High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

In this video from KAUST Live, Dr. Robert Voigt discusses his recent keynote at the HPC Saudi Conference on the topic of Educating Computational Scientists. "This talk will provide a historical perspective on the challenges of educating computational scientists based on my personal involvement over a number of years. Three decidedly different activities will be drawn on to indicate how one can successfully approach the challenge."The post Dr. Robert Voigt on Educating Computational Scientists appeared first on insideHPC.

Hyperion Research has posted the final agenda for the HPC User Forum April 17-19 in Santa Fe. Note that Hyperion Research is the new name for the former IDC HPC group.The post Agenda Posted for HPC User Forum in Santa Fe appeared first on insideHPC.

"Infiniband Virtualization allows a single Channel Adapter to present multiple transport endpoints that share the same physical port. To software, these endpoints are exposed as independent Virtual HCAs (VHCAs), and thus may be assigned to different software entities, such as VMs. VHCAs are visible to Subnet Management, and are managed just like physical HCAs. We will cover the Virtualization model, management, addressing modes, and discuss deployment considerations."The post Video: InfiniBand Virtualization appeared first on insideHPC.

"Iceotope's novel approach to liquid cooling allows us to deliver compute capability for customers with environments outside the traditional air cooled datacentre – for example a factory shop floor or an office environment where standard servers are too noisy," said Steve Reynolds, sales director at OCF. "Our partnership with Iceotope enables us to provide an alternative and innovative solution for our customers.”The post OCF in the UK Adopts Iceotope Liquid Cooling Technology appeared first on insideHPC.

E8 Storage has selected NVMe solid-state drives from HGST as the next-generation storage vendor pushes the boundaries of performance for the enterprise and software-defined cloud. According to Western Digital, Embedding HGST Ultrastar SN200 family PCIe SSDs into E8 Storage’s NVMe enclosure can deliver a 10x increase in performance, 50% lower total cost of ownership, and up to 153 terabytes in 2U.The post E8 Storage Integrates HGST Ultrastar NVMe SSDs appeared first on insideHPC.

The European PRACE initiative has issued its 15th Call for Proposals for Project Access, the second Call under the PRACE 2 program. "Applications for Project Access must use codes that have been previously tested and that demonstrate high scalability and optimization to multi-core architectures or that demonstrate a requirement for ensemble simulations that need a very large amount of CPU/GPU overall."The post Call for Proposals: PRACE 2 Project Access appeared first on insideHPC.

Xiaoyi Lu from Ohio State University presented this talk at the Open Fabrics Workshop. "Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) technology has been steadily gaining momentum for high performance interconnects such as InfiniBand. SR-IOV can deliver near native performance but lacks locality-aware communication support. This talk presents an efficient approach to building HPC clouds based on MVAPICH2 and RDMA-Hadoop with SR-IOV."The post Building Efficient HPC Clouds with MCAPICH2 and RDMA-Hadoop over SR-IOV IB Clusters appeared first on insideHPC.

DDN is helping the University of Edinburgh accelerate its genomics and other industry research. According to professor Mark Parsons, director of the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Center, DDN’s high-performance storage supports fast-growing genomics research while enabling multinational companies and smaller businesses to benefit from access to advanced technologies. “We’re entering a period of huge innovation both in HPC and storage,” he said.The post DDN Lustre Powers Genomics Research at University of Edinburgh appeared first on insideHPC.

Today ISC 2017 announced the finalists for the Hans Meuer Award. Introduced in memory of the late Dr. Hans Meuer of TOP500 fame, the award recognizes the most outstanding research paper submitted to the conference’s Research Papers Committee.The post ISC 2017 Announces Finalists for Hans Meuer Award appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Hyperion Research reports that Worldwide factory revenue for the high-performance computing technical server market grew 4.4% in full-year 2016 to a record $11.2 billion, up from $10.7 billion in 2015 and from the previous record of $11.1 billion in exceptionally strong 2012. Hyperion Research is the new name for the former IDC HPC group.The post Report: Supercomputer Growth Drives Record HPC Revenue in 2016 appeared first on insideHPC.

Los Alamos National Lab is seeking a Research Technologist in our Job of the Week. "This position will focus on research and development of novel DNA and RNA isolation and library preparation methods to accommodate library preparation requirements for a variety of NGS platforms. This includes shotgun, amplicon or other enrichment methods targeting single cell, small volume or small nucleic acid concentration samples as well as traditional samples for sequencing on Illumina, Pacbio, and MinION."The post Job of the Week: Research Technologist at LANL appeared first on insideHPC.

"The rapid growth of these systems has been driven by the value that they deliver, but the market for all-flash systems under the $100,000 price point has been slow to take off. Systems like the Seagate RealStor 5005 array, however, set a new bar for value in these price ranges by delivering up to 300,000 IOPS at sub 300 microsecond latencies and 20 terabytes of raw flash capacity in just 2U of rack space, all starting at under $50,000."The post Seagate Unveils All-Flash and Hybrid Storage Arrays appeared first on insideHPC.

The Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering has awarded its first round of Catalyst Grants, providing $75,000 each to four innovative projects in computational science. The proposals were judged on novelty, likelihood of success, potential for external funding, and potential to leverage U-M’s existing computing resources.The post Catalyst Grants Foster Innovative Projects in Computational Science appeared first on insideHPC.

Greg Casey from Dell EMC presented this talk at the OpenFabrics Workshop. "This session will focus on the new Gen-Z memory-semantic fabric. The speaker will show the audience why Gen-Z is needed, how Gen-Z operates, what is expected in first products that employ Gen-Z, and encourage participation in finalizing the Gen-Z specifications. Gen-Z will be connecting components inside of servers as well as connecting servers with pools of memory, storage, and acceleration devices through a switch environment."The post GEN-Z: An Overview and Use Cases appeared first on insideHPC.

Today IBM announced that it is the first major cloud provider to make the Nvidia Tesla P100 GPU accelerator available globally on the cloud. "As the AI era takes hold, demand continues to surge for our GPU-accelerated computing platform in the cloud,” said Ian Buck, general manager, Accelerated Computing, NVIDIA. "These new IBM Cloud offerings will provide users with near-instant access to the most powerful GPU technologies to date – enabling them to create applications to address complex problems that were once unsolvable."The post NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU Speed AI Workloads in the IBM Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Raid Inc. announced the ARI-500 High Performance Low Cost All Flash Array. "The ASIC-based architecture of the ARI-500 Series has an enormous cost advantage over other all flash array solutions, that's a differentiator in a competitive market place," said Robert Picardi, CEO of RAID Inc. "Users are able to benefit from ultra-high performance at a uniquely low cost point."The post Raid Inc. Launches ARI-500 Flash Array appeared first on insideHPC.

"Using RDMA, NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) provides the high BW and low-latency characteristics of NVMe to remote devices. Moreover, these performance traits are delivered with negligible CPU overhead as the bulk of the data transfer is conducted by RDMA. In this session, we present an overview of NVMe-oF and its implementation in Linux. We point out the main design choices and evaluate NVMe-oF performance for both Infiniband and RoCE fabrics."The post Experiences with NVMe over Fabrics appeared first on insideHPC.

The New York University Center for Urban Science and Progress will host the Advanced Computing for Competitiveness Forum on April 13. Sponsored by the U.S. Council on Competitiveness, the day-long event will look at why "To out-compete is to out-compute." The Council's landmark Advanced Computing Roundtable (ACR) - formerly the High Performance Computing (HPC) Initiative - is the preeminent forum for experts in advanced computing to set a national agenda on how such technologies should be leveraged for U.S. comptitiveness. Advanced computing includes technologies such as high performance computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT). ACR members represent industrial and commercial advanced computing users, hardware and software vendors and directors of academic and national laboratory advanced computing centers."The post NYU Hosts Advanced Computing for Competitiveness Forum on April 13 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the HPC Saudi Conference, Dr. Thomas Schulthess from the Swiss National Supercomputing Center discusses how CSCS approaches High Performance Computing. According to Schulthess, supporting legacy software is the biggest challenge for moving HPC forward. "Earlier this month, the European PRACE initiative went into Phase 2, with Switzerland becoming a new Hosting Member. As a Hosting Member, Switzerland is now making its Piz Daint supercomputer at CSCS available for cutting-edge PRACE research. The other Hosting Members are Spain, Italy, Germany and France."The post Video: Thomas Schulthess on how HPC Propels the Global Enterprise of Science appeared first on insideHPC.

Today STEM-Trek announced that Google, Inc. is a STEM-Trek Platinum supporter of the PEARC17 Student Program. The donation will increase the number of students who can participate in the Practice & Experience in Advanced Research Computing conference which will be held July 9-13 in New Orleans.The post Google becomes STEM-Trek Supporter for PEARC17 Student Program appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Silicon Mechanics announced that California Polytechnic State University is the recipient of its sixth annual Research Cluster Grant. As a result of its successful application, Cal Poly will receive a High-Performance Computing cluster with the latest high-performance processing, networking, storage and GPU technologies, valued at over $130,000 for use in demonstrated research and educational purposes going forward.The post Cal Poly Wins Silicon Mechanics Research Cluster Grant appeared first on insideHPC.

"We selected vSMP Foundation from ScaleMP as the sole available solution turning cluster hardware into an SMP; as a single machine, it allows us to distribute the jobs without using any batch/queuing system, and we only need to manage one logical entity rather than a collection of nodes," said Dr. Dirk Bockelmann of the department NMR-based Structural Biology at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry. "We are looking forward to putting vSMP Foundation to work for our Scientists.”The post Max Planck Institute Adopts ScaleMP Cluster Virtualization Software appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Adaptive Computing announces the latest release of Moab HPC Suite and related add-ons. The new release extends ease-of-use submission and workload management to new platforms by delivering a release of Viewpoint that can now work directly with either Torque or Slurm. Because of this “Open Platform” extension, other related products now automatically work with either resource manager, including remote visualization, submissions of high throughput workloads (Nitro enables tens of thousands to millions of tasks), and use of Adaptive Computing’s new Reporting & Analytics solution.The post Adaptive Computing Releases Moab HPC Suite 9.1.1 appeared first on insideHPC.

Todd Rimmer from Intel presented this talk at the OpenFabrics Workshop. “Intel Omni-Path was first released in early 2016. Omni-Path host and management software is all open sourced. This session will provide an overview of Omni-Path including some of the technical capabilities and performance results as well as some recent industry results.”The post Video: Omni-Path Status, Upstreaming, and Ongoing Work appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the week's top stories: Quantum Startup Rigetti Computing Raises $64 Million in Funding, Rex Computing has their low-power chip, and Intel is shipping their Optane SSDs.The post Radio Free HPC Looks at Quantum Startup Rigetti Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

The International Conference on HPC & Simulation has issued its Call for Papers. Also known as HPBench, the event place in July 17-21 in Genoa, Italy. "Benchmarking is an essential aspect of modern computational science, and as such, it provides a means for quantifying and comparing the performance of different computer systems. With a large combination of aspects to benchmark, all the way from the capability of a single core, to cluster configuration, and to various software configurations, the benchmarking process is more of an art than science. However, the results of this process, drive modern science and are vital for the community to draw sensible conclusions on the performance of applications and systems."The post Call for Papers: International Conference on HPC & Simulation in Genoa appeared first on insideHPC.

Yuval Degani from Mellanox presented this talk at the OpenFabrics Workshop. "In this talk, we present a Java-based, RDMA network layer for Apache Spark. The implementation optimized both the RPC and the Shuffle mechanisms for RDMA. Initial benchmarking shows up to 25% improvement for Spark Applications."The post Accelerating Apache Spark with RDMA appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Eurotech announced the Eurotech Aurora Tigon v4, the flagship product of the Eurotech hybrid HPC systems line that adds support for the second generation Intel Xeon Phi Processor. With up to 72 cores (288 threads) per CPU the Xeon Phi brings new levels of performance in the datacenter: the Tigon is one of the most powerful and power efficient supercomputers on the market, featuring up to 18.432 CPU cores and 256 Nvidia Kepler GPUs at less than 100KW per rack.The post Eurotech Unveils Aurora Tigon V4 System with Intel Xeon Phi appeared first on insideHPC.

Today French Startup Calyos launched a kickstarter funding project for the NSG S0, "the World's First Fanless Chassis for High Performing PC." The secret behind the Calyos fanless gaming PC chassis is phase-change cooling through loop heat pipes. Used in Datacenter servers, they absorb the heat from the hot components and move it passively to the edges of the case, where heat can be easily removed with an air or liquid heat exchanger.The post Calyos Launches Kickstarter for Fanless Gaming PC appeared first on insideHPC.

"This year’s workshop continues SDSC’s strategy of bringing high-performance computing to what is known as the ‘long tail’ of science, i.e. providing resources to a larger and more diverse number of modest-sized computational research projects that represent, in aggregate, a tremendous amount of scientific research and discovery. SDSC has developed and hosted Summer Institute workshops for well over a decade."The post Register Now for the SDSC Summer Institute on HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the OpenFabrics Workshop, Susan Coulter from LANL presents: State of the OpenFabrics Alliance. "The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) is an open source-based organization that develops, tests, licenses, supports and distributes OpenFabrics Software (OFS). The Alliance’s mission is to develop and promote software that enables maximum application efficiency by delivering wire-speed messaging, ultra-low latencies and maximum bandwidth directly to applications with minimal CPU overhead."The post Video: State of the OpenFabrics Alliance appeared first on insideHPC.

"The Cloud Lightning conference will feature academics and industry professionals from across Europe and the UK who will deliver presentations, talks, and research findings into High Performance Infrastructure for Public Sector Research, Heterogeneous Computing, HPC in the Cloud Use Cases, and Next Generation Resource Management for cloud/HPC."The post CloudLightning Conference Coming to Dublin April 11 appeared first on insideHPC.

"The SHAPE Program will help European SMEs overcome barriers to using HPC, such as cost of operation, lack of knowledge and lack of resources. It will facilitate the process of defining a workable solution based on HPC and defining an appropriate business model."The post SHAPE Program offers HPC to Small Businesses in Europe appeared first on insideHPC.

"This talk will present RDMA-based designs using OpenFabrics Verbs and heterogeneous storage architectures to accelerate multiple components of Hadoop (HDFS, MapReduce, RPC, and HBase), Spark and Memcached. An overview of the associated RDMA-enabled software libraries (being designed and publicly distributed as a part of the HiBD project for Apache Hadoop."The post Accelerating Hadoop, Spark, and Memcached with HPC Technologies appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the GW4 Alliance in the UK unveiled Isambard, the world’s first ARM-based production supercomputer at today’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) launch at the Thinktank science museum in Birmingham. "Isambard is able to provide system comparison at high speed as it includes over 10,000, high-performance 64-bit ARM cores, making it one of the largest machines of its kind anywhere in the world. Such a machine could provide the template for a new generation of ARM-based services."The post GW4 Unveils ARM-Powered Isambard Supercomputer from Cray appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) announced that Prof. Dr. Dieter Kranzlmüller is the new Chairman of the Board of Directors at GCS member Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ).The post Prof. Dieter Kranzlmüller Named Chairman of the Board at LRZ in Germany appeared first on insideHPC.

"Besides trying to identify likely drug targets for new HIV treatments, EAFIT’s first supercomputer, named Apolo, is being used for everything from earthquake science in a country regularly shaken by tremors, to a groundbreaking examination of the tropical disease leishmaniasis, to the most “green” way of processing cement. The machine speeds the time to science for Colombian researchers and lets them tackle bigger problems."The post Purdue Supercomputer Gets Second Life in Colombia appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Ohio Supercomputer Center dedicated its newest, most powerful supercomputer: the Owens Cluster. The Dell cluster, named for the iconic Olympic champion Jesse Owens, delivers 1.5 petaflops of total peak performance. "OSC’s Owens Cluster represents one of the most significant HPC systems Dell has built,” said Tony Parkinson, Vice President for NA Enterprise Solutions and Alliances at Dell.The post Dell Powers New Owens Cluster at Ohio State appeared first on insideHPC.

Registration is now open for PRACEdays17. The event May 16-18 in Barcelona, Spain. "The PRACEdays17 program will follow the tradition set by the first three editions and will include international keynote presentations from high-level scientists and researchers from academia and industry, including among others Telli van der Lei, Senior Scientist Supply Chain and Process Modeling at DSM; Nuria Lopez, Professor at the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia; and Xue-Feng Yuan, Director of the Institute for Systems Rheology (ISR), P. R. China."The post Register Now for PRACEdays17 in Barcelona appeared first on insideHPC.

Bill Magro from IBTA gave this talk at the OpenFabrics Workshop. "This talk discusses some recent activities in the InfiniBand Trade Association including recent specification updates. It also provides a glimpse into the future for the IBTA." Bill Magro is an Intel Fellow and Intel’s Chief Technologist for HPC software. In this role, he serves as the technical lead and strategist for Intel's high-performance computing software and provides HPC software requirements for Intel product roadmaps."The post Recent Topics in the IBTA… and a Look Ahead appeared first on insideHPC.

"Since the NICE acquisition by Amazon Web Services (AWS), many customers asked us how to make the HPC experience in the Cloud as simple as the one they have on premises, while still leveraging the elasticity and flexibility that it provides. While we stay committed to delivering new and improved capabilities for on-premises deployments, like the new support for Citrix XenDesktop and the new HTML5 file transfer widgets, EnginFrame 2017 is our first step into making HPC easier to deploy and use in AWS, even without an in-depth knowledge of its APIs and rich service offering."The post NICE Software Releases EnginFrame 2017 appeared first on insideHPC.

Pavel Shamis from ARM Research presented this talk at the OpenFabrics Workshop. "With the emerging availability server platforms based on ARM CPU architecture, it is important to understand ARM integrates with RDMA hardware and software eco-system. 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 (OFED/MOFED Verbs) and one-sided communication libraries (Open UCX, OpenSHMEM/SHMEM) on ARM and share preliminary evaluation results."The post Video: RDMA on ARM appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Rigetti Computing, a leading quantum computing start-up, announced it has raised $64 million in Series A and B funding. "Quantum computing will enable people to tackle a whole new set of problems that were previously unsolvable," said Chad Rigetti, founder and chief executive officer of Rigetti Computing. "This is the next generation of advanced computing technology. The potential to make a positive impact on humanity is enormous."The post Quantum Startup Rigetti Computing Raises $64 Million in Funding appeared first on insideHPC.

In previous articles (1 and 2) here on insideHPC, James Reinders described “Intel Xeon Phi processor Programming in a Nutshell” for Intel’s 72-core processor. In this special guest feature, he discusses cluster modes and the interaction of the memory modes with these cluster modes.The post Intel Xeon Phi Cluster Mode Programming (and interactions with memory modes) in a Nutshell appeared first on insideHPC.

"Grid Engine 8.5’s significant performance improvement for submitting jobs and reduced scheduling times will have a profound impact to our customers’ bottom line as they can now get more work done in the same amount of time. By reducing the wait time for end-users, our customers can save significant costs. Managing the purchase of more servers and getting higher throughput means deadlines can be met with confidence and on budget. Our goal was to increase the value Univa provides over previous versions of Grid Engine, including the popular open source version 6.2U5,” said Bill Bryce, Vice President of Products at Univa.The post New Univa Grid Engine Release Doubles Performance over Previous Versions appeared first on insideHPC.

Users of the integrated iRODS Rule Oriented Data System from around the globe will gather at the iRODS User Group meeting to discuss iRODS-enabled applications, discoveries, and technologies. The event takes place June 13-15 in Utrecht, The Netherlands. "Thousands of businesses, research centers, and government agencies located in the U.S., Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, and Africa use iRODS for flexible, policy-based data management that provides long-term preservation and federation."The post Call for Papers: iRODS User Group in The Netherlands appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Argonne announced that computer scientist Valerie Taylor has been appointed as the next director of the Mathematics and Computer Science (MCS) division at Argonne National Laboratory, effective July 3, 2017. “Valerie brings with her a wealth of leadership experience, computer science knowledge and future vision,” said Rick Stevens, Argonne Associate Laboratory Director for Computing, Environment and Life Sciences. “We feel strongly that her enthusiasm and drive will serve her well in her new role, and are pleased to have her joining our staff.”The post Valerie Taylor Named Director of Mathematics and Computer Science at Argonne appeared first on insideHPC.

“Supermicro RSD makes it easy for companies of any size to build cloud infrastructure that until now are limited to leading large public and private cloud providers,” said Charles Liang, President and CEO of Supermicro. “The Supermicro RSD solution enables more customers to build large scale modern data centers leveraging Supermicro’s best-of-breed server, storage and networking product portfolio.”The post Supermicro Unveils RSD Rack Scale Design appeared first on insideHPC.

"In this keynote, Al Geist will discuss the need for future Department of Energy supercomputers to solve emerging data science and machine learning problems in addition to running traditional modeling and simulation applications. The ECP goals are intended to enable the delivery of capable exascale computers in 2022 and one early exascale system in 2021, which will foster a rich exascale ecosystem and work toward ensuring continued U.S. leadership in HPC. He will also share how the ECP plans to achieve these goals and the potential positive impacts for OFA."The post Exascale Computing Project – Driving a HUGE Change in a Changing World appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Asetek announced a new order from one of its existing OEM partners for its RackCDU D2C (Direct-to-Chip) liquid cooling solution. The order is part of a new installation for an undisclosed HPC customer. "I am very pleased with the progress we are making in our emerging data center business segment," said André Sloth Eriksen, CEO and founder of Asetek. "This repeat order, from one of our OEM partners, to a new end customer confirms the trust in our unique liquid cooling solutions and that adoption is growing.”The post Asetek Liquid Cooling Solution Coming to HPC Center appeared first on insideHPC.