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

Simon D. Smart gave this talk at the PASC17 conference. "Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) and Climate simulations sit in the intersection between classically understood HPC and the Big Data communities. Driven by ever more ambitious scientific goals, both the size and number of output data elements generated as part of NWP operations has grown by several orders of magnitude, and will continue to grow into the future. This poses significant scalability challenges for the data processing pipeline, and the movement of data through and between stages is one of the most significant factors in this."The post A Scalable Object Store for Meteorological and Climate Data appeared first on insideHPC.

Initial results of the Scientific Computing World (SCW) HPC readership survey have shown training and support for HPC resources are the number one concern for both those that operate and manage HPC facilities and researchers using HPC resources. "Several themes have emerged as a priority to both HPC managers and users/researchers. Respondents cite that training and support are essential parameters compared to performance, hardware or the availability of HPC resources."The post Survey: Training and Support #1 Concern for the HPC Community appeared first on insideHPC.

"A few weeks ago, we revealed ddR (Distributed Data-structures in R), an exciting new project started by R-Core, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and others that provides a fresh new set of computational primitives for distributed and parallel computing in R. The package sets the seed for what may become a standardized and easy way to write parallel algorithms in R, regardless of the computational engine of choice."The post Video: ddR – Distributed Data Structures in R appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Jérémie Bourdoncle from Altair describes the company's new PBScloud.IO offering for private clouds. "Altair is excited to announce the availability of PBScloud.io, its latest appliance solution to enable and expand cloud computing for organizations. PBScloud.io allows users to model, build and run High Performance Computing (HPC) appliances on both public and private clouds, as well as bare-metal infrastructures.The post Altair Showcases PBScloud.IO at ISC 2017 appeared first on insideHPC.

NCAR in Boulder is seeking a Software Engineer in our Job of the Week. "This position focuses primarily on the development of tools to meet the needs for the NCAR/IT community, and the design, writing, implementation, and support for systems monitoring tools necessary for the management of the computer infrastructure. Support will also be provided to the research community for the development of web-based analysis tools and general web programming."The post Job of the Week: Software Engineer at NCAR appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from ISC 2017, Sunita Chandrasekaran and Michael Wolfe describe how OpenACC makes GPU-accelerated computing more accessible to scientists and engineers. "OpenACC is a user-driven directive-based performance-portable parallel programming model designed for scientists and engineers interested in porting their codes to a wide-variety of heterogeneous HPC hardware platforms and architectures with significantly less programming effort than required with a low-level model."The post OpenACC Brings Directives to Accelerated Computing at ISC 2017 appeared first on insideHPC.

The MVAPICH User Group Meeting (MUG) has posted its meeting agenda. The event takes place August 14-16, 2017 in Columbus, Ohio. "As the annual gathering of MVAPICH2 users, researchers, developers, and system administrators, the MUG event includes Keynote Talks, Invited Tutorials, Invited Talks, Contributed Presentations, Open MIC session, and hands-on sessions."The post Agenda Posted: August MVAPICH User Group Meeting in Ohio appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Red Hat announced that the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) is using Red Hat Ceph Storage to support the growing needs of its research community. UAB selected Red Hat Ceph Storage because it offers researchers a flexible platform that can accommodate the vast amounts of data necessary to support future innovation and discovery. "UAB is a leader in computational research, with more than $500 million in annual research expenditures in areas including engineering, statistical genetics, genomics and next-generation gene sequencing," said Curtis A. Carver Jr., VP and CIO at UAB. "Researchers and students aggregate, analyze, and store massive amounts of data, which is used to support groundbreaking medical discoveries from new cancer biomarkers to state-of-the-art magnetic resonance imaging techniques."The post Red Hat Ceph Storage Powers Research at the University of Alabama at Birmingham appeared first on insideHPC.

"Following an introduction to the exceptional computational power of quantum computers using analogies with classical high performance computing systems, I will discuss real-world application problems that can be tackled on medium scale quantum computers but not on post exa-scale classical computers. I will motivate hardware software co-design of quantum accelerators to classical supercomputers and the need for educating a new generation of quantum software engineers with knowledge both in quantum computing and in high performance computing."The post Video: Towards Quantum High Performance Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

Today, Intel launched the Movidius Neural Compute Stick, the world’s first USB-based deep learning inference kit and self-contained artificial intelligence accelerator that delivers dedicated deep neural network processing capabilities to a wide range of host devices at the edge. Designed for product developers, researchers and makers, the Movidius Neural Compute Stick aims to reduce barriers to developing, tuning and deploying AI applications by delivering dedicated high-performance deep-neural network processing in a small form factor.The post Intel Launches Movidius Neural Compute Stick appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing (SIGHPC) announced that Fernanda Foertter from ORNL is the new Vice Chair of the organization's Education Committee. In this position, Foertter will support the goals of SIGHPC Education to promote increased knowledge and greater interest in the educational and scientific aspects of HPC. "Organizations such as SIGHPC broadens our periphery of other individuals within the HPC field. By connecting with my peers, I can make better decisions about what kinds of HPC training are needed and desired both within and outside of our own lab,” Foertter said.The post Fernanda Foertter Elected SIG HPC Education Vice Chair appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from PASC17, Idamura Yasuhiro from the Japan Atomic Energy Agency and Laurent Villard from EPFL discuss the computational challenges of developing Fusion reactors. "Numerical plasma physics models are used to improve our understanding of transport, instability growth and other poorly understood phenomena encountered in the experimental devices edging toward viable fusion energy. Since computational expense imposes a major limitation on accurate physical modeling, computational resources must be used as efficiently as possible."The post Interview: The Computational Challenges of Fusion Energy appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, ISC Diversity Chair Kim McMahon interviews Jessica Popp from DDN about the importance of fostering diversity in High Performance Computing. “Through collaboration and networking, the Women in HPC community strives to bring together women in HPC and technical computing while encouraging women to engage in outreach activities and improve the visibility of inspirational role models.”The post Interview: DDN’s Jessica Popp on the Importance of Diversity in HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Use of the Go* programming language and it’s developer community has grown significantly since it’s official launch by Google in 2009. Like many popular programming languages (C and Java come to mind), Go started as an experiment to design a new programming language that would fix some of the common problems of other languages and yet stay true to the basic tenets of modern programming: be scalable, productive, readable, enable robust development environments, and support networking and multiprocessing.The post Go with Intel® Data Analytics Acceleration Library and Go* appeared first on insideHPC.

The Hot Interconnects conference has posted their program Agenda. The event takes place Aug. 28-30 in Santa Clara, California. "Join us for our 25th year of an information-packed three-day Symposium about the latest in High Performance Interconnects. IEEE Hot Interconnects is the premier international forum for researchers and developers of state-of-the-art hardware and software architectures and implementations for interconnection networks of all scales, ranging from multi-core on-chip interconnects to those within systems, clusters, and data centers. Leaders in industry and academia attend the conference to interact with individuals at the forefront of this field."The post Agenda Posted: Hot Interconnects Conference in Santa Clara appeared first on insideHPC.

Researchers have performed the first ever quantum-mechanical simulation of the benchmark ultracold chemical reaction between potassium-rubidium (KRb) and a potassium atom, opening the door to new controlled chemistry experiments and quantum control of chemical reactions that could spark advances in quantum computing and sensing technologies. The research by a multi-institutional team simulated the ultracold chemical reaction, with results that had not been revealed in experiments. "We found that the overall reactivity is largely insensitive to the underlying chaotic dynamics of the system,” said Brian Kendrick of Los Alamos National Laboratory's Theoretical Division, “This observation has important implications for the development of controlled chemistry and for the technological applications of ultracold molecules from precision measurement to quantum computing.”The post Supercomputing the Signature of Chaos in Ultracold Reactions appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from ISC 2017, Rick Koopman from Lenovo describes the company's innovative solutions for HPC. "Lenovo recently announced the delivery of one of the most powerful systems – among the first in the world based on Intel Xeon Platinum processor family – to Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). The BSC MareNostrum 4 supercomputer, tasked with jobs in science and engineering research, incorporates 48 racks with more than 3,400 nodes with next generation Intel Xeon processors and a central memory of 390 Terabytes. Its peak power will be over 11 Petaflops."The post Lenovo Gains Momentum in HPC at ISC 2017 appeared first on insideHPC.

"PASC has recently formed collaborative partnerships with a number of scientific journals. In this panel discussion, representatives from these journals are invited to express their thoughts regarding publication practices in the computational sciences, including the publication of software codes. How can we validate published results and guarantee reproducibility? Finally, we will describe our vision for the PASC papers initiative going forward."The post Panel Discussion: Sustainable Software Development in Computational Sciences appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Bright Computing announced a reseller agreement with AMT. "We are very impressed with Bright’s technology and we believe it will make a huge difference to our customers’ HPC environments," said Ricardo Lugão, HPC Director at AMT. "With Bright, the management of an HPC cluster becomes very straightforward, empowering end users to administer their workloads, rather than relying on HPC experts.”The post Brazil-Based AMT to Resell Bright Computing Software appeared first on insideHPC.

Hyperion Research has posted the preliminary agenda for the HPC User Forum Sept. 5-7 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. "The HPC User Forum community includes thousands of people from the steering committee, member organizations, sponsors and everyone who has attended an HPC User Forum meeting. Our mission is to promote the health of the global HPC industry and address issues of common concern to users."The post Agenda Posted for September HPC User Forum in Milwaukee appeared first on insideHPC.

Today ANSYS, Saudi Aramco, and KAUST announced a new supercomputing milestone by scaling ANSYS Fluent to nearly 200,000 processor cores – enabling organizations to make critical and cost-effective decisions faster and increase the overall efficiency of oil and gas production facilities. This supercomputing record represents a more than 5x increase over the record set just three years ago, when Fluent first reached the 36,000-core scaling milestone. "Today's regulatory requirements and market expectations mean that manufacturers must develop products that are cleaner, safer, more efficient and more reliable," said Wim Slagter, director of HPC and cloud alliances at ANSYS. "To reach such targets, designers and engineers must understand product performance with higher accuracy than ever before – especially for separation technologies, where an improved separation performance can immediately increase the efficiency and profitability of an oil field. The supercomputing collaboration between ANSYS, Saudi Aramco and KSL enabled enhanced insight in complex gas, water and crude-oil flows inside a separation vessel, which include liquid free-surface, phase mixing and droplets settling phenomena."The post ANSYS Scales to 200K Cores on Shaheen II Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

Eduard Porta-Pardo from BSC has undertaken the first ever comparative analysis of sub-gene algorithms that mine the genetic information in cancer databases. These powerful data-sifting tools are helping untangle the complexity of cancer, and find previously unidentified mutations that are important in creating cancer cells. "Finding new cancer driver genes is an important goal of cancer genome analysis,” adds Porta-Pardo. This study should help researchers understand the advantages and drawbacks of sub-gene algorithms used to find new potential drug targets for cancer treatment.The post BSC Comparing Algorithms that Search for Cancer Mutations appeared first on insideHPC.

Today CSIRO, Australia’s top science agency, announced deployment of a new Dell EMC supercomputer, kicking off a new generation of research in artificial intelligence. "This new system will provide greater scale and processing power we need to build our computer vision systems by optimization of processing over broader scenarios, represented by much larger sets of images, to help train the software to understand and represent the world. We’ll be able to take our computer vision research to the next level, solving problems through leveraging large scale image data that most labs around the world aren’t able to.” Assoc. Professor Barnes said.The post Dell Builds Bracewell Supercomputer for Bionic Vision Research at CSIRO in Australia appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Jon Masters from Red Hat describes the company's multi-architecture solutions that were on display at ISC 2017. "Developing new and adapting existing highly scalable applications to take advantage of the new technological advances across multiple deployment domains is the greatest challenge facing HPC sites. This is where the operating system can provide a unified interface to the underlying hardware and interconnects and serve as a foundation for modular and standardized application stacks that take advantage of enhanced system capabilities."The post Red Hat Showcases ThunderX 2 Development Platform for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

In big data science, storage archives protect massive volumes of research-critical content. Scientists at the University of Warsaw (UW) Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling (ICM) rely on a petabyte-scale active archive built on modern storage technology.The post Petabyte-Scale Active Archive in Private Object Storage appeared first on insideHPC.

"Fluid Dynamics (FD) simulations provide a powerful tool for the analysis of such fluid flows and are an essential element of many industrial and academic problems. The complexities and nature of fluid flows, often combined with problems set in open domains, implies that the resources needed to computationally model problems of industrial and academic relevance is virtually unbounded."The post Exaflow: Collaborating on the Computational Challenges of CFD appeared first on insideHPC.

"Lenovo is an interesting company in that they started in China and the founders realized they need to become diverse in culture and every other way. So what we've found is that they've become a multi-cultural company very, very quickly. Now, we've seen studies that show that a high level of diversity in all sorts of different ways gives us better business results. What we find is, without Gender Diversity, we're not reflecting our customers."The post Fostering Diversity in HPC at Lenovo appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Advanced Clustering Technologies announced new systems based on the new Intel Xeon Scalable processors. "Integrating this new breakthrough generation of Intel Xeon processors into our systems means we can provide our customers with a powerful platform that has been designed specifically to deliver advanced HPC capabilities,” said Advanced Clustering Technologies President Kyle Sheumaker. “Researchers and data scientists will be able to unlock data and scientific insights faster than ever before because of the advancements Intel Xeon Scalable processors bring across compute, storage, memory and I/O.”The post Intel Xeon Scalable Processors Power New Servers from Advanced Clustering Technologies appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Peter Maas from Supermicro gives us a tour of the company's exhibit at ISC 2017. "Supermicro offers the industry’s broadest selection of HPC Solutions in the industry, including 1U, 2U, 3U, 4U SuperServers, FatTwin, SuperWorkstations and SuperBlade platforms. Now, the HPC community can build even higher density compute clusters to deliver maximum parallel computing performance per watt, per dollar, and per square foot. Look to Supermicro HPC Servers and Solutions to deliver the performance, scalability and reliability needed to solve the most complex computing challenges of our time."The post Video: Supermicro Showcases HPC Solutions at ISC 2017 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at why the Alan Turing Institute is focusing on Graph Computing with their acquisition of a Cray Urika-GX supercomputer. After that, they cover a series of IT developments that go to Infinity and Beyond.The post Radio Free HPC Looks at Big News in Graph Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

"Shrinking the feature sizes of wires and transistors has been the driver for Moore’s Law for the past 5 decades, but what might lie beyond the end of current lithographic roadmaps and how will it affect computing as we know it? Moore’s Law is an economic theory after all, and any option that can make future computing more capable each new generation (by some measure) could continue Moore’s economic theory well into the future." The goal of this panel session is to communicate the options for extending computing beyond the end of our current silicon lithography roadmaps.The post Panel Discussion: Beyond Moore’s Law appeared first on insideHPC.

In this MacObserver podcast, John Martellaro discusses the evolution of HPC with John Gustafson, Visiting Professor at NUS in Singapore. “Known by many as the father of Gustafson's Law, Dr. John Gustafson is a professor of computer science, now at The National University of Singapore. Listen in as John describes his career arc and offers some great advice for young scientists just getting started.”The post Interview: John Gustafson on the Evolution of Supercomputing appeared first on insideHPC.

Over at ALCF, Joan Koka writes that researchers at the National Cancer Institute are using Argonne supercomputers to advance disease studies by enhancing our understanding of RNA, biological polymers that are fundamentally involved in health and disease. “Getting the real functional structure, which is the 3-D structure, is very difficult to do experimentally, because the RNA polymer is too flexible,” he said. “This is why we rely on computational simulation. Simulations can be used to explore hundreds or thousands of possible conformational states that would eventually lead us to the most likely 3-D structure.”The post Supercomputing RNA Structure at Argonne appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Asetek announced an order from a new European OEM customer to service demand for an HPC (High Performance Computing) installation. "The order is for Asetek’s RackCDU D2C (Direct-to-Chip) liquid cooling solution and is valued at $32,000 USD with delivery scheduled for Q3 2017."The post Asetek Announces Regional OEM HPC installation appeared first on insideHPC.

"We present the open meta data format openPMD for data format agnostic markup of particle-mesh data. Based on a minimal kernel of meta information and enriched with domain-specific extensions, we develop an open ecosystem of interoperable simulations and data processing frameworks from the domains of laser-plasma interaction, X-ray photon sciences, astrophysics up to systems biology. This poster presents our efforts to enable & establish workflows suitable to frictionless transposition between those domains, using highly scalable I/O methods (e.g. ADIOS BP or HDF5), a truly self-describing data markup and peer reviewed participation."The post Open Science with OpenPMD appeared first on insideHPC.

"The Second Annual HPC Systems Professionals Workshop will bring together systems administrators, systems architects, and systems analysts in order to share best practices, discuss cutting­-edge technologies, and advance the state­ of ­the ­practice for HPC systems. Submissions are encouraged that discuss all aspects of HPC systems design, implementation, maintenance, and security."The post Call for Papers: HPC Systems Professionals Workshop appeared first on insideHPC.

“The signature of this collaboration agreement between two of the largest producers of science data on the planet shows that we are really entering a new era of science worldwide”, said Prof. Philip Diamond, SKA Director-General. “Both CERN and SKA are and will be pushing the limits of what is possible technologically, and by working together and with industry, we are ensuring that we are ready to make the most of this upcoming data and computing surge.”The post SKA and CERN Sign Big Data Agreement appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from ISC 2017, Bill Nitzberg from Altair demonstrates how easy it is to launch jobs with PBS Pro. "Altair’s PBS Works workload management suite is used by thousands of organizations worldwide to simplify the administration and use of HPC clusters, clouds and supercomputing environments."The post How PBS Works Makes HPC Easy to Use appeared first on insideHPC.

Today OpenSFS announced that the Lustre 2.10.0 release has been declared GA and is available download. "Thanks to all those who have contributed to the creation of this release. This is the first release of the 2.10.x LTS release stream. A freely available Lustre 2.10.1 should become available in the coming weeks."The post Lustre 2.10.0 Released appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Teradata announced the acquisition of StackIQ, developers of one of the industry’s fastest bare metal software provisioning platforms which has managed the deployment of cloud and analytics software at millions of servers in data centers around the globe. The deal will leverage StackIQ’s expertise in open source software and large cluster provisioning to simplify and automate the deployment of Teradata Everywhere. Offering customers the speed and flexibility to deploy Teradata solutions across hybrid cloud environments, allows them to innovate quickly and build new analytical applications for their business. "Teradata prides itself on building and investing in solutions that make life easier for our customers,” said Oliver Ratzesberger, Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer for Teradata. “Only the best, most innovative and applicable technology is added to our ecosystem, and StackIQ delivers with products that excel in their field. Adding StackIQ technology to IntelliFlex, IntelliBase and IntelliCloud will strengthen our capabilities and enable Teradata to redefine how systems are deployed and managed globally.”The post Teradata Acquires StackIQ appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from ISC 2017, Lara Kisielewska moderates a panel discussion on Diversity in HPC. "Through collaboration and networking, the Women in HPC community strives to bring together women in HPC and technical computing while encouraging women to engage in outreach activities and improve the visibility of inspirational role models."The post Panel Looks at Improving Diversity in HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Today WekaIO, a venture backed high-performance cloud storage software company, today emerged from stealth to introduce the industry's first cloud-native scalable file system that delivers unprecedented performance to applications, scaling to Exabytes of data in a single namespace. Headquartered in San Jose, CA, WekaIO has developed the first software platform that harnesses flash technology to create a high-performance parallel scale out file storage solution for both on-premises servers and public clouds.

"There are large efforts towards refining the horizontal resolution of climate models to O(1 km) with the intent to represent convective clouds explicitly rather than using semi-empirical parameterizations. This refinement would move the governing equations closer to first principles and is expected to reduce the uncertainties of climate models. However, the output volume of climate simulations would dramatically grow, and storing it for later analysis would likely become impractical, due to limited I/O bandwidth and mass-storage capacity. In this presentation we discuss possible solutions to this challenge."The post Interview: Dr. Christoph Schär on Escaping the Data Avalanche for Climate Modeling appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Cray announced the Company will provide a Cray Urika-GX system to the Alan Turing Institute. “The rise of data-intensive computing – where big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and supercomputing converge – has opened up a new domain of real-world, complex analytics applications, and the Cray Urika-GX gives our customers a powerful platform for solving this new class of data-intensive problems.”The post Alan Turing Institute to Acquire Cray Urika-GX Graph Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

To compare how one version of a part of the code is running to another version, since this is a ratio, it is important to keep one of the values constant in order to understand if the optimization is working. If more cpu cycles are being used, but more instructions are being executed, then the ratio could be the same, but this measure will not show any improvement. The goal is to lower the CPI in certain parts of the code as well as the overall application.The post Cycles Per Instruction – Why it matters appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the 2017 DDN User Group meeting at ISC, James Coomer from DDN presents: IME Update - I/O Profiling of applications. "DDN’s Infinite Memory Engine (IME) is a scale-out, flash-native, software-defined, storage cache that streamlines the data path for application IO. IME interfaces directly to applications and secures IO via a data path that eliminates file system bottlenecks."The post IO Management with DDN IME 1.1 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at why Drive Writes Per Day are such an important metric for acquiring the right kind of SSD for your particular workload. "Drive writes per day (DWPD) is an endurance rating that manufacturers of NAND flash storage provide their customers. ... DWPD will vary, depending upon whether the storage is intended for consumer or enterprise use. Consumer use solid state drives (SSDs) have a fixed endurance rating and capacity."The post Radio Free HPC Optimizes Drive Writes Per Day for SSDs appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Silicon Mechanics announced immediate availability of Intel's new family of processors, the Intel Xeon Scalable platform, formerly code-named Purley. Intel's newest processing platform features a selection of Intel Xeon processors designed to scale with a business as it grows, from an entry-level Bronze processor to the Intel Xeon Platinum processor for maximum performance, hardware-enhanced security, and advanced RAS (reliability, availability, and serviceability). "As a long-term Strategic OEM partner with Intel, we are excited to bring the Intel Xeon Scalable platform to our customers on day one," said Silicon Mechanics Chief Marketing Officer Sue Lewis. "Our customers have been excited about the expected improvements in memory bandwidth and performance, and through our close-working partnership with Intel, we are ready to help them deploy systems based on the new processors now."The post Silicon Mechanics steps up with Intel Xeon Scalable Processors appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from ISC 2017, Keith Morris from NVIDIA describes how the company's next-generation Volta GPU technology will drive HPC and AI applications to new levels of performance. "GV100 not only builds upon the advances of its predecessor, the Pascal GP100 GPU, it significantly improves performance and scalability, and adds many new features that improve programmability. These advances will supercharge HPC, data center, supercomputer, and deep learning systems and applications."The post Nvidia Volta GPUs Power HPC & AI at ISC 2017 appeared first on insideHPC.

Intel outlines the highlights and features of the company's new Intel Xeon Scalable processors designed to accelerate HPC systems. The Intel Xeon processor Scalable Family, the newest Intel Xeon processors, are optimized to address today’s most demanding high-performance computing challenges.The post New Intel Xeon Scalable Processors Accelerate HPC Systems appeared first on insideHPC.