High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

In this video from SC16, Bill Mannel from Hewlett Packard Enterprise describes how the company is gaining momentum in the HPC space as the leading vendor on the TOP500. With the recent acquisition of SGI, HPE is moving forward with broader range of solutions for high performance computing. "The combined HPE and SGI portfolio, including a comprehensive services capability, will support private and public sector customers seeking larger high-performance computing installations, including U.S. federal agencies as well as enterprises looking to leverage high-performance computing for business insights and a competitive edge."The post Hewlett Packard Enterprise Gains Momentum with SGI Acquisition at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

Scientists have taken the closest look yet at molecule-sized machinery called the human preinitiation complex. It basically opens up DNA so that genes can be copied and turned into proteins. The science team formed from Northwestern University, Berkeley National Laboratory, Georgia State University, and UC Berkeley. They used a cutting-edge technique called cryo-electron microscopy and combined it with supercomputer analysis. They published their results May of 2016 in the journal Nature.The post Podcast: Combining Cryo-electron Microscopy with Supercomputer Simulation appeared first on insideHPC.

"Atos is incredibly proud to see the concrete results of the Tera1000 project," said Philippe Vannier, CTO in the Atos Group. "Today we are taking a major step on the road towards exaflops. Undoubtedly, the interconnect technologies will provide a crucial contribution in achieving exaflops performance. With BXI, Atos is confirming its leadership in the field of supercomputers and beyond in the processing of very large volumes of data."The post First-phase Bull sequana Supercomputer at CEA is Number 55 on TOP500 appeared first on insideHPC.

"Most of the IT innovation that is happening today is with a cloud-first model,” said Joris Poort, co-founder and CEO of Rescale. “We’re building a platform that can satisfy and accelerate the ideas of the world’s top scientists and thinkers. From automotive design to drug discovery and even actual rocket science, we’re empowering our customers as leaders in their respective fields, to accomplish more and innovation faster.”The post Rescale Adds HPC and AI Capabilities via the IBM Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC16, Nate Parada from One Stop Systems describes the company's new High Density Compute Accelerator (HDCA) for Deep Learning. "The CA16000 High Density Compute Accelerator with sixteen NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators is used for a variety of HPC applications including oil and gas exploration and financial services. Completely integrated with the GPUs most suited for a specific application, it's easy installation and tested reliability makes it superior to alternative products."The post Video: One Stop Systems Takes GPU Density to the Next Level at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

A workflow to support genomic sequencing requires a collaborative effort between many research groups and a process from initial sampling to final analysis. Learn the 4 steps involved in pre-processing.The post High-Throughput Genomic Sequencing Workflow appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Asia Supercomputer Community announced that the world's fastest supercomputer, Sunway TaihuLight, will be used by students in the upcoming 2017 ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge. "The teams will design and build a cluster under 3000W to conduct a benchmark test, a mystery app, and other applications involving the latest technologies. Prizes and awards will be based on single applications and overall performances."The post ASC17 Student Competitors to Gain Access to #1 Sunway TaihuLight Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC16, Paul Messina and Stephen Lee describe the mission, status, and recent milestones of the Exascale Computing Project. Now entering its second year, the ECP recently announced that it has selected four co-design centers as part of a 4 year, $48 million funding award. It also announced the selection of 35 software development proposals representing 25 research and academic organizations.The post Exascale Computing Project Gains Momentum Entering Year 2 appeared first on insideHPC.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory is seeking a Science Writer and Communications Specialist in our Job of the Week. "This person will lead ECP writing efforts and coordinate additional services of US Department of Energy (DOE) lab resources and contractors as necessary. ECP is a collaboration between two DOE organizations: the Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration."The post Job of the Week: Science Writer and Communications Specialist at ORNL appeared first on insideHPC.

SC17 General Chair Bernd Mohr introduced the theme of the upcoming conference with these fine words: "One connection can change your life. Our community is making millions of connections every day: by bringing together people at workshops, conferences, in research teams and projects, by connecting extreme-scale supercomputers to instruments and visualization and data analytics systems, by inspiring collaborations between different fields of science And all with the goal of making the greatest impact on society and changing our world I invite you to continue on this journey of creating meaningful connections at SC17."The post SC17 Preview turns the Spotlight on Making Connections appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Cycle Computing announced that Dell EMC will offer its software and services as an option with Dell EMC HPC Systems.At Dell EMC, we are constantly looking for the best ways to serve our customers, and Cycle Computing is a valuable addition to our HPC offerings," said Jim Ganthier, senior vice president, Validated Solutions, and HPC organization, Dell EMC. "With Cycle, Dell EMC will be the first to offer 'crate to cloud' for HPC in a matter of hours and will help our customers accelerate time to results while reducing cost and complexity."The post Dell EMC & Cycle Computing to offer Cloud Software and Services for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Silicon Mechanics announced the opening of the 6th Annual Research Cluster Grant (RCG) program. "We hope you will consider this opportunity to support your research by submitting a proposal or by forwarding this to others in your department who could benefit from this grant. The RCG is open to all United States and Canadian qualified post-secondary institutions, university-affiliated research institutions, non-profit research institutions and researchers at federal labs with university affiliations. Submissions will be reviewed for merit and related impacts. Further details on the grant rules and the technical specifications of the cluster itself are available on our Research Cluster Grant website."The post Win a Cluster for your Institution with the 2017 Research Cluster Grant appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC16, Steve Conway from IDC moderates a panel discussion on Precision Medicine. "Recently, DOE Secretary Moniz, VA Secretary MacDonald, NCI Director Lowy and the GSK CEO Andrew Witty announced that the Nation’s leading supercomputers would be applied to the challenge of the Cancer Moonshot initiative. This partnership of nontraditional groups, collectively see the path to unraveling the complexities of cancer through the power of new machines, operating systems, and applications that leverage simulations, data science and artificial intelligence to accelerate bringing precision oncology to the patients that are waiting. This initiative is one of many research efforts in the race to solve some of our most challenging medical problems."The post Video: For Precision Medicine, HPC Matters at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

"Huawei's new-generation FusionServer X6000 HPC platform, based on the Intel Scalable System Framework, provides the balanced performance, scalability, and flexibility to efficiently handle a wide range of HPC workloads," said Hugo Saleh, Director of Marketing and Enabling, Intel Scalable Datacenter Solutions. "The FusionServer X6000 is a great example of how Intel Xeon processors and Intel Omni-path architecture can combine to build industry leading solutions with innovative fabric features that optimize performance, resiliency, and traffic movement."The post Huawei Showcases FusionServer X6000 at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

If you were not able to attend SC16, have we got a video for you! Courtesy of Asetek, this time-lapse walk-through of the exhibit hall sure looks familiar to this reporter who spent the last four days shooting over 50 interviews.The post Video: Time-Lapse Walk-Through of SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison are developing new computer chips that combine tasks usually kept separate by design. According to assistant professor Jing Li, these “liquid silicon” chips can be configured to perform complex calculations and store massive amounts of information within the same integrated unit — and communicate efficiently with other chips. "There’s a huge bottleneck when classical computers need to move data between memory and processor,” says Li. “We’re building a unified hardware that can bridge the gap between computation and storage.”The post Liquid Silicon Could Bridge the Gap Between Computation and Storage appeared first on insideHPC.

“Watson and cognitive computing in general can serve significantly in every single arena in which we grapple with multi-layered, data-intensive problems: how to best treat cancers; how to adapt to conditions brought about by climate change; how to quickly and effectively harness new kinds of sustainable energy; how to untangle intractable governmental or community development challenges,” Frase stated. “Now more than ever, visionary thinking will drive an endless and transformative array of applications for Watson and cognitive computing in general, along with whatever comes next.”The post Video: SC16 Keynote Katharine Frase on Cognitive Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

We expect the Intel Nervana platform to produce breakthrough performance and dramatic reductions in the time to train complex neural networks,” said Diane Bryant, executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group at Intel. “Before the end of the decade, Intel will deliver a 100-fold increase in performance that will turbocharge the pace of innovation in the emerging deep learning space.”The post Intel Doubles Down on AI & Machine Learning appeared first on insideHPC.

"The majority of deep learning frameworks provide good out-of-the-box performance on a single workstation, but scaling across multiple nodes is still a wild, untamed borderland. This discussion follows the story of one researcher trying to make use of a significant compute resource to accelerate learning over a large number of CPUs. Along the way we note how to find good multiple-CPU performance with Theano* and TensorFlow*, how to extend a single-machine model with MPI and optimize its performance as we scale out and up on both Intel Xeon and Intel Xeon Phi architectures."The post Scaling Machine Learning Software with Allinea Tools appeared first on insideHPC.

The Intel Xeon Phi processor supports different types of memory, and can organize this into three types of memory mode. The new processor from Intel contains two type of memory, MCDRAM and DDR memory. These different memory subsystems are complimentary but can be used in different ways, depending on the application that is being executed. "By using these two types of memory in the same system gives flexibility to the overall system and will show an increase in performance for almost any application."The post Memory Modes For Increased Performance on Intel Xeon Phi appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC16, Yugendra Guvvala, VP of Technology at RAID Inc. describes the company's new Dashboard software. The Dashboard provides a single pane of glass to manage your high performance Lustre storage pools. "Scaling to tens of petabytes and thousands of clients – considered a best filesystem for storage by many – Lustre is a high performance storage architecture for clusters. The central component of this architecture is the Lustre shared file system, which is currently available for Linux, providing a POSIX-compliant UNIX file system interface. RAID, Inc. offers custom Lustre solutions with installation & 24/7 support."The post Manage Your Lustre HPC Storage with the new Dashboard from RAID Inc. appeared first on insideHPC.

As an HPC technology vendor, Mellanox is in the business of providing the leading-edge interconnects that drive many of the world's fastest supercomputers. To learn more about what's new for SC16, we caught up with Michael Kagan, CTO of Mellanox. "Moving InfiniBand beyond EDR to HDR is critical not only for HPC, but also for the numerous industries that are adopting AI and Big Data to make real business sense out the amount of data available and that we continue to collect on a daily basis."The post What’s Next for HPC? A Q&A with Michael Kagan, CTO of Mellanox appeared first on insideHPC.

"With the accelerating trend of higher wattages and the continuing requirement of high density, the need for adaptable, cost effective, and reliable liquid cooling is accelerating among those striving to obtain TOP500 status,” said John Hamill, Vice President of WW Sales and Marketing. “This need is exactly what Asetek’s distributed cooling architecture provides.”The post Asetek Sports Eight Installations on the TOP500 Supercomputer List appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Nimbix announced the immediate availability of the Xilinx SDAccel development environment for on-demand development, testing, and deployment of FPGA-accelerated workflows in the Nimbix Cloud, powered by JARVICE. The SDAccel development environment combines the industry's first architecturally optimizing compiler supporting any combination of OpenCL, C, and C++ kernels, along with libraries, development boards and industry standard development and run‐time experience for FPGAs.The post Nimbix & Xilinx Accelerate FPGA-Based Workloads in the Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

SC16 will the 29th supercomputing event in the conference series, a long tradition that brings some 10,000 HPC professionals to Salt Lake City this week. While many of us regulars have attended for years, there is a hearty group of 18 SC Perennials that have managed to attend every conference since the beginning. The SC Perennials are very young at heart," said conference committee member Mike Bernhardt. "And we stand tall with our motto, 'We Keep Coming Back.'" If you're in Salt Lake City this week and see someone wearing the SC Perennial pin, please see hello.The post It’s #SC16, and the SC Perennials Keep Coming Back! appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC16, Figen Ulgen from Intel and Maurizio Davini from the IT Center University of Pisa describe the newly announced Intel® HPC Orchestrator software. "With Intel® HPC Orchestrator, based on the OpenHPC system software stack, you can take advantage of the innovation driven by the open source community - while also getting peace of mind from Intel® support across the HPC system software stack."The post Video: Announcing the New Intel® HPC Orchestrator Software appeared first on insideHPC.

Today RAID Inc announced a strategic go to market partnership with SwiftStack, the leader in object storage for the enterprise. This officially ratified partnership augments the RAID Inc. portfolio of technical computing and data center infrastructure solutions by adding SwiftStack's object storage platform to its Ability Storage solutions, ultimately allowing a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) for all. "State of the art advancements in computing require a storage architecture that traditional SAN or NAS infrastructure was never designed for," said Don Jaworski, CEO of SwiftStack. "Our partnership with RAID Inc. gives HPC audiences a modern storage architecture that supports data-centric workflows and enables an infrastructure cost model that meets both the durability and budget requirements of those organizations."The post RAID Inc. & SwiftStack Deliver HPC Object Storage at Scale appeared first on insideHPC.

"Maximizing value of data in the kinds of extraordinary environments represented by supercomputing is all about being able to handle extreme, unpredictable storage bandwidth and capacity needs at scale,” said Ken Claffey, vice president and general manager, Seagate HPC systems business. “Seagate’s ClusterStor 300N expands on our proven, engineered systems approach that delivers performance efficiency and value for HPC environments of any size, using a hybrid technology architecture to handle tough workloads at a fraction of the cost of all-flash approaches.”The post Video: Seagate Launches ClusterStor 300N Platform at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

The HPC Innovation Excellence Award recognizes noteworthy achievements by users of high performance computing technologies. The program's main goals are to showcase return on investment (ROI) and scientific success stories involving HPC; to help other users better understand the benefits of adopting HPC and justify HPC investments, especially for small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs); to demonstrate the value of HPC to funding bodies and politicians; and to expand public support for increased HPC investments.The post IDC Announces HPC Innovation Excellence Awards appeared first on insideHPC.

The K-Computer in Japan continues to top the Graph 500 ranking of the world’s fastest supercomputers. The latest list was released today at SC16 in Salt Lake City. "The Graph 500 measures performance against three kernels: search, optimization (single-source shortest path), and edge-oriented. Results on these kernels are informative for application performance in business areas as diverse as cybersecurity, medical informatics, social networks, data enrichment, and symbolic networks such as the human brain."The post K-Computer Leads Graph 500 List of World’s Fastest Supercomputers appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the Intel HPC Developer Conference, Prabhat from NERSC describes how high performance computing techniques are being used to scale Machine Learning to over 100,000 compute cores. "Using TB-sized datasets from three science applications: astrophysics, plasma physics, and particle physics, we show that our implementation can construct kd-tree of 189 billion particles in 48 seconds on utilizing ∼50,000 cores."The post Machine Learning and HPC Converge at NERSC appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Dell EMC announced new HPC cloud offerings, software, systems and customer success, continuing its focus on democratizing HPC for enterprises of all sizes, optimizing HPC technology innovations and advancing the HPC community. "The global HPC market forecast exceeds $30 billion in 2016 for all product and services spending, including servers, software, storage, cloud, and other categories, with continued growth expected at 5.2 percent CAGR through 2020,” said Addison Snell, CEO, Intersect360 Research. “Bolstered by its combination with EMC, Dell will hold the number-one position in total HPC revenue share heading into 2017.”The post Dell EMC Advances in Cloud, Software and Systems at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

Couldn't make it SC16? Tune in right here on insideHPC to watch all the Nvidia Theater talks this week. "Come join NVIDIA at SC16 to learn how AI supercomputing is breaking open a world of limitless possibilities. This is an era of multigenerational discoveries taking place in a single lifetime. See how other leaders in the field are advancing computational science across domains, get free hands-on training with the newest GPU-accelerated solutions, and connect with NVIDIA experts."The post Watch the Wednesday Livestream from Nvidia Booth at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

"This is the sixth list produced for the emerging benchmark designed to complement the traditional High Performance LINPACK (HPL) benchmark used as the official metric for ranking the TOP500 systems. The first HPCG list was announced at ISC’14 two and a half years ago, containing 15 entries, the SC’15 list had 60 and ISC’16 had 80. The current list contains more than 100 entries as HPCG continues to gain traction in the HPC community."The post HPCG Performance List Released at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

"We have assembled a comprehensive display of technology and OEM solutions to address all liquid cooling requirements in the global HPC market,” said CoolIT Systems CEO and CTO Geoff Lyon. “Our partnership with STULZ provides the market with the benefits of a single vendor to implement and service HPC cooling solutions in over 140 countries – truly a unique offering.”The post CoolIT Systems Showcases HPC Liquid Cooling at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today ThinkParQ announced the immediate availability of BeeGFS version 6.0. As the first release in a new versioning scheme, release 6.0 is the direct successor of the 2015.03 release series, which was in fact the 5th BeeGFS major release. "This new release is another big step for the development of BeeGFS”, says Christian Mohrbacher, development lead of BeeGFS. “In combination with the high availability features of the BeeGFS storage service, which were introduced in the 2015.03 major release last year, fully fault-tolerant storage systems can now be built by solely using BeeGFS-internal functionality.”The post BeeGFS Updates with built-in Metadata High-Availability appeared first on insideHPC.

Today One Stop Systems announced two new deep learning appliances that leverage the NVIDIA NVLink. One Stop Systems’ deep learning appliances are designed for augmented performance in machine learning and deep learning applications. These appliances provide the ultimate power for performing deep learning training and exploring neural networks,” said Steve Cooper, OSS CEO. “The OSS-PASCAL4 and OSS-PASCAL8 […]The post One Stop Systems Introduces a New Line of GPU Accelerated Servers for Deep Learning at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

"InfiniBand's advantages of highest performance, scalability and robustness enable users to maximize their data center return on investment. InfiniBand was chosen by far more end-users compared to a proprietary offering, resulting in a more than 85 percent market share. We are happy to see our open Ethernet adapter and switch solutions enable all of the 40G and the first 100G Ethernet systems on the TOP500 list, resulting in overall 194 systems using Mellanox for their compute and storage connectivity."The post Mellanox Brings HDR to SC16 while Dominating Today’s TOP500 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the Intel HPC Developer Conference, Justin Gottschlich, PhD from Intel describes how the company doubling down on Anomaly Detection using Machine Learning and Intel technologies. "In this talk, we present future research directions at Intel Labs using deep learning for anomaly detection and management. We discuss the required machine learning characteristics for such systems, ranging from zero positive learning, automatic feature extraction, and real-time reinforcement learning. We also discuss the general applicability of such anomaly detection systems across multiple domains such as data centers, autonomous vehicles, and high performance computing."The post Using Machine Learning to Avoid the Unwanted appeared first on insideHPC.

Demonstrating Asetek’s adaptability to any data center cooling need, HPC installations from around the world are currently on display at SC16 in Salt Lake City, Utah November 14-17. Servers from these installations featuring Asetek liquid cooling will be on display including servers installed at Oakforest-PACS, the highest Performance Supercomputer System in Japan.The post Asetek’s Adaptable Liquid Cooling on Display at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

Watch this video of Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang's talk from SC16 in Salt Lake City. Can't make it to the show? Tune in right here on insideHPC to watch Nvidia talks all this week. "See how other leaders in the field are advancing computational science across domains, get free hands-on training with the newest GPU-accelerated solutions, and connect with NVIDIA experts."The post Video: Jen-Hsun Huang Keynote from the Nvidia Booth at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Aquila announced a liquid-cooled edge data center co-development program featuring the first ruggedized modular edge data center developed around the Aquarius liquid cooled compute platform. This platform combines TAS’s industry-leading efficient modular data centers with Aquarius’s liquid cooled compute, switching, and storage to address the need for small modular data centers.The post Aquila and TAS Energy Launch Liquid Cooled Edge Data Center Solution appeared first on insideHPC.

The new TOP500 list is out, and Rad is Free HPC is here podcasting the scoop in their own special way. With two new systems in the TOP10, there are many different perspectives to share. "The Cori supercomputer, a Cray XC40 system installed at Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), slipped into the number 5 slot with a Linpack rating of 14.0 petaflops. Right behind it at number 6 is the new Oakforest-PACS supercomputer, a Fujitsu PRIMERGY CX1640 M1 cluster, which recorded a Linpack mark of 13.6 petaflops."The post Radio Free HPC Reviews the New TOP500 appeared first on insideHPC.

FPGAs will become increasing important for organizations that have a wide range of applications that can benefit from performance increases. Rather than a brute force method to increasing performance in a data center by purchasing and maintaining racks of hardware and associated costs, FPGAs may be able to equal and exceed the performance of additional servers, while reducing costs as well.The post Can FPGAs Help You? appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Seagate Technology introduced the ClusterStor 300N storage system with Nytro Intelligent I/O Manager, the newest addition to its family of scale-out storage systems for high-performance computing and the first with a flash cache accelerator. “Seagate’s ClusterStor 300N expands on our proven, engineered systems approach that delivers performance efficiency and value for HPC environments of any size, using a hybrid technology architecture to handle tough workloads at a fraction of the cost of all-flash approaches.”The post Seagate Accelerates ClusterStor with Flash appeared first on insideHPC.

Welcome to the Mobile Edition for the Print ‘n Fly Guide to SC16 in Salt Lake City. Inside this guide you will find technical features on supercomputing, HPC interconnects, and the latest developments on the road to exascale. It also has great recommendations on food, entertainment, and transportation in SLC.The post Mobile Edition: Print ‘n Fly Guide to SC16 in Salt Lake City appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Penguin Computing announced several important achievements of its Penguin Computing On-Demand (POD) HPC cloud service, including a recent 50 percent increase in capacity and plans to double POD’s total capacity in Q1 2017. The upgrade will include new Intel Xeon processors and Intel Omni-Path architecture. “Rapid demand for and growth in our POD business reflects the significant benefits customers are experiencing, particularly since we announced availability of the OCP-compliant Tundra platform on POD late last year,” said Tom Coull, President and CEO, Penguin Computing. “With the Tundra platform, our customers have greater capacity due to faster scaling combined with increased performance and streamlined costs. Tundra on POD also highlights the growth and maturing market role of open computing, with thousands of high-speed, cost-efficient cores available to meet customers’ needs for faster, easier deployment of capacity at a low cost.”The post Omni Path Comes to Penguin Computing On-Demand appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the Intel HPC Developer Conference, Ananth Sankaranarayanan from Intel describes how the company is optimizing Machine Learning frameworks for Intel platforms. Open source frameworks often are not optimized for a particular chip, but bringing Intel's developer tools to bear can result in significant speedups. For meaningful impact and business value, organizations require that the time to train a deep learning model be reduced from weeks to hours. In this talk, we will present the details of the optimization and characterization of Intel-Caffe and the support of new deep learning convolutional neural network primitives in the Intel Math Kernel Library."The post Accelerating Machine Learning on Intel Platforms appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Cray announced the launch of the Cray XC50 supercomputer – the company’s fastest supercomputer ever with a peak performance of one petaflop in a single cabinet. "Supercomputing applications are evolving to include more deep learning algorithms, and with this evolution, the uses for GPUs in our systems are increasing, enabling our customers to use new analytics techniques to gain insight from increasingly large and complex data,” said Ryan Waite, Cray senior vice president of products. “The new Cray XC50 system represents a major advancement in our supercomputing capabilities. It provides the highest performance density of any Cray supercomputer, and gives customers the computational resources they need to take on larger, more complex workloads, as well as the next generation of scientific challenges.”The post New Cray XC50 Delivers 1 Petaflop Per Cabinet appeared first on insideHPC.