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

Today CoolIT Systems unveiled their new AHx10 Heat Exchange Module. This latest member of the CoolIT lineup is a rack mounted Liquid-to- Air heat exchanger that enables dramatic increases in server density without the need for any facility water. "Data centers struggling to manage the heat from high density racks now have a solution with the AHx10 that requires no facility modification,” said CoolIT Systems VP of Product Marketing, Pat McGinn. “The plug and play characteristics of the AHx10 make it a high flexible, simple to install solution that delivers the great benefits of liquid cooling immediately.”The post CoolIT Systems AHx10 Heat Exchanger Delivers Rack Level Cooling without Facility Water appeared first on insideHPC.

Today DDN announced that Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Western Australia has deployed a pair of DDN GRIDScaler parallel file system appliances to help deliver the first colored panoramic view of the universe. "The GRIDScaler solution comprises 5PBs of storage as well as an additional 2PBs of DDN capacity to support diverse research, simulations and visualizations in radio astronomy, renewable energy and geosciences, among several other scientific disciplines. At Pawsey, DDN’s GRIDScaler delivers the performance and stability needed to address 50 large data collections and contribute towards scientific outcomes for some of the thousand scientists who benefit from Pawsey services."The post DDN Powers Radio Astronomy at Pawsey Centre in Australia appeared first on insideHPC.

In HPC we talk a lot about performance, and vendors are constantly striving to increase the performance of their components, but who out there is making sure that customers get the performance that they’re paying for? Well, according to their recently published ebook, a company called RedLine Performance Solutions has adopted that role with gusto.The post All about Baselining: RedLine Explains HPC Performance Methodology appeared first on insideHPC.

Intel® Integrated Performance Primitives (Intel IPP) is a highly optimized, production-ready, library for lossless data compression/decompression targeting image, signal, and data processing, and cryptography applications. Intel IPP includes more than 2,500 image processing, 1,300 signal processing, 500 computer vision, and 300 cryptography optimized functions for creating digital media, enterprise data, embedded, communications, and scientific, technical, and security applications.The post Building Fast Data Compression Code with Intel Integrated Performance Primitives (Intel IPP) 2018 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Rescale announced a partnership with X-ISS to offer professional services to enterprises migrating HPC workloads to the cloud. "At X-ISS, we are very excited to partner with Rescale to eliminate the compute ceilings and queuing wait times that our customers sometimes deal with. Together, X-ISS and Rescale will provide a comprehensive HPC solution and services that will delight our joint customers,” said Deepak Khosla at X-ISS.The post Rescale & X-ISS offer Professional Services for HPC Cloud Migration appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Gidel announced the availability of new development tools that take advantage of Intel’s HLS, producing a speed increase of 5x over prior development options. Intel’s High Level Synthesis (HLS) compiler turns untimed C++ into Register Transfer Level (RTL) — a low- level FPGA code. Gidel’s development tools map board resources to application needs, and provide the glue between the host computer and the FPGA logic by building an Application Support Package (ASP). Gidel’s tools provide access for software developers to be able to work with HLS, and simplify integration of new IP that may utilize HLS into existing designs.The post Gidel FPGA Tools Speed Development with Intel’s HLS appeared first on insideHPC.

To open up opportunities to attend the conference, SC17 set up a new “Inclusivity Travel Grant” with the goal of helping individuals with demonstrated interest and passion for HPC that would not otherwise have close to a chance of participating in the conference. "This year, the winner Umesh Upadhyaya comes all the way from Nepal."The post Announcing the SC17 Inaugural Inclusivity Travel Grant appeared first on insideHPC.

The ISC High Performance 2018 contributed program is now open for submissions. As the largest HPC conference and exhibition in Europe, ISC 2018 takes place June 24 – 28, 2018, in Frankfurt, Germany "We welcome submissions for the following sessions - birds of a feather, research posters, project posters and the PhD forum. ISC 2018 also calls on regional and international STEM undergraduate and graduate students interested in the field of high performance computing to volunteer as helpers at the five-day conference."The post Call for Submissions: ISC 2018 Contributed Program appeared first on insideHPC.

Today DDN announced it has entered into a partnership with global high-performance computing leader Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Under the agreement, HPE will integrate DDN’s parallel file system storage and flash storage cache technology with HPE’s HPC platforms. The focus of the partnership is to accelerate and simplify customers’ workflows in technical computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning environments. “With this partnership, two trusted leaders in the high-performance computing market have come together to deliver high value solutions as well as a wealth of technical field expertise for customers with data intensive needs,” said Paul Bloch, president, DDN.The post HPE Teams up with DDN for High Speed Storage appeared first on insideHPC.

We've updated our Denver Pub Crawl for 2017. "Denver has great bars and entertainment in store for your visit to the Mile-High City. You’ll find that most of the fun places are in the LoDo area of Downtown. It’s a bit of a hike from the convention center, but you can hop on the free 16th Street Mall Shuttle and get off on Blake Street to catch the action."The post SC17 Pub Crawl – Locals’ Guide to Bars and Entertainment in Denver appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team previews the SC17 Student Cluster Competition. "Dan’s got the inside scoop on all the new wrinkles of the competition this year, where 16 international student teams will go head-to-head. There’s an all high school squad from Indiana, returning champs from China, and an all-new cloud computing component utilizing Cycle Computing on Azure."The post Radio Free HPC Previews the SC17 Student Cluster Competition appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Cavium announced a new partnership that will position the University of Michigan as a leader in data-intensive scientific research by creating a powerful Big Data computing cluster using dual socket servers powered by Cavium’s ThunderX ARMv8-A workload optimized processors. The cluster consists of 40 servers each containing 96 ARMv8 cores and 512 GB of RAM per server.The post Cavium ThunderX Cluster to Crunch Big Data at University of Michigan appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Panasas introduced the next generation of its ActiveStor scaleout NAS solution, capable of scaling capacity to 57PB and delivering 360GB/s of bandwidth. This flexible system doubles metadata performance to cut data access time in half, scales performance and capacity independently, and seamlessly adapts to new technology advancements.The post Panasas Doubles Metadata Performance on ActiveStor Scaleout NAS appeared first on insideHPC.

Today, Amazon Web Services announced the availability of C5 instances, the next generation of compute optimized instances for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Designed for compute-heavy applications like batch processing, distributed analytics, and HPC, C5 instances feature 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Skylake-SP) up to 72 vCPUs, and 144 GiB of memory—twice the vCPUs and memory of previous generation C4 instances—providing the best price-performance of any Amazon EC2 instance.The post Intel Xeon Scalable Processors power new AWS C5 Instances for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Supermicro announced that the company has partnered with the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) to expand advanced computing and data analytics used to study the Earth, solar system and universe. Based on the combination of density, system performance and optimized cost, the Supermicro FatTwin-based solution brings an additional 1.56 PetaFlops to NASA researchers. The Rack Scale solution is factory integrated at Supermicro's Silicon Valley headquarters to deliver optimal reliability and efficiency.The post Supermicro Powers Advanced Analytics at NASA NCCS appeared first on insideHPC.

In this TACC podcast, Cosmos code developer Chris Fragile joins host Jorge Salazar for a discussion on how researchers are using supercomputers to simulate the inner workings of Black holes. "For this simulation, the manycore architecture of KNL presents new challenges for researchers trying to get the best compute performance. This is a computer chip that has lots of cores compared to some of the other chips one might have interacted with on other systems," McDougall explained. "More attention needs to be paid to the design of software to run effectively on those types of chips."The post Podcast: Optimizing Cosmos Code on Intel Xeon Phi appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Bright Computing, a global leader in cluster and cloud infrastructure automation software, is proud to announce that the University of North Texas (UNT) has integrated Bright Cluster Manager into its HPC environment for research support. The University uses this 350-node cluster to optimize efficiency for researchers working on groundbreaking discoveries in a variety of domains material science, engineering, chemistry, and physics. Bright Cluster Manager helps UNT’s University Information Technology department successfully provision, monitor and manage heterogeneous clusters.The post University of North Texas turns to Bright Computing for Efficient Cluster Management appeared first on insideHPC.

Composable infrastructure allows any number of CPU nodes to dynamically map the optimum number of GPU and NVMe storage resources to each node required to complete a specific task. In this sponsored post, Katie Rivera of One Stop Systems, explores the power of GPUs and the potential benefits of composable infrastructure for HPC.The post Composable Infrastructure: Composing Greater HPC Breakthroughs appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced the HPE Superdome Flex, "the world’s most scalable and modular in-memory computing platform." The platform enables enterprises of any size to process and analyze massive amounts of data and turn it into real-time business insights. "HPE’s latest mission critical in-memory computing platform combines the reliability of HPE Integrity Superdome X with the scalable technology for high performance data analytics that HPE gained with its acquisition of SGI."The post HPE brings SGI in-memory Technology to Superdome Flex System appeared first on insideHPC.

Since its early days, the OLCF has consistently delivered supercomputers of unprecedented capability to the scientific community on behalf of DOE—contributing to a rapid evolution in scientific computing that has produced a millionfold increase in computing power. This rise has included the launch of the first teraflop system for open science, the science community’s first petaflop system, and two top-ranked machines on the TOP500 list. The next chapter in the OLCF’s legacy is set to begin with the deployment of Summit, a pre-exascale system capable of more than five times the performance of Titan."The post Video: 25 Years of Supercomputing at Oak Ridge appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Mellanox announced the Innova-2 product family of FPGA-based smart network adapters. Innova-2 is the industry leading programmable adapter designed for a wide range of applications, including security, cloud, Big Data, deep learning, NFV and high performance computing. "Xilinx is pleased that our All Programmable UltraScale FPGAs are accelerating Mellanox’s Innova network adaptors,” said Manish Muthal, vice president of Data Center Business at Xilinx. “Our combined technology enables the rapid deployment of customized acceleration for emerging data center and high performance computing workloads.”The post Mellanox Announces Innova-2 FPGA-Based Programmable Adapters appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Oklahoma State University announced that Advanced Clustering Technologies has been contracted to build and install its newest supercomputer to support a broad range of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. "The new supercomputer, which will be named after the university’s mascot, Pistol Pete, will serve as a campus-wide shared resource, available at no charge to all OSU faculty, staff, postdocs, graduate students and undergraduates, as well as to researchers and educators across Oklahoma."The post Advanced Clustering Technologies to build “Pistol Pete” Supercomputer at Oklahoma State appeared first on insideHPC.

This year at SC17, Intel offers many opportunities to learn about the newest technologies, emerging fields like Artificial Intelligence, and the ways organizations are applying those capabilities for real-world applications."The post Intel at SC17: Showcasing HPC technologies, luminary speakers, and a virtual motorsports experience appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Shared Services Canada (SSC) dedicated a pair of Cray supercomputers in Quebec. The new HPC systems will be used by the Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) to improve the accuracy and timeliness of weather warnings and forecasts. "Accurate and timely weather forecasting helps us protect our homes and businesses in the face of extreme storms and tornadoes, which are getting worse due to climate change. By supporting quality weather forecasts and warnings, the new High Performance Computers will help protect Canadians for years to come."The post Cray Deploys Pair of Supercomputers in Canada for Weather Forecasting appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC teams discusses performance optimization with Carolyn Pasti and Don Avart from Red Line Performance Solutions. The company is partnering with Radio Free HPC on Project Cyclops, an effort to build the world’s fastest single node on the HPCG benchmark. Listen in as Don and Carolyn share their methodology for workload performance optimization and what it takes to make clusters really perform up their potential in the real world.The post Radio Free HPC Talks Optimization with RedLine Performance Solutions appeared first on insideHPC.

For the first time, a team high school of high schoolers will compete in the Student Cluster Competition next week at SC17 in Denver. The team hails from Harrison High School in West Lafayette, Indiana. "In this real-time, non-stop, 48-hour challenge, teams of undergraduate and/or high school students assemble a small cluster on the exhibit floor and race to complete a real-world workload across a series of applications and impress HPC industry judges."The post High School Team to Compete in SC17 Student Cluster Competition appeared first on insideHPC.

Wayne State University is seeking a Senior Systems Software Engineer in our Job of the Week. "This position will utilize a specialized knowledge of Linux/CentOS to assist with installing, configuring, and troubleshooting software, compilers, libraries, build tools, and updating and maintaining respective modules for research applications for WSU affiliated researchers and students. Candidates will also help deploy and manage OpenHPC systems software across the Grid and related systems on campus."The post Job of the Week: Senior Systems Software Engineer at Wayne State University appeared first on insideHPC.

The ARM HPC User Group has posted their Agenda for their SC17 Meetup. The event takes place Monday, Nov. 13 from 1:30 - 6:30pm at the Grand Hyatt in Denver. "Join us for Arm’s third annual HPC User Group session held during SC17 in Denver, CO. Sessions will feature presentations by Arm ecosystem leads, end-users, and ecosystem partners involved in the deployment of Arm servers for HPC."The post Agenda Posted for ARM HPC User Group at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Univa announced the integration of UberCloud parallel application containers with Univa Grid Engine. In May of last year, Univa, a leading innovator of workload management products, announced the availability of Docker software container support with its Grid Engine 8.4.0 product, enabling enterprises to automatically dispatch and run jobs in Docker containers, from a user specified Docker image, on a Univa Grid Engine cluster.The post Univa Grid Engine adds UberCloud Parallel MPI to Docker Containers appeared first on insideHPC.

At SC17 in Denver, volunteers have already started the installation of SCinet, the high-capacity network that supports the revolutionary applications and experiments that are a hallmark of the SC conference. SCinet takes one year to plan, and those efforts culminate in a month-long period of staging, setup and operation of the network during the conference.The post Volunteers Ready High Speed SCinet for SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Asetek announced E4 Computer Engineering as a new datacenter OEM partner. E4 Computer Engineering has utilized Asetek RackCDU D2C (Direct-to-Chip) liquid cooling for the D.A.V.I.D.E. SUPERCOMPUTER in Italy. Commissioned by PRACE (The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) and installed at CINECA (PRACE Italian hosting member), the innovative OpenPOWER-based D.A.V.I.D.E. supercomputer is built on top of the IBM POWER8 architecture.The post Asetek Partners with E4 Computer Engineering, Announces Installation at CINECA appeared first on insideHPC.

D-Wave Systems will hold a Quantum Computing Seminar & Livestream from 2:00pm - 5:00pm on Monday, Nov. 13 in Denver. "We will discuss quantum computing, the D-Wave 2000Q system and software, the growing software ecosystem, an overview of some user projects, and how quantum computing can be applied to problems in optimization, machine learning, cyber security, and sampling.”The post Agenda Posted for D-Wave Quantum Seminar & Livestream at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the 2017 Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing, Pavan Balaji from Argonne presents an overview of system interconnects for HPC. "The Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing (ATPESC) 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."The post Video: System Interconnects for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this RCE Podcast, Brock Palen and Jeff Squyres discuss Jupyter with Dr. Brian Granger from Cal Poly State University. "Jupyter is a non-profit, open-source project, born out of the IPython Project in 2014 as it evolved to support interactive data science and scientific computing across all programming languages."The post RCE-Podcast Looks at Project Jupyter for Interactive Data Science appeared first on insideHPC.

Ellexus has launched Container Checker on Amazon Web Services’ Marketplace, a pioneering cloud-based tool that provides visibility into the inner workings of Docker containers. "Container Checker will help people using cloud platforms to quickly detect problems within their containers before they are let loose on the cloud to potentially waste time and compute spend. Estimates suggest that up to 45% of cloud spend is wasted due in part to unknown application activity and unsuitable storage decisions, which is what we want to help businesses tackle.”The post Ellexus Container Checker looks to Revolutionize Cloud Container Use appeared first on insideHPC.

The Pagoda Project—a three-year Exascale Computing Project software development program based at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory—has successfully reached a major milestone: making its open source software libraries publicly available as of September 30, 2017. "Our job is to ensure that the exascale applications reach key performance parameters defined by the DOE,” said Baden.The post Pagoda Project Rolls Out First Software Libraries for Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.

There are two main categories or uses where rendering on the Intel Xeon Phi processors should be investigated. The first is what could be called "Professional rendering" and the second, "Scientific visualization." "Software based visualization, whether for photo-realistic rendering or scientific visualization can be accelerated with a software only approach. This allows for new algorithms to be implemented faster than waiting for the next generation of hardware systems to appear. As the number of computing elements increases, performance can increase as well."The post Visualizing with Software Rendering with Intel Xeon Phi appeared first on insideHPC.

The world of High Frequency Trading is all about reducing latency to make money. At the recent STAC Summit in Chicago, a Penguin Computing device called The Ultimate Trading Machine achieved a record-low 98 nanosecond tick-to-trade latency, some 18% faster than the previous world record. "Facing tremendous pressures to optimize the transaction lifecycle, the financial services industry helps drive innovations in many core technologies. At Penguin Computing, we empower our customers with with open technology solutions that achieve performance requirements while keeping costs low and avoiding vendor lock-in. We are proud to join with our partners to deliver this Ultimate Trading Machine."The post “The Ultimate Trading Machine” from Penguin Computing sets Record for Low Latency appeared first on insideHPC.

This week at GTC DC, Supermicro is showcasing GPU server platforms that support NVIDIA Tesla V100 PCI-E and V100 SXM2 GPUs. “Our high performance computing solutions enable deep learning, engineering and scientific fields to scale out their compute clusters to accelerate their most demanding workloads and achieve fastest time-to-results with maximum performance per watt, per square foot and per dollar."The post Supermicro Showcases Volta GPU Systems at GTC Washington DC appeared first on insideHPC.

Today NVIDIA announced a broad expansion of its Deep Learning Institute (DLI), which is training tens of thousands of students, developers and data scientists with critical skills needed to apply artificial intelligence. "The world faces an acute shortage of data scientists and developers who are proficient in deep learning, and we’re focused on addressing that need,” said Greg Estes, vice president of Developer Programs at NVIDIA. “As part of the company’s effort to democratize AI, the Deep Learning Institute is enabling more developers, researchers and data scientists to apply this powerful technology to solve difficult problems.”The post NVIDIA Expands Deep Learning Institute appeared first on insideHPC.

"Linux Containers gain more and more momentum in all IT ecosystems. This talk provides an overview about what happened in the container landscape (in particular Docker) during the course of the last year and how it impacts datacenter operations, HPC and High-Performance Big Data. Furthermore Christian will give an update/extend on the ‘things to explore’ list he presented in the last Lugano workshop, applying what he learned and came across during the year 2016."The post Video: The State of Linux Containers appeared first on insideHPC.

The DDN User Group has posted their agenda for their meetup at SC17. The meeting takes place 2:30pm - 6:30pm on Nov. 13 at the Embassy Suites in Denver. "The DDN User Group brings the HPC community together with DDN executive and technical leadership to share how leading global organizations are leveraging innovative new approaches, best practices, and technologies to raise the bar on HPC discoveries. This year, we are hosting the user group at the Embassy Suites, which is a three minute-walk across the street from the Colorado Convention Center."The post Agenda Posted for DDN User Group at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today RAID Incorporated announced “its most advanced storage series yet.” The Xanadu 500 series is designed to simplify and deliver high performance computing storage at an optimized price/performance ratio. With companies and organizations increasing their IT infrastructure to accommodate Big Data and Analytics at record magnitudes, it is imperative that their storage systems are appropriately […]The post RAID Inc. Unveils Xanadu 500 Storage Appliances appeared first on insideHPC.

DK Panda from Ohio State University presented this talk at the HPC Advisory Council Spain Conference. "This talk will focus on challenges in designing HPC, Big Data, and Deep Learning middleware for Exascale systems with millions of processors and accelerators. For the HPC domain, we will discuss about the challenges in designing runtime environments for MPI+X (PGAS OpenSHMEM/UPC/CAF/UPC++, OpenMP, and CUDA) programming models. Features and sample performance numbers from MVAPICH2 libraries will be presented."The post Designing HPC, Big Data, & Deep Learning Middleware for Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Asetek announced NEC Corporation as a new data center OEM partner. NEC Corporation, through its subsidiary NEC Fielding, Ltd., will deploy Asetek RackCDU Direct-to-Chip liquid cooling at a new HPC installation in Japan. Asetek has already begun to make shipments in support of this installation. "Liquid cooling technology is becoming a key supercomputer component. Asetek’s direct-to-chip technology enables more effective cooling and increased computational performance in high density HPC clusters, adding value for our end-users,” said Noritaka HOSHI, (Senior Manager), NEC Corporation.The post Asetek Announces NEC as New Datacenter OEM Partner appeared first on insideHPC.

Fujitsu has posted news that their new AI supercomputer at RIKEN in Japan is already being used for AI research. Called RAIDEN (Riken AIp Deep learning ENvironment), the GPU-accelerated Fujitsu system sports 4 Petaflops of processing power. "The RAIDEN supercomputer is built around Fujitsu PRIMERGY RX 2530 M2 servers with and 24 NVIDIA DGX-1 systems. With 8 NVIDIA Tesla GPUs per chassis, the DGX-1 includes access to today’s most popular deep learning frameworks."The post NVIDIA GPUs Power Fujitsu AI Supercomputer at RIKEN in Japan appeared first on insideHPC.

Magnified in 2017 by machine learning and AI, there is a heightened concern in the HPC community over wattage trends in CPUs, GPUs and emerging neural chips required to meet accelerating computational demands in HPC clusters. In this sponsored post from Asetek, the company examines how high wattage trends in HPC, deep learning and AI might be reaching an inflection point.The post The Inflection Point of Wattage in HPC, Deep Learning and AI appeared first on insideHPC.

Hyperion Research will host their annual Breakfast Briefing at SC17 in Denver. The event takes place at the Denver Marriott City Center at 7:30am - 9:30am on Tuesday, Nov. 14. "We will be presenting an update on HPC market results, key technology issues & trends, results of new research studies in AI & Big data, new ROI results, and the mapping of HPC centers across the US."The post Hyperion Research Breakfast Briefing Returns to Denver at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the SC17 HPC Connects series, Pete Beckman and Charlie Catlett from Argonne describe how the Smart Cities initiative to improve the quality of life for residents using HPC, urban informatics, and other technologies to improve the efficiency of services. "Smart Cities will be the topic of the SC17 plenary session, which kicks off the conference at 5:30pm on Monday, Nov. 13 in the Colorado Convention Center."The post HPC Connects with Smart Cities at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Pawsey Supercomputing Center in Australia announced plans to expand its Zeus cluster from a pre/post processing cluster to a mid-range compute cluster in December 2017. This expansion will provide more than 20 million additional core hours to researchers. "This is another piece of the puzzle, ensuring that Pawsey provides the most suitable resources for Australian researchers,” said David Schibeci, Head of Supercomputing at Pawsey. “We’ve seen an unquenchable thirst for compute power in this country and we are happy to continue to support science outcomes that come from that thirst.”The post Pawsey Centre in Australia Upgrades Zeus Cluster appeared first on insideHPC.