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

In this video from SC17 in Denver, Michael Klemm from the OpenMP ARB describes how the OpenMP programming community is moving forward to new levels of scalable performance. The OpenMP Architecture Review Board (ARB) is seeking feedback on the newly released Technical Report 6.The post OpenMP ARB Releases New Technical Report and Asks for Feedback appeared first on insideHPC.

A valuable feature of Intel Advisor is its Roofline Analysis Chart, which provides an intuitive and powerful visualization of actual performance measured against hardware-imposed performance ceilings. Intel Advisor's vector parallelism optimization analysis and memory-versus-compute roofline analysis, working together, offer a powerful tool for visualizing an application’s complete current and potential performance profile on a given platform.The post A New Way to Visualize Performance Optimization Tradeoffs appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Jay Breakstone and Sumit Puri from Liqid describe the company's innovative composable infrastructure technology for HPC. "Liqid Grid enables once-static infrastructure to scale on demand to effectively manage the explosion of data associated with cloud, enterprise, HPC and AI, as well as other emerging, high-value, data-intensive applications."The post Liqid steps up with Composable Infrastructure for HPC at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

At SC17 in Denver, Cavium showcased a wide variety of ThunderX2 Arm-based server platforms for high performance computing. "ThunderX2 server SoC integrates fully out-of-order, high-performance custom cores supporting single and dual-socket configurations. It is optimized to drive high computational performance delivering outstanding memory bandwidth and memory capacity. The new line of ThunderX2 processors includes multiple SKUs for both scale up and scale out applications and is fully compliant with Armv8-A architecture specifications as well as the Arm Server Base System Architecture and Arm Server Base Boot Requirements standards."The post Cavium Showcases ThunderX2 Arm-based Server Platforms for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC17, Molly Presley from Quantum describes how the company's high performance storage systems power HPC. "So why have an autonomous car at a Supercomputing show? The answer is Big Data. The Autonomous Stuff vehicle in this video is actually a rolling software development platform equipped with sensors that generate a whopping 30 Terabytes of data per day. Now just imagine if there were millions of vehicles on the road generating this kind of data. Only HPC could deal with that problem at scale. Companies like Quantum are stepping up to help solve this big data problem, both in the vehicle, on the edge, and in the datacenter."The post Quantum Drives High Performance Storage at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

The IEEE Cluster 2018 conference has issued it Call for Papers. The event takes place September 10-14, 2018 in Belfast UK. "Following the successes of previous IEEE Cluster conferences, for IEEE Cluster 2018, which will be held September 10-14, 2018 in Belfast UK, we again solicit high-quality original work that advances the state-of-the-art in clusters and closely related fields. All papers will be rigorously peer-reviewed for their originality, technical depth and correctness, potential impact, relevance to the conference, and quality of presentation."The post Call for Papers: IEEE Cluster 2018 in Belfast appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the Intel HPC Developer Conference, Erik Lindahl from Stockholm University describes the challenges of cryo-EM, a technique that fires beams of electrons at proteins that have been frozen in solution, to deduce the biomolecules’ structure. "Structural biology is going through a revolution where cryo-EM now determine 3D structures from 100,000s of noisy images, but it relies on very large computations. I will present our work with Intel to accelerate the RELION program with x86 SIMD, TBB, and MKL to provide outstanding performance."The post Accelerating Cryo-EM with Intel Technologies appeared first on insideHPC.

The 9th Irish Supercomputer List was released today. For the first time, Ireland has four computers ranked on the Top500 and Ireland is now ranked number one globally in terms of number of Top500 supercomputers per capita.The post Ireland Reaches #1 in TOP500 Supercomputers per capita appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC17, Ken King describes how new Power9 compute nodes will power the next generation of the world's most powerful Coral supercomputers at ORNL and LLNL. "We’re pleased to announce that we are delivering on our project, with our next-generation IBM Power Systems with NVIDIA Volta GPUs being deployed at Oak Ridge and Lawrence Livermore National Labs."The post IBM Readies Power9 Coral Supercomputers at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

The popularity of “better than human” classification on tasks that people do well (such as recognizing faces, Internet image search, self-driving cars, etcetera) has reached a mass audience. "What has been lacking is coverage that machine learning is also fantastic at performing tasks that humans tend to do poorly."The post AI and HPC: Inferencing, Platforms & Infrastructure appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Jeff Kuehn from LANL, Pavel Shamis from ARM, and Gilad Shainer from Mellanox describe progress on the new UCF consortium, a collaboration between industry, laboratories, and academia to create an open-source production grade communication framework for data centric and high-performance applications.The post UCX and UCF Projects for Exascale Move Forward at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

Researchers are using HPC systems at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center to predict potential threats to air traffic posed by Antarctic volcanoes. "Antarctic volcanoes might pose a higher threat than previously considered. A research focused on the potential impacts of ash dispersal and fallout from Deception Island highlights how ash clouds entrapped in circumpolar upper-level winds have the potential to reach lower latitudes and disrupt Austral hemisphere air traffic. The study has been published today in the Nature group journal, Scientific Reports."The post Video: BSC Simulations Predict Air Traffic Disruption from Antarctic Volcanic Ash appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Gilad Shainer from Mellanox describes the company's advanced interconnect technologies that were on display at SC17 in Denver. "Mellanox is leading industry innovation by providing the highest throughput and lowest latency HDR 200Gb/s InfiniBand and Ethernet solutions available today, with a clear roadmap for tomorrow."The post Video: Mellanox Takes HPC Interconnects to the Next Level at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today HPE announced a collaboration with the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge to accelerate new discoveries in the mathematical sciences. This includes partnering with Stephen Hawking’s Centre for Theoretical Cosmology (COSMOS) to understand the origins and structure of the universe. Leveraging the HPE Superdome Flex in-memory computing platform, the COSMOS group will search for clues hiding in massive data sets—spanning 14 billion years of information—that could unlock the secrets of the early universe and black holes.The post HPE Superdome Flex to power Stephen Hawking’s COSMOS Research Group appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC17 in Denver, Brian Gold from Pure Storage describes how the company's innovative FlashBlade Systems speed up I/O for AI & HPC workloads. "From scientific research and movie rendering to artificial intelligence, applications push the limits on thousands of GPU cores or thousands of CPU servers. Parallel compute demands parallel storage. FlashBlade is the industry’s first all-flash storage purpose-built for modern analytics – architected from the ground-up to deliver a powerful cloud-era data platform that’s fast, big, and simple."The post Video: Pure Storage Speeds I/O for AI & HPC Workloads at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

To meet some of the biggest HPC software challenges, representatives from more than 25 academic, research, and commercial organizations formed a community project at the end of 2015: OpenHPC. This is the third article in a four-part series that explores going beyond OpenHPC with Intel HPC Orchestrator. Download the full insideHPC Special Report.The post Exploring the OpenHPC Solution for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team goes over the results of the SC17 Student Cluster Competition. This year, Nanyang Technological University from Singapore took the Top Prize. "In this competition, student teams design and build small clusters, with hardware and software vendor partners, learn designated scientific applications, apply optimization techniques for their chosen architectures, and compete in a non-stop, 48-hour challenge, at the SC conference."The post Radio Free HPC wraps up the SC17 Student Cluster Competition appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Nuance Communications announced that they are working together to bring the power of machine learning to radiologists and data scientists working across the entire healthcare system. "We stand on the edge of a new age in radiology, where artificial intelligence and machine learning will become a necessity in every radiologist's essential toolkit,” said Dr. Luciano Prevedello, Division Chief of Medical Imaging Informatics at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. “It is critical for the state of AI adoption and its potential to improve patient outcomes and operations that AI-based tools are more than just available – they must be valuable, validated and valued by the institution of radiology.”The post NVIDIA and Nuance to Advance AI for Radiology appeared first on insideHPC.

Argonne National Laboratory is collaborating with HPE to provide system software expertise and a development ecosystem for a future high-performance computing system based on 64-bit ARM processors. "Argonne is working with HPE to evaluate early versions of chipmaker Cavium ARM ThunderX2 64-bit processors for the ARM ecosystem. Argonne is interested in evaluating the ARM ecosystem as a cost-effective and power-effective alternative to x86 architectures based on Intel CPUs, which currently dominate the high-performance computing market."The post Argonne to Install Comanche System to Explore ARM Technology for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC17, Josh Mora describes how the new AMD EPYC Processors deliver huge memory bandwidth and application performance for HPC. "EPYC strikes the perfect balance of cores/threads, memory, I/O bandwidth and security to deliver excellent performance for many High Performance Computing (HPC) workloads. AMD’s state-of-the-art GPUs combined with EPYC provide excellent solutions for your most demanding HPC applications."The post AMD steps up with EPYC Processors for HPC at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Bill Mannel gives a booth tour that highlights some of the amazing HPC innovations on display in the HPE booth at SC17. "HPE’s first ARM-based HPC system brings more choice and flexibility to HPC customers. The Apollo 70, using Cavium’s 64-bit ARMv8-A ThunderX2 Server Processor, is purpose-built for memory intensive HPC workloads and delivers up to 33 percent more memory bandwidth than today’s industry standard servers."The post Video: HPE Showcases Innovation for HPC at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory describe Sierra, LLNL’s next-generation supercomputer. "The IBM-built advanced technology high-performance system is projected to provide four to six times the sustained performance and be at least seven times more powerful than LLNL’s current most advanced system, Sequoia, with a 125 petaFLOP/s peak. At approximately 11 megawatts, Sierra will also be about five times more power efficient than Sequoia."The post Video: Introducing the 125 Petaflop Sierra Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the International Workshop on Advanced Computing and Analysis Techniques in Physics Research, Dr. Colin P. Williams from D-Wave Systems presents: Quantum Computing for the Real World Today. His focus for the talk centers around using quantum computing for machine learning. "We expect that quantum computing will lead to breakthroughs in science, engineering, modeling and simulation, healthcare, financial analysis, optimization, logistics, and national defense applications."The post Video: Quantum Computing for the Real World Today appeared first on insideHPC.

Penguin Computing has announced plans to deploy more than 11,500 cores of the latest Intel Xeon Scalable processor in their Penguin Computing On-Demand HPC cloud. “The latest Intel Xeon Scalable processor expansion will provide an ideal compute environment for MPI workloads that can leverage thousands of cores for computation. We have significant customer demand for POD HPC cloud in applicable areas like high-resolution weather forecasting and computational fluid dynamics, including solutions from software partners like ANSYS, Flow Science and CD-adapco.”The post Intel Xeon Scalable Processors come to Penguin on Demand HPC Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC17 in Denver, Dan Reed moderates a panel discussion on HPC Software for Energy Efficiency. "This panel will explore what HPC software capabilities were most helpful over the past years in improving HPC system energy efficiency? It will then look forward; asking in what layers of the software stack should a priority be put on introducing energy-awareness; e.g., runtime, scheduling, applications? What is needed moving forward? Who is responsible for that forward momentum?"The post SC17 Panel: Energy Efficiency Gains From Software appeared first on insideHPC.

Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland is seeking an IT Engineer in our Job of the Week. "The IT Engineer will serve as lead architect to manage, develop and design high-level systems. The position shares responsibility for the research computing services provided to the university community, which leverages the university's investment in cyberinfrastructure. This includes identifying appropriate computational platforms (locally and externally) for research projects and diagnosing and resolving issues in the configuration, installation, tuning, and management of very large distributed and tightly coupled computer systems, based on the Linux OS."The post Job of the Week: IT Engineer at Case Western Reserve University appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Excelero announced that SciNet, Canada's largest supercomputer center, has deployed Excelero's NVMesh server SAN for the highly efficient, cost-effective storage behind a new supercomputer at the University of Toronto. "For SciNet, NVMesh is an extremely cost-effective method of achieving unheard-of burst buffer bandwidth," said Dr. Daniel Gruner, chief technical officer, SciNet High Performance Computing Consortium. "By adding commodity flash drives and NVMesh software to compute nodes, and to a low-latency network fabric that was already provided for the supercomputer itself, NVMesh provides redundancy without impacting target CPUs. This enables standard servers to go beyond their usual role in acting as block targets – the servers now can also act as file servers."The post Excelero NVMesh powers Canada’s new SciNet Petascale Storage Facility appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC17 in Denver, Steve Branton from Asetek describes the company's wide array of liquid cooling solutions for HPC. At the Asetek booth, the company displayed liquid cooling from recently announced OEMs and channel partners in addition to cooling solutions for the latest Intel, Nvidia and IBM CPUs, accelerators and GPUs. “We are seeing higher wattage HPC nodes that require liquid cooling as they cannot be cooled with air. Wattage density is only going to get higher with the inclusion of machine learning and AI across the HPC spectrum.”The post Asetek Rides the Wave of Liquid Cooling for HPC at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

Last week at SC17, Univa announced its Univa Grid Engine distributed resource management system is powering the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics’ (WHG) high performance computing environment. WHG is a research institute within the Nuffield Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford. The Centre is an international leader in genetics, genomics, statistics and structural biology with more than 400 researchers and 70 administrative and support personnel. WHG’s mission is to advance the understanding of genetically-related conditions through a broad range of multi-disciplinary research.The post Univa Grid Engine Powers University of Oxford Human Genetics Centre appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the Altair Tiki Bar at SC17, Bill Nitzberg describes the company's open sources solutions for HPC system management. "PBS Professional automates job scheduling, management, monitoring and reporting, and is the trusted solution for complex Top500 systems as well as smaller cluster owners."The post Video: Altair Serves Up HPC with PBS Pro at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature from Scientific Computing World, David Yip, HPC and Storage Business Development at OCF, provides his take on the place of GPU technology in HPC. "Using GPUs in the HPC datacenter in place of CPUs can dramatically increase the power requirements needed, but if your computational performance goes through the roof, then I’d argue it’s a trade-off worth making."The post For HPC and Deep Learning, GPUs are here to stay appeared first on insideHPC.

Green Revolution Cooling has announced plans to deliver a custom GPU-based cluster to the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). Our goal is to make HPC more affordable. Offering lower cost, energy dense servers that take full advantage of our highly efficient CarnotJet cooling system is a huge benefit to our customers,” said Larry Stone, VP of Engineering at GRC “we are seeing a growing number of people opt for servers designed for immersion, over traditional big brand OEM hardware.”The post GRC Builds GPU-Based Immersion Cluster for TACC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Geoff Lyon from CoolIT Systems describes the company's innovative liquid-cooling solutions for HPC. "Liquid cooling in the data center continues to grow in adoption and delivers more compelling ROIs. Our collaboration with OEM partners such as Dell EMC, HPE, Intel and STULZ provides further evidence that the future of the data center is destined for liquid cooling,” said Geoff Lyon, CEO and CTO at CoolIT Systems.The post CoolIT Systems Showcases OEM & Enterprise Data Center Liquid Cooling Solutions at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

Last week at SC17, ThinkParQ announced immediate availability of the BeeGFS version 7.0 release candidate. While previous versions of BeeGFS are already running on systems of all kinds and sizes around the globe (including burst buffers, hyper-converged setups and of course dedicated high-performance enterprise storage), this new major release introduces several features that were desired by the BeeGFS community.The post New BeeGFS 7.0 Delivers All-Flash Performance at Spinning Disk Price appeared first on insideHPC.

"Traditional methods of moving data are expensive and very time-consuming. These processes often negate the value-add that the cloud offers. Moving all of your data to the cloud is not necessary in order to use cloud compute for an individual application’s workload. In fact, you don’t need to move large data sets at all. Cloud caching filers can often take on the data required to run each job, putting the data migration portion all onto this caching appliance."The post Moving HPC Workloads to the Cloud with Avere Systems at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

"InfiniBand being the preferred interconnect for new HPC systems shows the increasing demand for the performance it can deliver. Its place at #1 and #4 are excellent examples of that performance,” said Bill Lee, IBTA Marketing Working Group Co-Chair. “Besides of delivering world-leading performance and scalability, InfiniBand guarantees backward and forward compatibility, ensuring users highest return on investment and future proofing their data centers.”The post InfiniBand Accelerates 77 Percent of New HPC Systems on the TOP500 appeared first on insideHPC.

"Are you operating a small to medium sized HPC Center? Interested in how others are managing their resources with open source tools and low risk/low overhead hardware? Questions about academic service centers and cost recovery models? Or just want to talk shop with other admins and center managers? This the the session for you! Come visit with Steve and Gowtham, they’re in the trenches with you, always on the lookout for innovative and interest ways of managing resources and sharing their experiences along the way. We’re open to discussing anything HPC for the rest of us!"The post Video: Share your know-how with “HPC for the Rest of Us” appeared first on insideHPC.

Today DDN announced that the Oakforest-PACS system JCAHPC in Japan, which uses DDN’s Infinite Memory Engine (IME), has been named the first annual IO500 winner. "The goal of the IO500 is to create a suite of I/O benchmarks that allow comparison of storage systems and is similar in concept to the Top500 for computing systems. Storage systems are ranked according to the combination of a set of I/O benchmarks that are designed to represent a mix of applications and real-world workloads."The post JCAHPC in Japan Wins Inaugural IO500 Award with help from DDN appeared first on insideHPC.

Last week at SC17, Nallatech showcased their FPGA solutions for high-performance computing, low latency network acceleration, and data analytics. "FPGAs are being deployed in volume across a range of on-premise platforms and cloud infrastructure to achieve a step-change in application performance and energy-efficiency above and beyond what can be achieved using conventional processor technologies” said Craig Petrie, VP Business Development of FPGA Solutions at Nallatech. “We’re excited to be showcasing our new OpenCL-programmable ‘520’ product range featuring Intel Stratix-10 FPGAs. These server-qualified accelerator products have been engineered to cost-effectively solve demanding co-processing and real-time data ingest and enrichment applications."The post Nallatech Showcases Next Generation FPGA Accelerators at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

Last week at SC17, SkyScale announced its partnership with Rescale, the foremost cloud simulation and HPC solution provider, and availability of NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU accelerators on its GPU as a Service cloud platform. Enhancing SkyScale’s dedicated, cloud-based ultra-fast multi-GPU platforms for deep learning and HPC applications, the Tesla V100 offers the performance of 100 CPUs in a single GPU—enabling data scientists, researchers, and engineers to tackle the most difficult deep learning and HPC challenges.The post SkyScale HPC Cloud steps up with Volta GPUs appeared first on insideHPC.

At SC17 last week, Nyriad Limited demonstrated their company's first commercial product, Nsulate, a GPU-accelerated storage solution that enables increased storage resilience while reducing the storage power requirements by over 50 percent. "Using a GPU as a storage controller inserts an enormous amount of general purpose processing power directly into the storage pipeline, enabling modern HPC storage appliances to deliver unprecedented speed, scale, security, storage efficiency and intelligence in real-time."The post Video: Nyriad Unveils GPU-accelerated Storage Device for the Square Kilometer Array appeared first on insideHPC.

An new energy-efficient supercomputer called CoolMUC-3 has been deployed at LRZ in Germany. Developed by MEGWARE, the HPC cluster features Intel’s many-core architecture and warm-water cooled Omni-Path switches. "In the long run, we want to get rid of inefficient air-cooling completely."The post Energy-efficient CoolMUC-3 Cluster comes to LRZ in Germany appeared first on insideHPC.

NEC Deutschland GmbH has delivered an LX series supercomputer to Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), one of Germany’s leading research universities and part of the German Gauss Alliance consortium of excellence in high-performance computing. The new HPC cluster ranks 65th in the most current TOP500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world from November 2017 and 51st in the Green500 list of the most energy-efficient supercomputers.The post NEC Supercomputer at JGU in Germany Ranks #65 on TOP500 appeared first on insideHPC.

Last week at SC17, Data Direct Networks announced that The University of Tennessee, Chattanooga (UTC) has selected DDN’s GS14KX parallel file system appliance with 1.1PB of storage to replace its aging big data storage system and to support a diversifying range of data-intensive research projects. The Center of Excellence in Applied Computational Science and Engineering (SimCenter) at UTC needed a big data storage solution that could scale easily to support growing research programs focused on computational fluid dynamics (CFD), machine learning, data analytics, smart cities and molecular biology.The post DDN Powers Big Data and Machine Learning at UTC in Tennessee appeared first on insideHPC.

Last week at SC17, Hyperion Research announced that the UberCloud and the Stanford Living Heart Project have won the Hyperion Award for Innovation Excellence. "The Stanford LHP project is simulating cardiac arrhythmia, which can be an undesirable and potentially lethal side effect of drugs. The electrical activity of the heart turns chaotic, decimating its pumping function, thus diminishing the circulation of blood through the body."The post Hyperion Innovation Excellence Award goes to UberCloud and Stanford Living Heart Project appeared first on insideHPC.

Last week at SC17, Russian HPC vendor RSC Group showcased the next generation of their liquid-cooled RSC Tornado supercomputers based on Intel Xeon Scalable Processors. "RSC is demonstrating a full set of components for modern HPC computing systems of different scale with 100% direct liquid cooling in ‘hot water’ mode, including high-performance RSC Tornado computing nodes based on the top-bin Intel Xeon Platinum and Intel Xeon Gold processors (part of the Intel Xeon Scalable platform), Intel Server Board S2600BP, high-speed NVMe solid state drives in high-dense М.2 format and the latest Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X Series. The RSC Tornado solution is built using 100% direct liquid cooled Intel Omni-Path Edge Switch 100 Series that ensures end-to-end efficiency of the cooling solution with ‘hot water’ and eventually the lowest possible total cost of ownership of the system."The post Russian RSC Group Joins the Intel Select Solutions for HPC Program appeared first on insideHPC.

Last week, the rhetorical one-two punch of the Intel HPC Developer Conference and Supercomputing 2017 offered global HPC aficionados new insights into the direction of advanced HPC technologies, and how those tools will empower the future of discovery and innovation. In case you missed it, here is a breakdown of all the action.The post Intel Xeon Processors and Intel Omni-Path Architecture Offer Breakthroughs for Top500 Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC17, Bruce Tulloch from BitScope describes a low-cost Rasberry Pi cluster that LANL can use to simulate large-scale supercomputers. "The BitScope Pi Cluster Modules system creates an affordable, scalable, highly parallel testbed for high-performance-computing system-software developers. The system comprises five rack-mounted BitScope Pi Cluster Modules consisting of 3,000 cores using Raspberry Pi ARM processor boards, fully integrated with network switching infrastructure."The post Video: An Affordable Supercomputing Testbed based on Rasberry Pi appeared first on insideHPC.

The School of Mines in Colorado is seeking a Computational Scientist in our Job of the Week. "The Computational Scientist works as part of the High Performance Computing Group to help Mines researchers by collaborating with other researchers and computational scientists to develop, integrate, port and tune applications to take advantage of the high performance computing capabilities at Mines."The post Job of the Week: Computational Scientist at the School of Mines appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team describes the highlights of SC17 in Denver. Highlights includes the debut of ARM hardware for HPC, a Rasberry Pie Cluster, and pervasive liquid cooling.The post Radio Free HPC Recaps SC17 in Denver appeared first on insideHPC.