn-key cryoEM cluster with little to no prior HPC experience.”The post Bright Computing Powers SingleParticle.com for cryo-EM appeared first on insideHPC.

Tim Barr from Cray gave this talk at the HPC User Forum in Milwaukee. "Cray’s unique history in supercomputing and analytics has given us front-line experience in pushing the limits of CPU and GPU integration, network scale, tuning for analytics, and optimizing for both model and data parallelization. Particularly important to machine learning is our holistic approach to parallelism and performance, which includes extremely scalable compute, storage and analytics."The post A Perspective on HPC-enabled AI appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Supermicro announced support for NVIDIA Tesla V100 PCI-E and V100 SXM2 GPUs on its industry leading portfolio of GPU server platforms. With our latest innovations incorporating the new NVIDIA V100 PCI-E and V100 SXM2 GPUs in performance-optimized 1U and 4U systems with next-generation NVLink, our customers can accelerate their applications and innovations to help solve the world’s most complex and challenging problems.”The post Supermicro steps up with Optimized Systems for NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs appeared first on insideHPC.

"Berkeley Lab’s tradition of team science, as well as its proximity to UC Berkeley and Silicon Valley, makes it an ideal place to work on quantum computing end-to-end,” says Jonathan Carter, Deputy Director of Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences. “We have physicists and chemists at the lab who are studying the fundamental science of quantum mechanics, engineers to design and fabricate quantum processors, as well as computer scientists and mathematicians to ensure that the hardware will be able to effectively compute DOE science.”The post Sowing Seeds of Quantum Computation at Berkeley Lab appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Penguin Computing announced strategic support for the field of artificial intelligence through availability of its servers based on the highly-advanced NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU accelerator, powered by the NVIDIA Volta GPU architecture. "Deep learning, machine learning and artificial intelligence are vital tools for addressing the world’s most complex challenges and improving many aspects of our lives,” said William Wu, Director of Product Management, Penguin Computing. “Our breadth of products covers configurations that accelerate various demanding workloads – maximizing performance, minimizing P2P latency of multiple GPUs and providing minimal power consumption through creative cooling solutions.”The post Penguin Computing Launches NVIDIA Tesla V100-based Servers appeared first on insideHPC.

Today AMAX.AI launched the [SMART]Rack AI Machine Learning cluster, an all-inclusive rackscale platform is maximized for performance featuring up to 96x NVIDIA Tesla P40, P100 or V100 GPU cards, providing well over 1 PetaFLOP of compute power per rack. "The [SMART]Rack AI is revolutionary to Deep Learning data centers," said Dr. Rene Meyer, VP of Technology, AMAX. "Because it not only provides the most powerful application-based computing power, but it expedites DL model training cycles by improving efficiency and manageability through integrated management, network, battery and cooling all in one enclosure."The post AMAX.AI Unveils [SMART]Rack Machine Learning Cluster appeared first on insideHPC.

Today IBM announced the Integrated Analytics System, a new unified data system designed to give users fast, easy access to advanced data science capabilities and the ability to work with their data across private, public or hybrid cloud environments. "Today’s announcement is a continuation of our aggressive strategy to make data science and machine learning more accessible than ever before and to help organizations like AMC, begin harvesting their massive data volumes – across infrastructures – for insight and intelligence,” said Rob Thomas, General Manager, IBM Analytics.The post IBM Moves Data Science Forward with Integrated Analytics System appeared first on insideHPC.

Adam Moody from LLNL presented this talk at the MVAPICH User Group. "High-performance computing is being applied to solve the world's most daunting problems, including researching climate change, studying fusion physics, and curing cancer. MPI is a key component in this work, and as such, the MVAPICH team plays a critical role in these efforts. In this talk, I will discuss recent science that MVAPICH has enabled and describe future research that is planned. I will detail how the MVAPICH team has responded to address past problems and list the requirements that future work will demand."The post Video: How MVAPICH & MPI Power Scientific Research appeared first on insideHPC.

This year, OpenMP*, the widely used API for shared memory parallelism supported in many C/C++ and Fortran compilers, turns 20. OpenMP is a great example of how hardware and software vendors, researchers, and academia, volunteering to work together, can successfully design a specification that benefits the entire developer community.The post OpenMP at 20 Moving Forward to 5.0 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the 2017 CGSF Review Meeting, Barbara Helland from the Department of Energy presents: With Exascale Looming, this is an Exciting Time for Computational Science. "Helland was also a presenter this week at the ASCR Advisory Committee Meeting, where she disclosed that the Aurora 21 Supercomputer coming to Argonne in 2021 will indeed be an exascale machine."The post With Exascale Looming, this is an Exciting Time for Computational Science appeared first on insideHPC.

Today NVIDIA and its systems partners Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM and Supermicro today unveiled more than 10 servers featuring NVIDIA Volta architecture-based Tesla V100 GPU accelerators -- the world's most advanced GPUs for AI and other compute-intensive workloads. "Volta systems built by our partners will ensure that enterprises around the world can access the technology they need to accelerate their AI research and deliver powerful new AI products and services," said Ian Buck, vice president and general manager of Accelerated Computing at NVIDIA.The post Server Vendors Announce NVIDIA Volta Systems for Accelerated AI appeared first on insideHPC.

Today EPSRC in the UK announced the 10 winners of the recent ARCHER Best-Use Travel Competition. The competition aimed to identify the best scientific use of ARCHER, the UK’s national supercomputing facility, within the arena of the engineering and physical sciences. "As we see the increasing need for high performance computing to tackle today’s complex scientific questions, we recognize the need to encourage today’s young researchers to bring their skills to the world," said Dr. Eddie Clarke, EPSRC’s Contract Manager for ARCHER. "The winners of these awards have shown ability, enthusiasm and real skill in their research and these prizes will help them work together with partners overseas to benefit science in the UK.”The post EPSRC Recognizes Young Scientists using ARCHER Supercomputing Facility appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Brad McCredie from IBM writes that launch of Volta GPUs from NVIDIA heralds a new era of AI. "We’re excited about the launch of NVIDIA’s Volta GPU accelerators. Together with the NVIDIA NVLINK “information superhighway” at the core of our IBM Power Systems, it provides what we believe to be the closest thing to an unbounded platform for those working in machine learning and deep learning and those dealing with very large data sets."The post No speed limit on NVIDIA Volta with rise of AI appeared first on insideHPC.

Vineeth Ram from HPE gave this talk at the HPC User Forum in Milwaukee. "Organizations across all sectors are putting Big Data to work. They are optimizing their IT operations and enhancing the way they communicate, learn, and grow their businesses in order to harness the full power of artificial intelligence (AI). Backed by high performance computing technologies, AI is revolutionizing the world as we know it—from web searches, digital assistants, and translations; to diagnosing and treating diseases; to powering breakthroughs in agriculture, manufacturing, and electronic design automation."The post Accelerate Innovation and Insights with HPC and AI appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Panasas announced that the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s (SFTC) Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in the UK has expanded its JASMIN super-data-cluster with an additional 1.6 petabytes of Panasas ActiveStor storage, bringing total storage capacity to 20PB. This expansion required the formation of the largest realm of Panasas storage worldwide, which is managed by a single systems administrator. Thousands of users worldwide find, manipulate and analyze data held on JASMIN, which processes an average of 1-3PB of data every day.The post Panasas Upgrades JASMIN Super-Data-Cluster Facility to 20PB appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Bright Computing announced that Bright Cluster Manager 8.0 now integrates with IBM Power Systems. "The integration of Bright Cluster Manager 8.0 with IBM Power Systems has created an important new option for users running complex workloads involving high-performance data analytics,” said Sumit Gupta, VP, HPC, AI & Machine Learning, IBM Cognitive Systems. “Bright Computing’s emphasis on ease-of-use for Linux-based clusters within public, private and hybrid cloud environments speaks to its understanding that while data is becoming more complicated, the management of its workloads must remain accessible to a changing workforce.”The post Bright Computing Announces Integration with IBM Power Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

In this RichReport slidecast, James Coomer from DDN presents an overview of the Infinite Memory Engine IME. "IME is a scale-out, flash-native, software-defined, storage cache that streamlines the data path for application IO. IME interfaces directly to applications and secures IO via a data path that eliminates file system bottlenecks. With IME, architects can realize true flash-cache economics with a storage architecture that separates capacity from performance."The post Infinite Memory Engine: HPC in the FLASH Era appeared first on insideHPC.

Today GTC China, NVIDIA made a series of announcements around Deep Learning, and GPU-accelerated computing for Hyperscale datacenters. "Demand is surging for technology that can accelerate the delivery of AI services of all kinds. And NVIDIA’s deep learning platform — which the company updated Tuesday with new inferencing software — promises to be the fastest, most efficient way to deliver these services."The post NVIDIA Brings Deep Learning to Hyperscale at GTC China appeared first on insideHPC.

Cloud adoption is accelerating at the blink of an eye, easing the burden of managing data-rich workloads for enterprises big and small. Yet, common myths and misconceptions about the hybrid cloud are delaying enterprises from reaping the benefits. "In this article, we will debunk five of the top most commonly believed myths that keep companies from strengthening their infrastructure with a hybrid approach."The post Common Myths Stalling Organizations From Cloud Adoption appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Nimbix announced the immediate availability of a new high-performance storage platform in the Nimbix Cloud specifically designed for the demands of artificial intelligence and deep learning applications and workflows. "As enterprises, researchers and startups begin to invest in GPU-accelerated artificial intelligence technologies and workflows, they are realizing that data is a big part of this challenge,” said Steve Hebert, CEO of Nimbix. “With the new storage platform, we are helping our customers achieve performance that breaks through the bottlenecks of commodity or traditional platforms and does so with a turnkey deep learning cloud offering.”The post Nimbix Launches High Speed Cloud Storage for AI and Deep Learning appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Cray announced it has completed the previously announced transaction and strategic partnership with Seagate centered around the addition of the ClusterStor high-performance storage business. “As a pioneer in providing large-scale storage systems for supercomputers, it’s fitting that Cray will take over the ClusterStor line.”The post Cray Assimilates ClusterStor from Seagate appeared first on insideHPC.

The CENATE Proving Ground for HPC Technologies at PNNL has named Kevin Barker as their new Director. "The goal of CENATE is to evaluate innovative and transformational technologies that will enable future DOE leadership class computing systems to accelerate scientific discovery," said PNNL's Laboratory Director Steven Ashby. "We will partner with major computing companies and leading researchers to co-design and test the leading-edge components and systems that will ultimately be used in future supercomputing platforms."The post Kevin Barker to Lead CENATE Proving Ground for HPC Technologies appeared first on insideHPC.

Scalability of scientific applications is a major focus of the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP) and in that vein, a project known as IDEAS-ECP, or Interoperable Design of Extreme-scale Application Software, is also being scaled up to deliver insight on software development to the research community.The post IDEAS Program Fostering Better Software Development for Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.

Computing Pioneer Gordon Bell will share insights and inspiration at SC17 in Denver. "We are honored to have the legendary Gordon Bell speak at SC17," said Conference Chair Bernd Mohr, from Germany's Jülich Supercomputing Centre. "The prize he established has helped foster the rapid adoption of new paradigms, given recognition for specialized hardware, as well as rewarded the winners' tremendous efforts and creativity - especially in maximizing the application of the ever-increasing capabilities of parallel computing systems. It has been a beacon for discovery and making the 'might be possible' an actual reality."The post Computing Pioneer Gordon Bell to Present at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

UC Berkeley professor Kathy Yelick presented this talk at the 2017 ACM Europe Conference. "Yelick's keynote lecture focused on the exciting opportunities that High Performance Computing presents, the need for advanced in algorithms and mathematics to advance along with the system performance, and how the variety of workloads will stress the different aspects of exascale hardware and software systems."The post Kathy Yelick Presents: Breakthrough Science at the Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at China’s massive upgrade of the Tianhe-2A supercomputer to 95 Petaflops peak performance. "As detailed in a new 21-page report by Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee, the upgrade should nearly double the performance of the system, which is currently ranked at #2 on TOP500."The post Radio Free HPC Looks at China’s 95 Petaflop Tianhe-2A Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

"Understanding and predicting material performance under extreme environments is a foundational capability at Los Alamos,” said David Teter, Materials Science and Technology division leader at Los Alamos. “We are well suited to apply our extensive materials capabilities and our high-performance computing resources to industrial challenges in extreme environment materials, as this program will better help U.S. industry compete in a global market.”The post LANL Steps Up to HPC for Materials Program appeared first on insideHPC.

Abhinav Vishnu from PNNL gave this talk at the MVAPICH User Group. "Deep Learning (DL) is ubiquitous. Yet leveraging distributed memory systems for DL algorithms is incredibly hard. In this talk, we will present approaches to bridge this critical gap. Our results will include validation on several US supercomputer sites such as Berkeley's NERSC, Oak Ridge Leadership Class Facility, and PNNL Institutional Computing."The post Scaling Deep Learning Algorithms on Extreme Scale Architectures appeared first on insideHPC.

Deep Learning was recently scaled to obtain 15PF performance on the Cori supercomputer at NERSC. Cori Phase II features over 9600 KNL processors. It can significantly impact how we do computing and what computing can do for us. In this talk, I will discuss some of the application-level opportunities and system-level challenges that lie at the heart of this intersection of traditional high performance computing with emerging data-intensive computing.The post SC17 Session Preview: Dr. Pradeep Dubey on AI & The Virtuous Cycle of Compute appeared first on insideHPC.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota are using Argonne supercomputers to to look for new ways to reduce the noise produced by jet engines. Among the loudest sources of human-made noise that exist, jet engines can produce sound in excess of 130 decibels. "The University of Minnesota team developed a new method based on input-output analysis that can predict both the downstream noise and the sideline noise. While it was thought that the sideline noise was random, the input-output modes show coherent structure in the jet that is connected to the sideline noise, such that it can be predicted and controlled."The post Supercomputing Jet Noise for a Quieter World appeared first on insideHPC.

Gabriel Broner from Rescale gave this talk at the HPC User Forum. "HPC has transitioned from unique and proprietary designs, to clusters of many dual-CPU Intel nodes. Vendors’ products are now differentiated more by packaging, density, and cooling than the uniqueness of the architecture. In parallel, cloud computing has gained momentum in the larger IT industry. Intel is now selling more processors to run in the cloud than in company-owned facilities, and cloud is starting to drive innovation and efficiencies at a rate faster than on premises."The post Video: Will HPC Move to the Cloud? appeared first on insideHPC.

Is your organization looking to hire HPC talent? Be sure to book a table at the SC17 Student/Post Doc Job Fair. "This face-to-face event will be held from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 15, in rooms 702-704-706 in the Colorado Convention Center. The Student/Postdoc Job Fair is open to all students and postdocs attending SC17, giving them an opportunity to meet with potential employers."The post Hiring? Sign up for the SC17 Student/Post Doc Job Fair appeared first on insideHPC.

PSSC Labs will work with BSI to create truly, turn-key HPC clusters, servers and storage solutions. PSSC Labs has already delivered several hundred computing platforms for worldwide genomics and bioinformatics research. Utilizing the PowerWulf HPC Cluster as a base solution platform, PSSC Labs and BSI can customize individual components for a specific end user’s research goals.The post PSSC Labs to Power Biosoft Devices for Genetics Research appeared first on insideHPC.

The Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing (PC²) has been selected by Intel to host a computer cluster that uses Intel’s Xeon processor with its Arria 10 FPGA software development platform." The availability of these systems allows us to further expand our leadership in this area and – as a next step – bring Intel FPGA accelerators from the lab to HPC production systems,” says Prof. Dr. Christian Plessl, director of the Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing, who is been active in this research area for almost two decades."The post Intel awards Paderborn University a Hybrid Cluster with Arria 10 FPGAs appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Cray announced the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) has awarded the Company a contract valued at more than $48 million for a Cray CS500 cluster supercomputer. The 128-rack system, which includes Intel Xeon Scalable processors and Intel Xeon Phi processors, will be the largest supercomputer in South Korea and will provide supercomputing services for universities, research institutes, and industries. "Our supercomputing division is focused on maximizing research performance while significantly reducing research duration and costs by building a top-notch supercomputing infrastructure,” said Pillwoo Lee, General Director, KISTI. “Cray’s proficiency in designing large and complex high-performance computing systems ensures our researchers can now apply highly-advanced HPC cluster technologies towards resolving scientific problems using the power of Cray supercomputers.”The post KISTI in South Korea orders up a Cray CS500 Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the good folks at the Google Compute Platform announced the availability of NVIDIA GPUs in the Cloud for multiple geographies. Cloud GPUs can accelerate workloads such as machine learning training and inference, geophysical data processing, simulation, seismic analysis, molecular modeling, genomics and many more high performance compute use cases. "Today, we're happy to make some massively parallel announcements for Cloud GPUs. First, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) gets another performance boost with the public launch of NVIDIA P100 GPUs in beta.The post NVIDIA P100 GPUs come to Google Cloud Platform appeared first on insideHPC.

"BigDL’s efficient large-scale distributed deep learning framework, built on Apache Spark, expands the accessibility of deep learning to a broader range of big data users and data scientists,” said Michael Greene, Vice President, Software and Services Group, General Manager, System Technologies and Optimization, Intel Corporation. “The integration with GigaSpaces’ in-memory insight platform, InsightEdge, unifies fast-data analytics, artificial intelligence, and real-time applications in one simplified, affordable, and efficient analytics stack.”The post GigaSpaces Simplifies Artificial Intelligence Development with Intel BigDL appeared first on insideHPC.

In this RichReport slidecast, Dr. Nick New from Optalysys describes how the company's optical processing technology delivers accelerated performance for FFTs and Bioinformatics. "Our prototype is on track to achieve game-changing improvements to process times over current methods whilst providing high levels of accuracy that are associated with the best software processes.”The post Slidecast: How Optalysys Accelerates FFTs with Optical Processing appeared first on insideHPC.

Earlier this week, U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry announced a new high-performance computing initiative that will help U.S. industry accelerate the development of new or improved materials for use in severe environments. "The High Performance Computing for Materials Program will provide opportunities for our industry partners to access the high-performance computing capabilities and expertise of DOE’s national labs as they work to create and improve technologies that combat extreme conditions,” said Secretary Perry.The post New HPC for Materials Program to Help American Industry appeared first on insideHPC.