High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

Today the Active Archive Alliance announced that Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has upgraded its active archive solutions to enhance the integrity and accessibility of its vast amount of data. The new solutions allow ORNL to meet its increasing data demands and enable fast file recall for its users. "These active archive upgrades were crucial to ensuring our users’ data is both accessible and fault-tolerant so they can continue performing high-priority research at our facilities,” said Jack Wells, director of science for the National Center for Computational Sciences at ORNL. “Our storage-intensive users have been very pleased with our new data storage capabilities.”The post Oak Ridge steps up to Active Archive Solutions appeared first on insideHPC.

"High Performance Computing (HPC) is considered the unlimited class of computing where performance is all that matters. Increasingly, business enterprises are looking to apply the technology and techniques from HPC to help them solve their complex business challenges. Weka.IO’s CTO, Liran Zvibel, will discuss how affordable HPC class storage performance and scale can be achieved using Flash technology and a hardware independent software architecture."The post Startup Video: Architecting Flash for Scale and Performance in HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

“Deploying DDN’s end-to-end storage solution has allowed us to elevate the standard of protection, increase compliance and push the boundaries of science on a single, highly scalable storage platform,” said Ramjan. “We’ve also saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by centralizing the storage of our data-intensive research and a dozen data-hungry scientific instruments on DDN. With all these advantages it is easy to see why DDN is core to our operation and a major asset to our scientists.”The post DDN Drives Discoveries at Van Andel Research Institute appeared first on insideHPC.

"Explore how Singularity liberates non-privileged users and host resources (such as interconnects, resource managers, file systems, accelerators ...) allowing users to take full control to set-up and run in their native environments. This talk explores Singularity how it combines software packaging models with minimalistic containers to create very lightweight application bundles which can be simply executed and contained completely within their environment or be used to interact directly with the host file systems at native speeds. A Singularity application bundle can be as simple as containing a single binary application or as complicated as containing an entire workflow and is as flexible as you will need."The post Video: Singularity – Containers for Science, Reproducibility, and HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Today ISC 2017 announced that their Tuesday keynote will be delivered by Dr. Peter Bauer from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). As Deputy Director of the Research Department Center at ECMWF, Dr. Bauer will discuss the computing and data challenges, as well as the current avenues the weather and climate prediction community is taking in preparing for the new computing era.The post Dr. Peter Bauer from ECMWF to Keynote ISC 2017 appeared first on insideHPC.

Team applications are now being accepted for the SC17 Student Cluster Competition. "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 Apply Now for the SC17 Student Cluster Competition appeared first on insideHPC.

The WHOI Information Services Department is looking for a Senior Systems Administrator to join their team. This is a regular, full-time position, and is eligible for benefits. The Senior Systems Administrator works within the Information Services Department supporting WHOI’s Linux servers, data storage, and HPC clusters.The post Job of the Week: Senior System Administrator for HPC at WHOI Institute appeared first on insideHPC.

The European PRACE initiative has published a new Best Practice Guide for Intel Xeon Phi, Knights Landing Edition. "This best practice guide provides information about Intel’s MIC architecture and programming models for the Intel Xeon Phi co-processor in order to enable programmers to achieve good performance of their applications. The guide covers a wide range of topics from the description of the hardware of the Intel Xeon Phi co-processor through information about the basic programming models as well as information about porting programs up to tools and strategies how to analyze and improve the performance of applications."The post PRACE Posts Best Practice Guide for Intel Xeon Phi appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Mellanox announced that it has shipped more than 100,000 units of its Direct Attach Copper Cables (DACs) to serve the growing demand of hyperscale Web 2.0 and cloud 100Gb/s networks.The post Mellanox Ships 100,000+ Cables for Next-Gen 100 Gb/s Networks appeared first on insideHPC.

A technology-leading Fortune 100 company has deployed over 30,000 Supermicro MicroBlade servers, at its Silicon Valley data center facility with a Power Use Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.06, to support the company’s growing compute needs. Compared to a traditional data center running at 1.49 PUE, or more, the new datacenter achieves an 88percent improvement in overall energy efficiency. When the build out is complete at a 35 megawatt IT load power, the company is targeting $13.18M in savings per year in total energy costs across the entire datacenter.The post Supermicro Deploys 30,000+ MicroBlade Servers for 1.06 PUE Datacenter appeared first on insideHPC.

"Professional workflows are now infused with artificial intelligence, virtual reality and photorealism, creating new challenges for our most demanding users," said Bob Pette, vice president of Professional Visualization at NVIDIA. "Our new Quadro lineup provides the graphics and compute performance required to address these challenges. And, by unifying compute and design, the Quadro GP100 transforms the average desktop workstation with the power of a supercomputer."The post NVIDIA Rolls Out New Quadro Pascal GPUs appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at recent developments in the Volkswagen Dieselgate scandal. According to reports, auto parts supplier Bosch wrote the software for VW that enabled the company's diesel vehicles to cheat on emissions tests. "We know because Bosch asked VW for indemnity back in 2006."The post Radio Free HPC Looks at How Bosch Helped Volkswagen Cheat Emissions Tests appeared first on insideHPC.

"The healthcare industry is undergoing significant changes due to the vast amounts of disparate data being generated. Blockchain technology provides a highly secure, decentralised framework for data sharing that will accelerate innovation throughout the industry," said Shahram Ebadollahi, vice president for innovations and chief science officer, IBM Watson Health.The post IBM Collaborates with FDA on Blockchain Health Data appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, researchers describe how the Tianhe-1 supercomputer supports scientific research. "Currently #43 on the TOP500, the 2.56 Petaflop Tianhe-1A carries out 1,400 computing tasks per day. It is mainly used to serve universities, research institutions, small and medium-sized enterprises, and provide scientific computing services."The post Video: Tianhe-1A Supercomputer at Work appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, a nonprofit genomics and genetics research institute, has been awarded a four-year, $6.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the next phase of the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) Project, a fundamental genomics resource used by many scientists to study human health and disease. Funded […]The post HudsonAlpha to expand Encyclopedia of DNA Elements Project appeared first on insideHPC.

"A new data type called a "posit" is designed for direct drop-in replacement for IEEE Standard 754 floats. Unlike unum arithmetic, posits do not require interval-type mathematics or variable size operands, and they round if an answer is inexact, much the way floats do. However, they provide compelling advantages over floats, including simpler hardware implementation that scales from as few as two-bit operands to thousands of bits. For any bit width, they have a larger dynamic range, higher accuracy, better closure under arithmetic operations, and simpler exception-handling."The post John Gustafson presents: Beyond Floating Point – Next Generation Computer Arithmetic appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) announced that the comet supercomputer has easily surpassed its target of serving at least 10,000 researchers across a diverse range of science disciplines, from astrophysics to redrawing the tree of life. "In fact, about 15,000 users have used Comet to run science gateways jobs alone since the system went into production less than two years ago."The post Over 10,000 Users and Counting for Comet Supercomputer at SDSC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the IEEE Rebooting Computing Workshop, Dr. William Vanderlinde, Chief Scientist at Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), explains how we have already entered the era at the end of Moore’s law, including the end of Dennard Scaling. Dr. Vanderlinde also reviews the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) and IARPA’s focus in relation to the NSCI’s objectives.The post Dr. William Vanderlinde on Computing Beyond Moore’s Law appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Spectra Logic announced its tenth consecutive year of profitability at the close of calendar year 2016. Spectra Logic’s success is rooted in investing in industry-leading research and development to build and improve its archive solutions, creating tailored solutions for key verticals that incorporate software and hardware to solve customer workflow and management issues, and focusing on digital preservation that protects customer data forever, while minimizing impact on business processes.The post Spectra Logic Celebrates Ten Years of Profitability appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Hexagon AB from Sweden announced an agreement to acquire MSC Software, a leading provider of computer-aided engineering solutions, including simulation software for virtual product and manufacturing process development. "MSC represents a game changer in our mission to deliver actionable manufacturing intelligence, taking us another step closer to realizing our smart connected factory vision in discrete manufacturing industries such as automotive and aerospace," said Hexagon President and CEO Ola Rollén. "We can now leverage the data our MI division is generating to improve design choices and processes upstream in the workflow. The acquisition will also open up new markets and touchpoints for MSC via our PPM division."The post Hexagon to Acquire MSC Software appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Dr. Carl J. Williams, Deputy Director of the Physical Measurement Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology within the United States Department of Commerce, reviews the National Strategic Computing Initiative. Issued by Executive Order, the initiative aims to maximize benefits of high-performance computing research, development and deployment.The post Video: A Look at the National Strategic Computing Initiative appeared first on insideHPC.

"Available on GitHub as Open Source, the Batch Shipyard toolkit enables easy deployment of batch-style Dockerized workloads to Azure Batch compute pools. Azure Batch enables you to run parallel jobs in the cloud without having to manage the infrastructure. It’s ideal for parametric sweeps, Deep Learning training with NVIDIA GPUs, and simulations using MPI and InfiniBand."The post Microsoft Releases Batch Shipyard on GitHub for Docker on Azure appeared first on insideHPC.

"The impending end of traditional MOSFET scaling has sparked research into preserving HPC performance improvements through alternative computational models. To better shape our strategy, we need to understand where each technology is headed and where it will be in a span of 20 years. This workshop brings together experts who develop or use promising technologies to present the state of their work, and spark a discussion on the promise and detriments of each approach."The post Call for Papers: Workshop on HPC in a post Moore’s Law World appeared first on insideHPC.

“Our collaboration with Cycle Computing enables the ANSYS Enterprise Cloud to meet the elastic capacity and security requirements of enterprise customers,” said Ray Milhem, vice president, Enterprise Solutions and Cloud, ANSYS. “CycleCloud has run some of the largest Cloud Big Compute and Cloud HPC projects in the world, and we are excited to bring their associated, proven software capability to our global customers with the ANSYS Enterprise Cloud.”The post ANSYS Enterprise Cloud goes with Cycle Computing for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Applications that can take advantage of the new vectorization capabilities of the Intel Xeon Phi processor will show tremendous performance gains. "When considering vectorization, there are different tools that can assist the developer in determining where to look further. The first is to look at the optimization reports that are generated by the Intel compiler and then to also use the Vector Analyzer that can give specific advice on what to do to get more vectorization from the code."The post Vectorization Leads to Performance Gains appeared first on insideHPC.

"Over two days we’ll delve into a wide range of interests and best practices - in applications, tools and techniques and share new insights on the trends, technologies and collaborative partnerships that foster this robust ecosystem. Designed to be highly interactive, the open forum will feature industry notables in keynotes, technical sessions, workshops and tutorials. These highly regarded subject matter experts (SME’s) will share their works and wisdom covering everything from established HPC disciplines to emerging usage models from old-school architectures and breakthrough applications to pioneering research and provocative results. Plus a healthy smattering of conversation and controversy on endeavors in Exascale, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and much much more!"The post Agenda Posted for Next Week’s HPC Advisory Council Stanford Conference appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Asetek announced that its server pump has achieved 200 million hours of reliable operation in real world use. Installed at end-user locations as diverse as Singapore and Norway, Asetek pumps have run fault-free for the equivalent of 22,000 years. “To date, we have not had a single server pump failure at any of our data center installations around the world,” said Mette Nørmølle, Vice President of Engineering. “Our low-pressure architecture is the key to enabling a cost-effective solution that is relied on by data centers demanding unrivaled performance and maximum uptime.”The post Asetek Achieves 200 Million Hours of Fault-Free Pump Operations at DataCenters appeared first on insideHPC.

“At Altair, we believe human-centered design is more than just mechanical fit; rather, it’s an exploration of the entire experience of users with a product, including ergonomic interface, usability and design aesthetics” said Jeff Brennan, Chief Marketing Officer at Altair. “As such, SantosHuman’s philosophy aligns nicely with ours and this partnership will enable Altair’s customers to further optimize their products’ performance early in the development cycle.”The post Digital Human Software Added to Altair Partner Alliance appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SUSECON 2016, Jo Harris from SUSE sits down with Dr. Figen Ulgen, GM HPC Software and Cloud at Intel to discuss women in Open Source and HPC, how Intel is contributing to this initiative, and the need for more women in the field.The post Figen Ulgen From Intel Champions Women in HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

The International Runtime Operating Systems on Supercomputers (ROSS) workshop has issued its Call for Papers. The event takes place June 27 in Washington, D.C. "Held as a full-day meeting at the HPDC 2017 conference in Washington, D.C., USA, ROSS focuses on principles and techniques to design, implement, optimize, or operate runtime and operating systems for supercomputers and massively parallel machines. ROSS provides a timely and lightweight forum for scientists and engineers to present the latest ideas and findings in this rapidly changing field."The post Call for Papers: ROSS Workshop on International Runtime Operating Systems on Supercomputers appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Univa announced the general availably of its Unisight v4.1 product, providing simple and extensible metric collection for all types of Univa Grid Engine data including NVIDIA GPUs and Software Licenses. Unisight v4.1 is a comprehensive monitoring and reporting tool that provides Grid Engine cluster admins the ability to measure resource utilization and use facts to plan additional server and application purchases. "With Unisight v4.1, organizations take an important step toward improving data center automation choices by understanding infrastructure utilization and workflow,” said Fritz Ferstl, CTO and Business Development, EMEA at Univa. “With built-in reports, customers can monitor resource usage – including software license - to obtain the deep insights required to make informed long-term IT strategy and budget decisions from server architecture to memory requirements.”The post Univa Unisight 4.1 Software Informs IT Purchasing Decisions appeared first on insideHPC.

"I’m pleased to have the opportunity to lead this important Council,” said Dr. J. Michael McQuade of United Technologies Corporation, who will serve as the first Chair of the ECP Industry Council. “Exascale level computing will help industry address ever more complex, competitively important problems, ones which are beyond the reach of today’s leading edge computing systems. We compete globally for scientific, technological and engineering innovations. Maintaining our lead at the highest level of computational capability is essential for our continued success.”The post Exascale Computing Project Announces ECP Industry Council appeared first on insideHPC.

"Billed as an exposition into 'The Future of Cloud HPC Simulation,' the event brought together experts in high-performance computing and simulation, cloud computing technologists, startup founders, and VC investors across the technology landscape. In addition to product demonstrations with Rescale engineers, including the popular Deep Learning workshop led by Mark Whitney, Rescale Director of Algorithms, booths featuring ANSYS, Microsoft Azure, Data Collective, and Microsoft Ventures offered interactive sessions for attendees."The post Video: Rescale Night Showcases HPC in the Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

HPC4Mfg will host their first annual High Performance Computing for Manufacturing Industry Engagement Day on March 2-3 in San Diego. With a theme of "Spurring Innovation in U.S. Manufacturing Through Advanced Computing," the conference will bring together representatives from U.S. manufacturing, national laboratories, universities, and consortiums to discuss the recent advancements in manufacturing realized through the application of HPC and how leveraging HPC expertise through public-private partnerships has lowered the risk of adoption.The post HPC4Mfg Industry Day Comes to San Diego March 2-3 appeared first on insideHPC.

Argonne has selected 10 computational science and engineering research projects for its Aurora Early Science Program starting this month. Aurora, a massively parallel, manycore Intel-Cray supercomputer, will be ALCF’s next leadership-class computing resource and is expected to arrive in 2018. The Early Science Program helps lay the path for hundreds of other users by doing actual science, using real scientific applications, to ready a future machine. “As with any bleeding edge resource, there’s testing and debugging that has to be done,” said ALCF Director of Science Katherine Riley.The post Argonne Annouces Early Science Projects for Aurora Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

In-Memory Computing can accelerate traditional applications by using a memory first design. Applicable to a wide range of domains, In-Memory Computing and In-Memory Data Grids take advantage of the latest trends in computer systems technology. "In-memory computing is designed to address some of the most critical and real-time task requirements today. This include real-time fraud detection, biometrics and border security and financial risk analytics. All of these use cases require very low latency access to data from very large amounts of data, which results in faster and more accurate decisions."The post In Memory Computing Speeds Results appeared first on insideHPC.

The IEEE International Workshop on High-Performance Interconnection Networks in the Exascale and Big-Data Era (HiPINEB) has published its program agenda. Held in conjunction with the IEEE HPCA 2017 Conference, HiPINEB takes place Feb 5, in Austin, Texas.The post HiPINEB Workshop on High Performance Networks Posts Agenda for February 5 in Austin appeared first on insideHPC.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is launching operations this month of one of the world's most powerful and energy-efficient supercomputers, providing the nation with a major new tool to advance understanding of the atmospheric and related Earth system sciences. Named "Cheyenne," the 5.34-petaflop system is capable of more than triple the amount of scientific computing performed by the previous NCAR supercomputer, Yellowstone. It also is three times more energy efficient.The post Cheyenne Supercomputer Triples Scientific Capability at NCAR appeared first on insideHPC.

Dr. Umit Catalyurek from Georgia Institute of Technology presented this talk as part of the USC Big Data to Knowledge series. "This lecture will be a brief crash course on computer architecture, high performance computing and parallel computing. We will, again very briefly, discuss how to classify computer architectures and applications, and what to look in applications to achieve best performance on different architectures."The post Video: Modern Computing – Cloud, Distributed, & High Performance appeared first on insideHPC.

The IDC HPC User Forum, taking place at the HLRS premises in Stuttgart-Vaihingen on February 28 and March 1, will bring together the HPC community to hear experts from all of Europe and the USA. During the two-day event, one of the subjects will be the role of small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) in HPC.The post HPC User Forum Returns to Stuttgart Feb 28 – March 1 appeared first on insideHPC.

"In order to handle the increasing amount of data, server architectures all too often require multiple 10G ports. 25G Ethernet arrives just in time and has started its climb towards dominance as the leading server-to-ToR switch interconnect. As this transition occurs, plugfests assure users that 25G and greater speeds from different vendors will perform as advertised with solid plug-and-play interoperability,” said Vittal Balasubramanian, chair of the 25G/50G Ethernet Interop Committee and Principal Signal Integrity Engineer at Dell.The post 25 Gigabit Ethernet Consortium Validates Multi-Vendor Interoperability appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team speaks to our special guest for the week: Binnie Coppersmith, also known as Henry’s Mom. It’s Binnie’s 80th birthday, and Dan wants to know once and for all if Henry is an alien, or at least why he is the way he is. After that, we look at why the UberCloud has received $1.7 Million in Pre-A Series funding. It’s great news for HPC in the Cloud.The post Radio Free HPC Interviews Henry’s Mom and Congratulates The UberCloud on New Funding appeared first on insideHPC.

Dr. Amit Seti from IIT-Gauwhati presented this talk at GTCx in India. "This talk will cover how medical imaging data can be used to train computer vision systems that automate diagnostic analysis in current clinical practice. Not only that, with more creative use of data, we can go even beyond that to predict outcome of specific treatment for individual patients. We will cover results from prostate and breast cancers to show that a future is not too far where algorithms will become a necessary set of tools in a pathologist's toolbox."The post Deep Learning in HPC – Using Data to Go Far Beyond Automation in Pathology appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Intel announced record results on a new benchmark in deep learning and convolutional neural networks (CNN). ZTE’s engineers used Intel’s midrange Arria 10 FPGA for a cloud inferencing application using a CNN algorithm. "ZTE has achieved a new record – beyond a thousand images per second in facial recognition – with what is known as “theoretical high accuracy” achieved for their custom topology. Intel’s Arria 10 FPGA accelerated the raw design performance more than 10 times while maintaining the accuracy."The post Intel FPGAs Break Record for Deep Learning Facial Recognition appeared first on insideHPC.

"The National Renewable Energy Laboratory(NREL), located at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Golden, Colorado, is the nation’s primary laboratory for research and development of renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies. NREL is continuing an active research and development program for modeling of wind farm interactions and mesoscale dynamics within the National Wind Technology Center. This R&D program has an opening for one full-time engineer in wind farm modeling and mesoscale research."The post Job of the Week: Wind Energy Research Engineer at NREL appeared first on insideHPC.

Ian Foster and other researchers in CODAR are working to overcome the gap between computation speed and the limitations in the speed and capacity of storage by developing smarter, more selective ways of reducing data without losing important information. "Exascale systems will be 50 times faster than existing systems, but it would be too expensive to build out storage that would be 50 times faster as well," said Foster. "This means we no longer have the option to write out more data and store all of it. And if we can’t change that, then something else needs to change."The post A Look at the CODAR Co-Design Center for Online Data Analysis and Reduction at Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.

“UberCloud has created an entire cloud computing ecosystem for complex technical simulations, leveraging cloud infrastructure providers, developing and utilizing middleware container technology, and bringing on board established and proven application software providers, all for the benefit of a growing community of engineers and scientists that need to solve critical technical problems on demand,” said Roland Manger, co-founder and Partner at Earlybird. “While technical computing has been slow to adopt the benefits of the Cloud, we are convinced that UberCloud can be a catalyst for change.”The post UberCloud Obtains $1.7 Million in Pre-A Funding Round appeared first on insideHPC.

In this RCE Podcast, Brock Palen and Jeff Squyres speak with the creators of iRODS: Jason Coposky and Terrell Russell. Also known as the Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System, iRODS open source data management software is used by research organizations and government agencies worldwide. "iRODS virtualizes data storage resources, so users can take control of their data, regardless of where and on what device the data is stored. The development infrastructure supports exhaustive testing on supported platforms. The plugin architecture supports microservices, storage systems, authentication, networking, databases, rule engines, and an extensible API."The post RCE Podcast Looks at iRODS Data Management Software appeared first on insideHPC.

"This talk reports efforts on refactoring and optimizing the climate and weather forecasting programs – CAM and WRF – on Sunway TaihuLight. To map the large code base to the millions of cores on the Sunway system, OpenACC-based refactoring was taken as the major approach, with source-to-source translator tools applied to exploit the most suitable parallelism for the CPE cluster and to fit the intermediate variable into the limited on-chip fast buffer."The post PASC17 to Feature Talk by Gordon Bell Prize Winner Haohuan Fu appeared first on insideHPC.