High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

Altair just released HyperWorks 2017, the "most comprehensive, open architecture CAE simulation platform in the industry, offering the best technologies to design and optimize high performance, weight efficient and innovative products. "HyperWorks 2017 adds key enhancements to the modeling and assembly capabilities of the software,” said James P. Dagg, Chief Technical Officer, User Experience at Altair. “Users can now communicate directly with their enterprise PLM system, storing libraries of parts and configurations of their models. Tasks like setting up a model with multiple configurations for different disciplines can now be done in minutes.”The post Altair Releases HyperWorks 2017 Comprehensive Simulation Platform appeared first on insideHPC.

Applications are now being accepted for the Women in IT Networking at SC (WINS) program at SC17. The conference takes place Nov. 12-17 in Denver. "The WINS program seeks qualified female U.S. candidates in their early to mid-career to join the SCinet volunteer team to help build and operate SCinet for SC17. Selected candidates will receive full travel support and mentoring by well-known engineering experts in the research and education community."The post Women in IT: Apply for WINS Program at SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

Accelerated computing continues to gain momentum. This year the GPU Technology Conference will feature 90 sessions on HPC and Supercomputing. "Sessions will focus on how computational and data science are used to solve traditional HPC problems in healthcare, weather, astronomy, and other domains. GPU developers can also connect with innovators and researchers as they share their groundbreaking work using GPU computing."The post GTC to Feature 90 Sessions on HPC and Supercomputing appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Fujitsu announced plans to establish a coordination center within the RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project (AIP). Scheduled to open April 1, the RIKEN AIP-Fujitsu Collaboration Center will combine RIKEN AIP’s knowledge of cutting-edge technology in the artificial intelligence field with Fujitsu’s experience developing AI-related technologies based on its customer platforms. The aim is […]The post RIKEN AIP-Fujitsu Collaboration Center to Focus on Next-Gen AI appeared first on insideHPC.

The 2017 FLOW-3D Americas Users Conference has issued its Call for Abstracts. The event takes place Sept. 20-21 in Santa Fe, NM. "The call for abstracts for is now open. Share your experiences, present your success stories and obtain valuable feedback from your fellow CFD practitioners and Flow Science staff. The deadline to submit an abstract is Friday, August 4. The conference proceedings will be made available to attendees as well as through the Flow Science website."The post Call for Abstracts: FLOW-3D Americas Users Conference appeared first on insideHPC.

"2017 will see the introduction of many technologies that will help shape the future of HPC systems. Production-scale ARM supercomputers, advancements in memory and storage technology such as DDN’s Infinite Memory Engine (IME), and much wider adoption of accelerator technologies and from Nvidia, Intel and FPGA manufacturers such as Xilinx and Altera, are all helping to define the supercomputers of tomorrow."The post Future Technologies on the Rise for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at a set of IT and Science stories. Microsoft Azure is making a big move to GPUs and the OCP Platform as part of their Project Olympus. Meanwhile, Huawei is gaining market share in the server market and IBM is bringing storage to the atomic level.The post Radio Free HPC Looks at Azure’s Move to GPUs and OCP for Deep Learning appeared first on insideHPC.

"Cybersecurity is a cat-and-mouse game where the mouse always has long had the upper hand because it’s so easy for new malware to go undetected. Dr. Eli David, an expert in computational intelligence and CTO of Deep Instinct, wants to use AI to change that, bringing the GPU-powered deep learning techniques underpinning modern speech and image recognition to the vexing world of cybersecurity."The post Podcast: Using GPUs and AI to Fight Cybercrime appeared first on insideHPC.

Scott Callaghan from the Southern California Earthquake Center presented this talk as part of the Blue Waters Webinar Series. "I will present an overview of scientific workflows. I'll discuss what the community means by "workflows" and what elements make up a workflow. We'll talk about common problems that users might be facing, such as automation, job management, data staging, resource provisioning, and provenance tracking, and explain how workflow tools can help address these challenges. I'll present a brief example from my own work with a series of seismic codes showing how using workflow tools can improve scientific applications."The post Video: Overview of Scientific Workflows appeared first on insideHPC.

The Data Science with Spark Workshop addresses high-level parallelization for data analytics workloads using the Apache Spark framework. Participants will learn how to prototype with Spark and how to exploit large HPC machines like the Piz Daint CSCS flagship system.The post Introduction to Data Science with Spark appeared first on insideHPC.

The Alibaba Cloud has announced a pilot program with Intel for a cloud-based FPGA acceleration service with the goal of enabling customers to have virtual access to powerful compute resources in the cloud to help them manage business, scientific and enterprise data application workloads more effectively. “This service greatly adds to our value as a leading provider of highly scalable cloud computing and data management services that provide businesses with flexible, reliable connectivity.”The post Accelerating the Alibaba Cloud with Intel Arria 10 FPGAs appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Ricard Borrell from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center describes how the Mont Blanc Project Industrial End User Group on TermoFluids is advancing HPC on ARM-based platforms.The post Video: Mont-Blanc Project Advances HPC for TermoFluids appeared first on insideHPC.

A new paper from IIT Hyderabad in India surveys cache partitioning techniques for multicore processors. Now accepted in ACM Computing Surveys 2017, the survey by Sparsh Mittal reviews 90 papers. "As the number of on-chip cores and memory demands of applications increase, judicious management of cache resources has become imperative. Cache partitioning is a promising approach to provide capacity benefits of shared cache with performance isolation of private caches. This paper reviews various cache partitioning techniques, e.g., strict/psuedo, static/dynamic, hardware/software-based, block/set/way-based, for improving performance/fairness/load-balancing/QoS, etc."The post New Paper Surveys Cache Partitioning Techniques appeared first on insideHPC.

Tokyo-based Startup XTREME DESIGN recently announced it has raised $700K of funding in its pre-series A round. Launched in early 2015, the Startup’s XTREME DNA software automates the process of configuring, deploying, and monitoring virtual supercomputers on public clouds. To learn more, we caught up with the company's founder, Naoki Shibata.The post Interview: XTREME DESIGN Automates HPC Cloud Configurations appeared first on insideHPC.

"Back in 2013 I wrote the following blog expressing my opinion that I doubted we would reach Exascale before 2020. However, recently it was announced that the world’s first Exascale supercomputer prototype will be ready by the end of 2017 (recently pushed back to early 2018), created by the Chinese. I did some digging and wanted to share my thoughts on the news."The post Moving to Exascale – Closer Than We Think? appeared first on insideHPC.

Today E4 Computer Engineering from Italy showcased a new PetaFlops-Class Open Compute Server with "remarkable energy efficiency" based on the IBM POWER architecture. "Finding new ways of making easily deployable and energy efficient HPC solutions is often a complex task, which requires a lot of planning, testing and benchmarking - said Cosimo Gianfreda CTO, Co-Founder, E4 Computer Engineering. - We are very lucky to work with great partners like Wistron, as their timing and accuracy means we have all the right conditions to have effective time-to-market. I strongly believe that the performance on the node, coupled with the power monitoring technology, will receive a wide acceptance from the HPC and Enterprise community.”The post E4 Computer Engineering’s Showcases New Petascale OCP Platform appeared first on insideHPC.

"Would you like to help manage and develop a state-of-the-art High Performance Compute (HPC) facility to enable cutting-edge biomedical research? This is an exciting opportunity to gain skills and experience as part of a friendly team supporting research staff and students at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology (KIR). The KIR is a world-class research centre located in new premises next to the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford."The post Job of the Week: HPC System Administrator at University of Oxford appeared first on insideHPC.

Today IBM announced it has created the world’s smallest magnet using a single atom – and stored one bit of data on it. Currently, hard disk drives use about 100,000 atoms to store a single bit. The ability to read and write one bit on one atom creates new possibilities for developing significantly smaller and denser storage devices, that could someday, for example, enable storing the entire iTunes library of 35 million songs on a device the size of a credit card.The post Podcast: IBM Researchers Store Data on a Single Atom appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Atos announced record SPEC benchmark performance on its bullion x86 servers. Performed with a 16-socket configuration, this benchmark demonstrates that the high-end enterprise bullion x86 servers perform at exceptional levels and thus the most powerful in the world in terms of speed and memory.The post Atos Bullion Breaks Record for SPEC Performance appeared first on insideHPC.

"This video is from the opening session of the "Introduction to Programming Pascal (P100) with CUDA 8" workshop at CSCS in Lugano, Switzerland. The three-day course is intended to offer an introduction to Pascal computing using CUDA 8."The post Introduction to GPUs in HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

With the release of Intel Parallel Studio XE 2017, the focus is on making applications perform better on Intel architecture-based clusters. Intel MPI Library 2017, a fully integrated component of Intel Parallel Studio XE 2017, implements the high-performance MPI-3.1 specification on multiple fabrics. It enables programmers to quickly deliver the best parallel performance, even if you change or upgrade to new interconnects, without requiring changes to the software or operating environment.The post Intel MPI Library 2017 Focuses on Intel Multi-core/Many-Core Clusters appeared first on insideHPC.

Today, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Ingrasys announced a new industry standard design to accelerate Artificial Intelligence in the next generation cloud. "Powered by eight NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs in each chassis, HGX-1 features an innovative switching design based on NVIDIA NVLink interconnect technology and the PCIe standard, enabling a CPU to dynamically connect to any number of GPUs. This allows cloud service providers that standardize on the HGX-1 infrastructure to offer customers a range of CPU and GPU machine instance configurations."The post Nvidia Brings AI to the Cloud with the HGX-1 Hyperscale GPU Accelerator appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS) Consortium announced that Intel Corporation has joined their membership-based foundation. "As a consortium member, Intel plans to improve integration between iRODS, the free open source software for data virtualization, data discovery, workflow automation, and secure collaboration, and Lustre, an open source parallel distributed file system used for computing on large-scale high performance computing clusters. Membership in the consortium is a first step in offering an integrated tiered solution to Lustre end-users that allows them to easily move data sets from HPC systems into less costly long-term storage systems, where the data can be managed, shared and kept secure using iRODS."The post Intel Joins iRODS Consortium to Better Integrate Lustre appeared first on insideHPC.

"GPUs potentially offer exceptionally high memory bandwidth and performance for a wide range of applications. The challenge in utilizing such accelerators has been the difficulty in programming them. Enter GPU Hackathons; Our mentors come from national laboratories, universities and vendors, and besides having extensive experience in programming GPUs, many of them develop the GPU-capable compilers and help define standards such as OpenACC and OpenMP."The post How GPU Hackathons Bring HPC to More Users appeared first on insideHPC.

Weather and climate simulation services could soon be run in Europe rather than the UK as it was announced that the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is proposing to move its supercomputing capabilities to a new data centre located in Italy.The post Will ECMWF Move Supercomputing to Italy? appeared first on insideHPC.

"Do you need to compress your software development cycles for services deployed at scale and accelerate your data-driven insights? Are you delivering solutions that automate decision making & model complexity using analytics and machine learning on Spark? Find out how a pre-integrated analytics platform that’s tuned for memory-intensive workloads and powered by the industry leading interconnect will empower your data science and software development teams to deliver amazing results for your business. Learn how Cray’s supercomputing approach in an enterprise package can help you excel at scale."The post Compressing Software Development Cycles with Supercomputer-based Spark appeared first on insideHPC.

Registration is now open for the 32nd ISC High Performance conference. Attendees can save over 45 percent off the onsite registration fee by registering between now and May 10 for the full conference pass. "The organizers advise attendees and exhibitors to plan their travel and housing as early as possible. A lot of travel happens in Europe in June and it is best to reserve your accommodation now."The post Plan Your Travel and Stay For ISC 2017 appeared first on insideHPC.

Registration is now open for ISC 2017 with discounted Early Bird rates. As the largest high performance computing forum in Europe, ISC 2017 takes place June 18-22 in Frankfurt, Germany. "First held in 1986, ISC High Performance is the world’s oldest and Europe’s most important conference and networking event for the HPC community. It offers a strong five-day technical program focusing on HPC technological development and its application in scientific fields, as well as its adoption in commercial environments."The post Registration Opens for ISC 2017 in Frankfurt appeared first on insideHPC.

Researchers at SDSC have developed a new seismic software package with Intel Corporation that has enabled the fastest seismic simulation to-date. SDSC’s ground-breaking performance of 10.4 Petaflops on earthquake simulations used 612,000 Intel Xeon Phi processor cores of the new Cori Phase II supercomputer at NERSC.The post SDSC Seismic Simulation Software Exceeds 10 Petaflops on Cori Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

“Developing a supercomputer that is many times faster than any of those currently available is clearly a challenging process and involves leveraging Fujitsu’s top hardware and software talent, as well as the help of partner companies such as ARM,” said Naoki Shinjo, SVP, Head of Next Generation Technical Computing Unit, Fujitsu.The post Fujitsu & Linaro Collaborate to Accelerate HPC on ARM appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced an agreement to acquire Nimble Storage, the California-based provider of predictive all-flash and hybrid-flash storage solutions. HPE will pay $12.50 per share in cash, representing a net cash purchase price at closing of $1.0 billion. In addition to the purchase price, HPE will assume or pay out Nimble’s unvested equity awards, with a value of approximately $200 million at closing. "Nimble Storage’s portfolio complements and strengthens our current 3PAR products in the high-growth flash storage market and will help us deliver on our vision of making Hybrid IT simple for our customers,” said Meg Whitman, President and CEO, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “And, this acquisition is exactly aligned with the strategy and capital allocation approach we’ve laid out. We remain focused on high-growth and higher-margin segments of the market.”The post HPE to Acquire Nimble Storage appeared first on insideHPC.

The use of simulation software for validation and testing is a well established process for many engineering companies – but advances in software, combined with increased pressure from competition and regulatory requirements, are driving simulation earlier into the design and concept stages of new product development. "If you can test lots of scenarios virtually, then you know that you have accounted for any possibility of it failing."The post Optimizing Vehicle Design with Simulation appeared first on insideHPC.

SCinet at SC17 has issued its Call for Applications for the Women in IT Networking (WINS) program. The WINS program is currently seeking qualified women U.S. candidates in their early to mid-career to join the SCinet volunteer workforce for SC17. Selected candidates will receive full travel support and mentoring by well-known engineering experts in the research […]The post Call for Applications: Women in IT Networking at SC17 (WINS) appeared first on insideHPC.

"IBM has invested over decades to growing the field of quantum computing and we are committed to expanding access to quantum systems and their powerful capabilities for the science and business communities," said Arvind Krishna, senior vice president of Hybrid Cloud and director for IBM Research. "Following Watson and blockchain, we believe that quantum computing will provide the next powerful set of services delivered via the IBM Cloud platform, and promises to be the next major technology that has the potential to drive a new era of innovation across industries."The post IBM to Build Commercially Available Quantum Computing Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Bright Computing announced that the Fox Chase Cancer Center is using Bright Cluster Manager for its new high-performance computing cluster. The 30-node cluster supports bioinformatics initiatives for Fox Chase's world class cancer research programs.The post Fox Chase Cancer Center Adopts Bright Cluster Manager appeared first on insideHPC.

“Electricity transformed industries: agriculture, transportation, communication, manufacturing. I think we are now in that phase where AI technology has advanced to the point where we see a clear path for it to transform multiple industries.” Specifically, Ng sees AI being particularly influential in entertainment, retail, and logistics.The post Andrew Ng on why Artificial Intelligence is the New Electricity appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Fujitsu announced that it has received RIKEN's order for the "Deep learning system," one of the largest supercomputers in Japan specializing in AI research. "NVIDIA DGX-1, the world’s first all-in-one AI supercomputer, is designed to meet the enormous computational needs of AI researchers," said Jim McHugh, VP & GM at Nvidia. "Powered by 24 DGX-1s, the RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project’s system will be the most powerful DGX-1 customer installation in the world. Its breakthrough performance will dramatically speed up deep learning research in Japan, and become a platform for solving complex problems in healthcare, manufacturing and public safety."The post Nvidia to Power Fujitsu’s New Deep Learning System at RIKEN appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Dr. Marcelo Ponce from SciNet presents: Scientific Visualization with Python. "SciNet is Canada’s largest supercomputer centre, providing Canadian researchers with computational resources and expertise necessary to perform their research on scales not previously possible in Canada. We help power work from the biomedical sciences and aerospace engineering to astrophysics and climate science."The post Video: Scientific Visualization with Python appeared first on insideHPC.

This year, the OpenMP Architecture Review Board is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the first OpenMP API specification with a pair of events: OpenMPCon and the International Conference on OpenMP (IWOMP). Both events will take place the week of September 18 at Stony Brook University in New York. "Developers attending this year’s OpenMPCon and IWOMP conferences will have the added bonus of joining us to celebrate the vital contribution OpenMP has made by enabling high-performance computing over the past two decades and will also help us to shape OpenMP’s next twenty years.” said Michael Klemm, OpenMP CEO."The post Call for Submissions: OpenMPCon & IWOMP at Stony Brook University in New York appeared first on insideHPC.

"This talk will describe Monotasks, a new architecture for the core of Spark that makes performance easier to reason about. In Spark today, pervasive parallelism and pipelining make it difficult to answer even simple performance questions like “what is the bottleneck for this workload?” As a result, it’s difficult for developers to know what to optimize, and it’s even more difficult for users to understand what hardware to use and what configuration parameters to set to get the best performance."The post Re-Architecting Spark For Performance Understandability appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Tokyo-based Startup XTREME DESIGN announced it has raised $700K of funding in its pre-series A round. Launched in early 2015, the Startup's XTREME DNA software automates the process of configuring, deploying, and monitoring virtual supercomputers on public clouds.The post XTREME DESIGN Startup Raises $700K in Funding for HPC Cloud Enablement appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the PEARC17 conference extended their Technical Paper Submission Deadline to March 13, 2017. Formerly known as the XSEDE Conference, PEARC17 will take place July 9-13 in New Orleans. "PEARC17 is open to professionals and students in advanced research computing. The PEARC17 Call for Participation contains details about each of the four technical tracks of papers. The technical track paper submissions may be full papers (strongly preferred) or extended abstracts."The post PEARC17 Extends Technical Paper Submission Deadline to March 13 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today PASC17 announced that Horst Simon will present a public lecture entitled “Supercomputers and Superintelligence” at the conference. PASC17 takes place June 26-28 in Lugano Switzerland. "In recent years the idea of emerging superintelligence has been discussed widely by popular media, and many experts voiced grave warnings about its possible consequences. This talk will use an analysis of progress in supercomputer performance to examine the gap between current technology and reaching the capabilities of the human brain. In spite of good progress in high performance computing and techniques such as machine learning, this gap is still very large. The presentation will then explore two related topics through a discussion of recent examples: what can we learn from the brain and apply to HPC, e.g., through recent efforts in neuromorphic computing? And how much progress have we made in modeling brain function? The talk will be concluded with a perspective on the true dangers of superintelligence, and on our ability to ever build self-aware or sentient computers."The post Horst Simon to Present “Supercomputers and Superintelligence” at PASC17 in Lugano appeared first on insideHPC.

The European PRACE initiative is now accepting nominations for the PRACE Ada Lovelace Award for HPC. "PRACE is happy to receive your nomination for the Award. The winner of the Award will be invited to participate in the concluding Panel Session at PRACEdays17, and will receive a cash prize of € 1 000 as well as a certificate and an engraved crystal trophy."The post Nominations Open for PRACE Ada Lovelace Award for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the 2017 HPC Advisory Council Stanford Conference, Yifan Zhang from Stanford presents: Using HPC in a Cohort Study of the Health Effects of Handgun Ownership in California. Researchers hope the study will identify characteristics of individuals at highest risk of experiencing firearm-related mortality.The post Using HPC in a Cohort Study of the Health Effects of Handgun Ownership in California appeared first on insideHPC.

The Exascale Computing Project (ECP) has selected its fifth Co-Design Center to focus on Graph Analytics — combinatorial (graph) kernels that play a crucial enabling role in many data analytic computing application areas as well as several ECP applications. Initially, the work will be a partnership among PNNL, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and Purdue University.The post Exascale Computing Project Selects Co-Design Center for Graph Analytics appeared first on insideHPC.

Today ISC 2017 announced that the conference Industrial Day on June 20 will feature a keynote by Dr. Alfred Geiger of T-Systems. With a day-long program, Industrial Day will address challenges in the industrial manufacturing, transport, and logistics sectors.The post Dr. Alfred Geiger to Keynote Industrial Day at ISC 2017 appeared first on insideHPC.

"The Amazon Web Services High Performance Computing (HPC) team is looking for Software Development Engineers (SDEs) to help drive the development of new features, functionality, and capabilities for AWS Batch. AWS Batch is developed by a newly formed team building a core set of offerings that allow our customers to plan, schedule, and execute batch computing workloads across the full range of AWS compute services and capabilities."The post Job of the Week: HPC Software Development Engineer at AWS appeared first on insideHPC.

In this slidecast, Jem Davies (VP Engineering and ARM Fellow) gives a brief introduction to Machine Learning and explains how it is used in devices such as smartphones, autos, and drones. "I do think that machine learning altogether is probably going to be one of the biggest shifts in computing that we'll see in quite a few years. I'm reluctant to put a number on it like -- the biggest thing in 25 years or whatever," said Jem Davies in a recent investor call. "But this is going to be big. It is going to affect all of us. It affects quite a lot of ARM, in fact."The post Slidecast: ARM Steps Up to Machine Learning appeared first on insideHPC.

SC17 has issues its Call for Technical Papers. The event takes place Nov 12-17 in Denver. "The Technical Papers Program at SC is the leading venue for presenting the highest-quality original research, from the foundations of HPC to its emerging frontiers. The Conference Committee solicits submissions of excellent scientific merit that introduce new ideas to the field and stimulate future trends on topics such as applications, systems, parallel algorithms, data analytics and performance modeling. SC also welcomes submissions that make significant contributions to the “state-of-the-practice” by providing compelling insights on best practices for provisioning, using and enhancing high-performance computing systems, services, and facilities."The post Call for Technical Papers: SC17 in Denver appeared first on insideHPC.