High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

In this time-lapse video, engineers build the Owens cluster at the Ohio Supercomputing Center. "Named after Olympic track star Jesse Owens, the new Owens Cluster is be powered by Dell PowerEdge servers featuring the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v4 product family, include storage components manufactured by DDN and an EDR interconnect provided by Mellanox. The center earlier had acquired NetApp software and hardware for home directory storage."The post Video: Building the Owens Cluster at OSC appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Russia's RSC Group announced that the company has achieved a record compute density of 1.41 Pflops per rack using direct liquid cooling and Intel Xeon Phi processors. "RSC supported the TUM student team from Munich with 8 nodes mobile cluster based on RSC Tornado direct liquid cooled architecture. This computing system provided stable operation of computing nodes in “hot water” mode at +63 °С cooling agent temperature at node inputs and had the following configuration: 72-cores Intel Xeon Phi 7290 processors, Intel S7200AP server boards, Intel SSD DC S3500 Series M.2 340 GB solid-state drives, switch and adapters based on Intel Omni-Path high-speed fabric, highly efficient Micron DDR4-2400 VLP 16-32 GB memory modules."The post RSC Tornado Breaks Record with 1.41 Petaflops per Rack appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Jeff Hollingsworth from SIGHPC and Michele De Lorenzi from CSCS invite you to submit papers, minisymposia proposals and posters to the PASC17 Conference, an interdisciplinary conference in HPC that brings together domain science, applied mathematics and computer science. PASC17 will be held June 26-28, 2017 in Lugano, Switzerland.The post Video: PASC17 Conference Seeks Papers, Minisymposia, and Posters appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Japan announced plans to build a 130 Petaflop (half precision) supercomputer for deployment in 2017. And while such a machine would not surpass the current #1 93 Petaflop Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer in China, it would certainly propel Japan to the top of an all new category of supercomputing leadership. "ABCI is an open innovation platform with computing resources of more than hundred petaflops for world-class AI R&D. Through industry and academia collaboration, Algorithms, Big Data, and Computing Power will be leveraged in a single common public platform. ABCI will rapidly accelerate the deployment of AI into real businesses and society."The post Japan to Build 130 Petaflop ABCI Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

"In the long run, if you need orders of magnitude more bandwidth than is currently available there’s a set of technologies that are sometimes referred to as processor in memory – I call it processor at memory – technologies that involves cheaper processors distributed out to adjacent to the memory chips. Processors are cheaper, simpler, lower power. That could allow a significant reduction in cost to build the systems, which allows you to build them a lot bigger and therefore deliver significantly higher memory bandwidth. That’s a very revolutionary change.”The post Podcast: John McCalpin Surveys HPC System Memory Bandwidth appeared first on insideHPC.

Researchers from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center have received the award for Best Paper of the MEMSYS 2016 conference. "This study confirms that improvements in the memory system can have significant impact on the real world, improving power and energy, performance, and/or dollar cost. The MEMSYS program committee liked the study especially because, in contrast to most of the prior research, it can be applied immediately in the production systems, and it requires no changes to the system architecture, Operating System, system software or applications.”The post BSC Paper: Scale-in on Large-memory Nodes to Save Energy appeared first on insideHPC.

The numbers are in for SC16, the international supercomputing conference that wrapped up last week in Salt Lake City. The conference drew more than 11,100 registered attendees and featured a technical program spanning six days. "The SC16 Exhibition was the largest in the history of the conference, with 349 exhibitors from industry, academia and research organizations from around the world."The post Full Rundown of SC16 Stats, World Records, and Awards appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the Intel HPC Developer Conference, Akira Sano from Supermicro describes the company's Machine Learning Solutions on Intel Architecture. "Our server systems, subsystems and accessories are architecturally designed to provide high levels of reliability, quality and scalability, thereby enabling our customers benefits in the areas of compute performance, density, thermal management and power efficiency to lower their overall total cost of ownership."The post Video: Supermicro Showcases Machine Learning Solutions on Intel Architecture appeared first on insideHPC.

Today CERN announced that it has selected T-Systems and Huawei to design, prototype the pilot phase of the Helix Nebula Science Cloud. T-Systems and Huawei will develop a solution based on its Open Telekom Cloud public cloud service launched in March 2016 and which currently supports workloads from various leading enterprises, SMEs and public sector organizations.The post CERN Selects T-Systems and Huawei for Helix Nebula Science Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC16, Steve Branton from Asetek describes the company's innovative liquid cooling systems for high performance computing. Unlike one-size-fits-all approaches, the flexibility of Asetek distributed liquid cooling technology enables OEMs to provide a fit-to-need strategy that is compelling to the elite members of the supercomputing community. “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. This need is exactly what Asetek’s distributed cooling architecture provides.”The post Asetek Liquid Cooling Delivers Savings and Flexibility for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

A weather science team from China has won 2016 ACM Gordon Bell Prize for their research project, “10M-Core Scalable Fully-Implicit Solver for Nonhydrostatic Atmospheric Dynamics.” The winning team presented a method for calculating atmospheric dynamics on the world's fastest computer, the 93 Petaflop Sunway TaihuLight system. "On the road to the seamless weather-climate prediction, a major obstacle is the difficulty of dealing with various spatial and temporal scales. The atmosphere contains time-dependent multi-scale dynamics that support a variety of wave motions.”The post Chinese Research Team Wins Gordon Bell Prize using #1 Sunway TaihuLight Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC16, Joe Yaworsky describes how Intel Omni Path is gaining traction on the TOP500. As the interconnect for the Intel Scalable System Framework, Omni-Path is focused on delivering the best possible application performance. "In the nine months since Intel Omni-Path Architecture (Intel OPA) began shipping, it has become the standard fabric for 100 gigabit systems. Intel OPA is featured in 28 of the top 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world announced at Supercomputing 2016 and now has 66 percent of the 100Gb market. Top500 designs include Oakforest-PACS, MIT Lincoln Lab and CINECA."The post Why Intel Omni-Path is Growing Fast on the TOP500 appeared first on 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.