High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

The UK is launching six HPC centers this month. Funded by £20 million from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) the centres are located around the UK, at the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Exeter, and Oxford, Loughborough University, and UCL. "These centres will enable new discoveries, drive innovation and allow new insights into today's scientific challenges. They are important because they address an existing gulf in capability between local university systems and the UK National Supercomputing Service ARCHER," said Professor Philip Nelson, EPSRC's Chief Executive.The post UK to Launch Six HPC Centers appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Ruben Cruz Garcia from the Earth Sciences department at BSC, describes how supercomputing is key to his research. He also explains what he would do if he had unlimited access to a fully operational exascale computer.The post Video: Why Supercomputing is Important for Science appeared first on insideHPC.

"The current versions of the codes use MPI and depend on finer and finer meshes for higher accuracy which are computationally demanding. To overcome the demands, the team has gained access to their state-of-the-art cluster equipped with POWER CPUs and Tesla P100 GPUs — and turning to OpenACC and machine learning to accelerate their science. This has allowed them to spend the least resources on programming, and effectively utilize available compute resources."The post Video: Computational Fluid Dynamics for Surgical Planning appeared first on insideHPC.

A team of researchers at Berkeley Lab, PNNL, and Intel are working hard to make sure that computational chemists are prepared to compute efficiently on next-generation exascale machines. Recently, they achieved a milestone, successfully adding thread-level parallelism on top of MPI-level parallelism in the planewave density functional theory method within the popular software suite NWChem. "Planewave codes are useful for solution chemistry and materials science; they allow us to look at the structure, coordination, reactions and thermodynamics of complex dynamical chemical processes in solutions and on surfaces."The post Berkeley Lab Tunes NWChem for Intel Xeon Phi Processor appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at some the top High Performance Computing stories from this week. First up, we look at Europe's effort to lead HPC in the next decade. After that, we look at why small companies like Scalable Informatics have such a hard time surviving in the HPC marketplace.The post Radio Free HPC Looks at Europe’s Push for Leadership in Global HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Registration is open for the 33rd International Conference on Massive Storage Systems and Technology (MSST 2017.) The event takes place May 15-19 in Santa Clara, California. "Since the conference was founded by the leading national laboratories, MSST has been a venue for massive-scale storage system designers and implementers, storage architects, researchers, and vendors to share best practices and discuss building and securing the world's largest storage systems for high-performance computing, web-scale systems, and enterprises."The post Register now for the International Conference on Massive Storage Systems and Technology (MSST 2017) appeared first on insideHPC.

"deal.II — a name that originally meant to indicate that it is the successor to the Differential Equations Analysis Library — is a C++ program library targeted at the computational solution of partial differential equations using adaptive finite elements. It uses state-of-the-art programming techniques to offer you a modern interface to the complex data structures and algorithms required."The post RCE Podcast Looks at Deal.II Finite Element Library appeared first on insideHPC.

ARM has taken a step into the artificial intelligence market with the announcement of a new micro-architecture - DynamIQ - specifically designed for artificial intelligence (AI). "DynamIQ technology is a monumental shift in multi-core microarchitecture for the industry and the foundation for future ARM Cortex-A processors. The flexibility and versatility of DynamIQ will redefine the multi-core experience across a greater range of devices from edge to cloud across a secure, common platform."The post New ARM Architecture Targets AI appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Huawei an agreement with the Institute of Technology and Renewable Energy (ITER) to provide HPC services on Tenerife, one of the Spanish-controlled Canary Islands off the west coast of Africa. "The agreement established the collaboration between ITER and Huawei to jointly develop the capacity in super-computation, smart technology, big data applications and analysis applications, in which we have made important progress," said Carlos Antonio Rodriguez, president of the local Administrative Council that runs ITER.The post Huawei to Provide HPC Services to Tenerife in Canary Islands appeared first on insideHPC.

"The SCC reproducibility program is part of a wider effort to encourage authors submitting papers to the conference to voluntarily complete an appendix to their paper that described the details of their software environment and computational experiments to the extent that an independent person could replicate their results."The post SC17 Student Cluster Competition Continues Push for Reproducibility appeared first on insideHPC.

"The Huawei-Altair cooperation will be dedicated to building highly efficient, high-performance industrial simulation cloud solutions leveraging Altair’s PBS Works software suite," said Yu Dong, President of Industry Marketing & Solution Dept of Enterprise BG, Huawei, "Committed to a vision of openness, cooperation, and win-win, Huawei cooperates with global partners to provide customers with innovative solutions for industrial manufacturing and help them achieve business success."The post Huawei and Altair to Build Industrial Simulation Cloud Solutions appeared first on insideHPC.

“As a team, we are laying the foundation to identify challenges and recommendations on possible solutions to the industry’s current limitations defined by Moore’s Law. With the launch of the nine white papers on our new website, the IRDS roadmap sets the path for the industry benefiting from all fresh levels of processing power, energy efficiency, and technologies yet to be discovered.”The post IEEE Looks Beyond Moore’s Law with IRDS Technology Roadmap appeared first on insideHPC.

Berkeley Lab researchers have developed the first 3-D atomic-scale model of P22 virus that identifies the protein interactions crucial for its stability. "This is a great example of how to exploit electron microscopy technology and combine it with new computational methods to determine a bacteriophage’s structure,” said Paul Adams, Berkeley Lab’s Molecular Biophysics & Integrated Bioimaging division director and a co-author of the paper. “We developed the algorithms—the computational code—to optimize the atomic model so that it best fit the experimental data.”The post Berkeley Lab Algorithm Boosts Resolution on Cryo–EM appeared first on insideHPC.

According to Asperitas, Immersed Computing is a concept driven by sustainability, efficiency and flexibility and goes far beyond just technology. In many situations, Immersed Computing can save more than 50% of the total energy footprint. By using immersion, 10-45% of IT energy is reduced due to the lack of fans, while other energy consumers like cooling installations can achieve up to 95% energy reduction. It allows for warm water cooling which provides even more energy savings on cooling installations. One more benefit, Immersed Computing enables high temperature heat reuse.The post Asperitas Unveils Liquid-cooled Modular Datacenter Solution appeared first on insideHPC.

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach is seeking a High Performance Computing System Administrator in our Job of the Week. "The HPC Specialist is responsible for technical systems management, administration, and support for the high-performance computing (HPC) cluster environments. This includes all configuration, authentication, networking, storage, interconnect, and software usage & installation of HPC Clusters. The position is highly technical and directly impacts the daily operational functions of the above environments."The post Job of the Week: HPC System Administrator at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University appeared first on insideHPC.

"Intel sees the huge potential in AI and are moving mountains to take full advantage of it," said Patrick Moorhead from Moor Insights & Strategy. "They have acquired Altera, Nervana Systems and other IP, need to connect to their home-grown IP and now it's time to accelerate the delivery of it. That's where today's organization comes in play, a centralized organization, reporting directly to CEO Brian Krzanich, to make that happen. This is classic organizational strategy, accelerating delivery by organizing a cross-product group directly reporting to the CEO.”The post Intel Aligns its AI Efforts into a Single Organization appeared first on insideHPC.

"HPC is moving towards its next frontier - more than 100 times faster than the fastest machines currently available in Europe," said Andrus Ansip, European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Single Market. "But not all EU countries have the capacity to build and maintain such infrastructure, or to develop such technologies on their own. If we stay dependent on others for this critical resource, then we risk getting technologically 'locked', delayed or deprived of strategic know-how. Europe needs integrated world-class capability in supercomputing to be ahead in the global race."The post Panel Discussion on How Europe Can Attain World Leadership in HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

"The new CooLMUC 3 system outperforms its predecessors in a number of respects, including its key feature of cooling in thermally insulated racks all compute and login nodes, power supply units, and Omni-Path switches directly with hot water, a combination the likes of which has never been seen before," said Axel Auweter, Head of HPC Development at MEGWARE. "Even at a cooling water temperature of 40 degrees Celsius and a room temperature of 25 degrees Celsius, a maximum of just 3% waste heat is produced in the ambient air."The post Megware to Install CooLMUC 3 Supercomputer at LRZ in Germany appeared first on insideHPC.

When used in a TBB environment, Intel has demonstrated a many-fold performance improvement over the same parallelized code using Intel MKL in an OpenMP environment. Intel TBB-enabled Intel MKL is ideal when there is heavy threading in the Intel TBB application. Intel TBB-enabled Intel MKL shows solid performance improvements through better interoperability with other parts of the workload.The post Intel MKL and Intel TBB Working Together for Performance appeared first on insideHPC.

Today ISC 2017 announced the inclusion of the STEM Student Day & Gala at this year’s conference. Taking place June 21 in Frankfurt, the new program aims to connect the next generation of regional and international STEM practitioners with the high performance computing industry and its key players. "There is currently a shortage of a skilled STEM workforce in Europe and it is projected that the gap between available jobs and suitable candidates will grow very wide beyond 2020 if nothing is done about it,” said Martin Meuer, the general co-chair of ISC High Performance. “This gave us the idea to organize the STEM Day, as many organizations that exhibit at ISC could profit from meeting the future workforce directly.”The post ISC 2017 Adds STEM Student Day appeared first on insideHPC.

"As the founding lead of the Google Brain project, and more recently through my role at Baidu, I have played a role in the transformation of two leading technology companies into “AI companies.” But AI’s potential is far bigger than its impact on technology companies. I will continue my work to shepherd in this important societal change. In addition to transforming large companies to use AI, there are also rich opportunities for entrepreneurship as well as further AI research."The post Andrew Ng Leaving Baidu for Next Chapter in AI appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur announced that it will be the first academic institution to open a supercomputing facility under India's National Supercomputing Mission (NSM). This will provide large computational support to users to carry out both research and teaching activities that involve state-of-the-art HPC and usher in a new age in research and innovation in the country, an IIT-Kharagpur spokesperson said. "The Petaflop new system with both CPU and CPU-GPU based servers along with the already existing HPC equipment will provide about 1.5 Peta-Flop capacity support to several areas where the researchers of IIT-KGP are actively involved," said IIT-KGP Director Prof P P Chakrabarti.The post 1.5 Petaflop Supercomputer coming to IIT-Kharagpur in India appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Penguin Computing announced a significant expansion of their Penguin Computing On-Demand (POD) High Performance Computing Cloud. The new offering includes the latest Intel Xeon processorss, Lustre, and Intel Omni-Path. "As current Penguin POD users, we are excited to have more resources available to handle our mission-critical real-time global environmental prediction workload,” said Dr. Greg Wilson, CEO, EarthCast Technologies. “The addition of the Lustre file system will allow us to scale our applications to full global coverage, run our jobs faster and provide more accurate predictions.”The post Penguin Computing Adds Omni-Path and Lustre to its HPC Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

We are sad to report that HPC vendor Scalable Informatics has gone out of business. Headed up by CEO Joe Landman, Scalable Informatics spent the last 12 years building 'Simply Faster" software-defined storage and compute solutions to the financial, research, scientific, and big data analysis markets. "There are days when this reporter wishes he wasn't in the news business. Today is one of those days."The post Scalable Informatics Closes Down their Shop appeared first on insideHPC.

"Marketing is important in good times, but it can be even more important in bad times. If you have the means to invest in marketing, then do it now. Invest, because there will be many others who will hold onto funds until there is more certainty on 2018 budget spend from the US government. If you are one of the few investing in marketing, your voice will be heard while others are silently standing by."The post Federal Budgets Cuts for HPC? How to Gain Market Share in an Uncertain Market appeared first on insideHPC.

Today SuperMicro rolled out a wide range of NVMe Flash server and storage systems with support for the new Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X based on 3D XPoint technology. "Being First-To-Market with the latest in computing technology continues to be our corporate strength, the addition of Intel Optane memory technology gives our top tier customers a new memory deployment strategy that provides better write performance and latency than existing NVMe NAND SSD solutions,” said Charles Liang, President and CEO of Supermicro. “In addition this new memory is slated to consume 30 percent lower max-power than SSD NAND memory, supporting our customer’s green computing priorities.”The post Supermicro Rolls Out Intel Optane SSD Platforms appeared first on insideHPC.

Researchers using the SuperMUC cluster in Germany have discovered a set of unknown species in rainforest soils. As described in a new paper published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, their study on microbial diversity in tropical rainforests required over one million CPU hours to complete. "Without the outstanding high performance computing infrastructure in Germany and especially at LRZ, this study would not have been feasible. The availability of SuperMUC constitutes an essential national advantage in the international scientific competition," states Alexandros Stamatakis.The post SuperMUC Helps Discover New Species Critical to Rainforest Ecosystems appeared first on insideHPC.

Supermassive black holes have a speed limit that governs how fast and how large they can grow,” said Joseph Smidt of the Theoretical Design Division at LANL. Using computer codes developed at Los Alamos for modeling the interaction of matter and radiation related to the Lab’s stockpile stewardship mission, Smidt and colleagues created a simulation of collapsing stars that resulted in supermassive black holes forming in less time than expected, cosmologically speaking, in the first billion years of the universe.The post Supercomputing the Black Hole Speed Limit appeared first on insideHPC.

“Bret Costelow is an inspiring sales leader with a clear understanding of our customers’ needs and a vision of how DDN’s technologies and solutions can best solve their toughest data storage challenges,” said Robert Triendl, senior vice president, global sales, marketing, and field services, DDN. “Bret’s proven success in high-growth business settings, deep knowledge of the Lustre* and HPC market, proven track record for generating traction with innovative, advanced technologies, and his broad experience with software sales make him a great asset to our team and a great resource for our partners and customers around the world.”The post DDN Names Bret Costelow VP of Global Sales appeared first on insideHPC.

The Allinea Forge parallel code development suite is helping to speed up exciting computational cardiology research at the Medical University of Graz. "Utilizing the power of the VSC-3 supercomputer at the University of Vienna, Postdoctoral researcher Dr. Aurel Neic and his team are developing a simulation framework for the human heart called the Cardiac Arrythmia Research Package (CARP). It replicates the electric, mechanic and haemodynamic (the forces associated with the flow of blood) phenomena in the heart in a coupled manner and is bringing exciting new possibilities to medical science."The post Allinea Software Powers Heart Simulation Framework appeared first on insideHPC.

"Artificial Intelligence will deliver the next wave of societal transformation on parallel with the industrial, technical and internet revolutions that preceded it. As our AI-fueled future evolves, we have a tremendous opportunity to address opportunities from scare resource utilization and scientific exploration to inclusion and human rights expansion. Intel Executive VP Diane Bryant will share Intel’s vision for unleashing AI as well as a perspective on how to accelerate the delivery of #AIforgood."The post Intel’s Diane Bryant on How AI Will Change Lives appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Mellanox introduced a new line of 200Gb/s silicon photonics and VCSEL-based transceivers in the same QSFP28 package as today’s 100Gb/s products. These new transceivers double the bandwidth for hyperscale Web 2.0 and cloud 100Gb/s networks. Mellanox is also introducing 200Gb/s Active Optical Cables (AOCs) and Direct Attach Copper Cables (DACs), including breakout cables, to […]The post Mellanox Doubles Silicon Photonics Ethernet Transceiver Speeds to 200Gb/s appeared first on insideHPC.

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 PRACE 2 Adds Piz Daint Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

PEARC17 provides students with a range of opportunities in the Technical Program and in targeted student activities. For all student attendees, PEARC17 will include a one-day intensive collaborative modeling and analysis challenge; a session on careers in modeling and large data analytics; a mentorship program; and opportunities for students to volunteer to assist with conference activities. Participation from traditionally under-represented communities including women, minorities, and people with disabilities, is strongly encouraged.The post Apply Now for the PEARC17 Student Program appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, Radio Free HPC looks at a recent report that the USA needs to take aggresive action to keep up with China in High Performance Computing. Produced by the NSA-DOE Technical Meeting on High Performance Computing, the report states that we need to change course now or the U.S. will lose leadership and not control its own future in HPC.The post Does the US Need to Change Course to Compete with China in HPC? appeared first on insideHPC.

"Delivering an industry-leading combination of low latency, ultra endurance, high QoS, and high throughput, the Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X Series is the most responsive data center SSD. Built with the revolutionary new 3D XPoint memory media, the SSD DC P4800X is the first product to combine the attributes of memory and storage. This innovative solution is optimized to break through storage bottlenecks by providing a new data tier."The post Intel Rolls Out First Optane SSD with 3D XPoint Technology appeared first on insideHPC.

"SC17 is excited to hold another nail-biting Student Cluster Competition, or SCC, now in its eleventh year, as an opportunity to showcase student expertise in a friendly yet spirited competition. Held as part of SC17’s Students@SC, the Student Cluster Competition is designed to introduce the next generation of students to the high-performance computing community."The post Video Preview of the SC17 Student Cluster Competition appeared first on insideHPC.

When used in a TBB environment, Intel has demonstrated a many-fold performance improvement over the same parallelized code using Intel MKL in an OpenMP environment. Intel TBB-enabled Intel MKL is ideal when there is heavy threading in the Intel TBB application. Intel TBB-enabled Intel MKL shows solid performance improvements through better interoperability with other parts of the workload.The post Intel MKL and Intel TBB Working Together for Performance appeared first on insideHPC.

Today NEC Corporation announced the deployment of an LX supercomputer at RWTH Aachen University in Germany. Featuring offering high performance computing services for engineering and scientific research. "We selected the NEC LX technology because of its superior performance, as well as low total cost of ownership due to innovative cooling technology," said Professor Matthias Muller, head of the IT Center at RWTH Aachen University. "Going forward, we are excited to work with NEC as a strong corporate partner in expanding our IT research."The post RWTH Aachen University Deploys NEC LX Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced plans to deploy one of the world’s largest supercomputers for industrial chemical research at BASF's Ludwigshafen headquarters. Based on the latest generation of HPE Apollo 6000 systems, the new supercomputer will drive the digitalization of BASF's worldwide research. “The new supercomputer will promote the application and development of complex modeling and simulation approaches, opening up completely new avenues for our research at BASF,” said Dr. Martin Brudermueller, Vice Chairman of the Board of Executive Directors and Chief Technology Officer at BASF.The post HPE Supercomputer to Power Chemical Research at BASF appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from The Good Stuff program, Katherine Riley and Argonne National Laboratory describes what a supercomputer really is and how Argonne uses high performance computing to solve the world's most challenging problems. "This is a great program for explaining HPC to your friends, neighbors, and even your kids."The post Video: How Smart is a Supercomputer? appeared first on insideHPC.

"The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) workshop is an annual event devoted to advancing the state of the art in networking. The workshop is known for showcasing a broad range of topics all related to network technology and deployment through an interactive, community-driven event. The comprehensive event includes a rich program made up of more than 50 sessions covering a variety of critical networking topics, which range from current deployments of RDMA to new and advanced network technologies."The post OFA Workshop in Austin to Put Spotlight on InfiniBand and RoCE appeared first on insideHPC.

The 2nd International Workshop on Performance Portable Programming Models for Accelerators (P^3MA) has issued its Call for Papers. He held in conjunction with ISC 2017, the event takes place June 22 in Frankfurt, Germany.The post Call for Papers: 2nd International Workshop on Performance Portable Programming Models for Accelerators appeared first on insideHPC.

Los Alamos National Laboratory has donated a decommissioned supercomputer to the University of New Mexico Center for Advanced Research Computing. The machine was acquired through the NSF-sponsored PR0bE project, which is run by the New Mexico Consortium.The post LANL Donates Supercomputer to University of New Mexico appeared first on insideHPC.

On Thursday, the U.S.-China Economic & Security Review Commission (USCC) held a hearing on the current and potential future state of supercomputing innovation worldwide, with an emphasis on China’s position on the global stage relative to the USA. Addison Snell from Intersect360 Research provided this testimony in answer to USCC’s questions for the hearing.The post Intersect360 Research Testimony on China’s Pursuit of HPC World Domination appeared first on insideHPC.

"The Project Olympus hyperscale GPU accelerator chassis for AI, also referred to as HGX-1, is designed to support eight of the latest “Pascal” generation NVIDIA GPUs and NVIDIA’s NVLink high speed multi-GPU interconnect technology, and provides high bandwidth interconnectivity for up to 32 GPUs by connecting four HGX-1 together. The HGX-1 AI accelerator provides extreme performance scalability to meet the demanding requirements of fast growing machine learning workloads, and its unique design allows it to be easily adopted into existing datacenters around the world."The post Overview of the HGX-1 AI Accelerator Chassis appeared first on insideHPC.

Today D-Wave Systems announced that Google, NASA, and Universities Space Research Association (USRA) have elected to upgrade to the new D-Wave 2000Q system. The upgraded system will support research on how quantum computing can be applied to artificial intelligence, machine learning, and difficult optimization problems. The new system will be the third generation of D-Wave technology installed at Ames,” said D-Wave CEO Vern Brownell. “We are pleased that Google, NASA, and USRA value the increased performance embodied in our latest generation of technology, the D-Wave 2000Q system, for their critical applications.”The post Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab to Install D-Wave 2000Q System appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Ethernet Alliance announced plans of details of its upcoming OFC 2017 interoperability demo featuring the full spectrum of Ethernet speeds from 1 Gigabit (1G) to 400 Gigabit (400G). "It’s an incredibly exciting time in the industry as investments in next-generation Ethernet standards are coming to fruition. Our members – including equipment manufacturers, system and component vendors, test and measurement, and everyone else in-between – are developing the solutions that will enable these standards,” said John D’Ambrosia, chairman, Ethernet Alliance; and senior principal engineer, Huawei.The post Ethernet Alliance to Demo 400G Networks at OFC 2017 appeared first on insideHPC.

Over at the SUSE Blog, Jay Kruemcke writes that the High-Performance Computing Module (HPC Module) for SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLES) is now available for 64-bit ARM (AArch64) systems. The HPC Module is delivered as an add-on product to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. "In summary, the HPC module allows us to keep the content closer to what’s happening in the HPC community upstream, providing more leading-edge tools in a more manageable fashion, leveraging a different lifecycle than the base SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. The new HPC module contains packages to optimize and manage HPC systems, and build HPC applications – building a bridge between the base server and an HPC stack (such as the stack provided by OpenHPC). This journey has started – some packages have already been made public and we have much more in the works and in our release queue."The post SUSE Adds HPC Module for ARM-based Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

"In order for developers to be able to focus on their application, a Vision Algorithm Designer application is included in the Intel Computer Vision SDK. This gives users a drag and drop interface that allows them to create new applications on the fly. Large and complex workflows can be modelled visually which takes the guesswork out of bringing together many different functions. In addition, customized code can be added to the workflows."The post Creating Applications with the Intel Computer Vision SDK appeared first on insideHPC.