High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

"In 2013, Western Digital acquired flash storage hardware and software supplier, Virident, for $685 million in cash. They followed that up in May 2016, with the acquisition of SanDisk Corporation. The addition of SanDisk makes Western Digital Corporation a comprehensive storage solutions provider with global reach, and an extensive product and technology platform that includes deep expertise in both rotating magnetic storage and non-volatile memory (NVM)."The post Video: SSD – The Transition from 2D to 3D NAND appeared first on insideHPC.

Altair will host the PBS Works User Group May 22-25 in Las Vegas. This four-day event (including 2 days of user presentations, round table discussions and surrounded by hands-on workshops) is the global user event of the year for PBS Professional and other PBS Works products. "This year we are excited to announce that we will be hosting a tour of the Switch data center facility on Tuesday afternoon."The post PBS Works User Group comes to Las Vegas May 22-25 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today ISC 2017 announced a day-long Deep Learning track on June 21 as part of its technical program. The full conference takes place June 18-21 in Frankfurt, Germany. "The overwhelming success of deep learning has triggered a race to build larger artificial neural networks, using growing amounts of training data in order to allow computers to take on more complex tasks. Such work will challenge the computational feasibility of deep learning of this magnitude, requiring massive data throughput and compute power. Hence, implementing deep learning at scale has become an emerging topic for the high performance computing community."The post Day-Long Deep Learning Track Comes to ISC 2017 appeared first on insideHPC.

The majority of SDSC’s data-intensive Gordon supercomputer will be used by Simons for ongoing research following completion of the system’s tenure as an NSF resource on March 31."We are delighted that the Simons Foundation has given Gordon a new lease on life after five years of service as a highly sought after XSEDE resource,” said SDSC Director Michael Norman, who also served as the principal investigator for Gordon. “We welcome the Foundation as a new partner and consider this to be a solid testimony regarding Gordon’s data-intensive capabilities and its myriad contributions to advancing scientific discovery.”The post Flatiron Institute to Repurpose Gordon Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

James Reinders discusses one of the “mode” options that Intel Xeon Phi processors have to offer: memory modes. "For programmers, this is the key option to really study because it may inspire programming changes."The post Intel Xeon Phi Memory Mode Programming (MCDRAM) in a Nutshell appeared first on insideHPC.

Today vScaler announced plans to showcase their HPC cloud platform March 15-16 at the upcoming Cloud Expo Europe Conference in London. Supported by two of its strategic technology partners - Aegis Data and Global Cloud Xchange, vScaler will showcase its application specific cloud platform, with experts on hand to discuss use cases such as HPC, Broadcast & Media, Big Data, Finance and Storage, as well as data centre innovation and co-location. "We provide full application stacks for a range of verticals as well as on-demand consultancy from our expert team," said David Power, vScaler CTO. “Our tailor-made, software-defined infrastructure cuts away time wasted on the distractions of setup and enables our users to concentrate on the task at hand.”The post vScaler to Showcase OpenHPC & Deep Learning at Cloud Expo Europe 2017 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today D-Wave Systems and Virginia Tech announced a joint effort to provide greater access to quantum computers for researchers from the Intelligence Community and Department of Defense. D-Wave and Virginia Tech will work towards the creation of a permanent quantum computing center to house a D-Wave system at the Hume Center for National Security and Technology. "Both D-Wave and Virginia Tech recognize how vital it is that quantum computing be accessible to a broad community of experts focused on solving real-world problems," said Bo Ewald, president of D-Wave International. "One of the many reasons we chose to work with Virginia Tech is their strong relationships with the intelligence and defense communities. A key area of focus will be to work with federal agencies towards the creation of a quantum computing center at the Hume Center."The post D-Wave Collaborates with Virginia Tech on Quantum Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

"DDN’s unique ability to handle tough application I/O profiles at speed and scale gives weather and climate organizations the infrastructure they need for rapid, high-fidelity modeling,” said Laura Shepard, senior director of product marketing, DDN. “These capabilities are essential to DDN’s growing base of weather and climate organizations, which are at the forefront of scientific research and advancements – from whole climate atmospheric and oceanic modeling to hurricane and severe weather emergency preparedness to the use of revolutionary, new, high-resolution satellite imagery in weather forecasting.”The post Top Weather and Climate Sites run on DDN Storage appeared first on insideHPC.

Next-generation sequencing (NGS) tools produce vast quantities of genetic data which poses a growing number of challenges to life sciences organizations. Accelerating analytics, providing adequate storage and memory capacity, speeding time-to-solution, and reducing costs are major concerns for IT department operating on traditional computing systems. In this week’s Sponsored Post, Bill Mannel, Vice President & General Manager of HPC Segment Solutions and Apollo Servers, Data Center Infrastructure Group at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, explains how next-generation sequencing is altering the patient care landscape.The post Next-Generation Sequencing Altering the Patient Care Landscape appeared first on 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.