High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) has joined the OpenPOWER Foundation. The news will be part of a keynote address by BSC Director, Mateo Valero at the OpenPOWER Summit Europe, which takes place this week in Barcelona.The post BSC Joins OpenPOWER Foundation appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team previews the SC16 Student Cluster Competition. To get us primed up, Dan gives us his impressions of the 14 teams competing this year. That's a record number! "The Student Cluster Competition was developed in 2007 to immerse undergraduate and high school students in HPC. Student teams design and build small clusters, with hardware and software vendor partners, learn designated scientific applications, apply optimization techniques for their chosen architectures, and compete in a non-stop, 48-hour challenge."The post Radio Free HPC Previews the SC16 Student Cluster Competition appeared first on insideHPC.

The Dell HPC Community at SC16 has posted their Meeting Agenda. "Blair Bethwaite from Monash University will present OpenStack for HPC at Monash. After that, Josh Simons from VMWare will describe the latest technologies in HPC virtualization." The event takes place Saturday, Nov. 12 at the Radisson Hotel in Salt Lake City.The post Speakers Announced for Dell HPC Community Meeting at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today's operating systems were not developed with the immense complexity of Exascale in mind. Now, researchers at Argonne National Lab are preparing for HPC's next wave, where the operating system will have to assume new roles in synchronizing and coordinating tasks. "The Argo team is making several of its experimental OS modifications available. Beckman expects to test them on large machines at Argonne and elsewhere in the next year."The post Argo Project Developing OS Technology for Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.

Intel has announced the availability of Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre* software V3.0.1.3. This maintenance release has the latest CVE updates from RHEL 7.2. Intel also announced a pair of Lustre events coming to SC16 in Salt Lake City.The post Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre Updates in time for SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Dr. Dimitri Kusnezov from the U.S. Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration presents: Supercomputing the Cancer Moonshot and Beyond. "How can the next generation of supercomputers unlock biomedical mysteries that will shape the future practice of medicine? Scientists behind the National Strategic Computing Initiative, a federal strategy for investing in high-performance computing, are exploring this question."The post Supercomputing the Cancer Moonshot and Beyond appeared first on insideHPC.

IDC will hold its annual Analyst Briefing and Breakfast at SC16. Free for attendees, the event takes place 7:15 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 15 at the Hilton Salt Lake City Center. "Join IDC industry analysts as they present their expert opinions and analysis on the technical computing market and the future of high-performance computing."The post IDC Breakfast Briefing Returns to SC16 on Nov. 15 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Emu Technology announced that it has delivered an Emu Chick Memory Server to Oak Ridge National Laboratory. "ORNL intends to study the system for streaming graph analysis applications, sparse multilinear computations, and other memory-intensive problems, as we continue to test the potential of emerging computing technologies to further our mission within the DOE," said Jeffrey S. Vetter, Director of the Future Technologies Group at ORNL’s Computer Science and Mathematics Division.The post ORNL Testing Compact “Emu Chick” Memory Server for Big Data appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Allinea Software announced that the compay will hold series of New Software Performance Briefings at SC16. The briefings will be held at the Allinea booth #1508 in Salt Lake City. This year at SC, we’re giving booth visitors the opportunity to find out more about what they don’t know about their software performance,” said […]The post Allinea to Offer New Software Performance Briefings at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today European software startup Appentra announced that its Parallware technology for guided parallelization has been selected to be part of the SC16 Emerging Technologies Showcase. "As a technology with the potential to influence computing and society as a whole, Parallware is novel LLVM-Based Software Technology for Classification of Scientific Codes to Assist in Parallelization with OpenMP and OpenACC."The post Parallware Selected for SC16 Emerging Technologies Showcase appeared first on insideHPC.

"This talk will provide empirical evidence from our Deep Speech work that application level performance (e.g. recognition accuracy) scales with data and compute, transforming some hard AI problems into problems of computational scale. It will describe the performance characteristics of Baidu's deep learning workloads in detail, focusing on the recurrent neural networks used in Deep Speech as a case study. It will cover challenges to further improving performance, describe techniques that have allowed us to sustain 250 TFLOP/s when training a single model on a cluster of 128 GPUs, and discuss straightforward improvements that are likely to deliver even better performance."The post Video: HPC Opportunities in Deep Learning appeared first on insideHPC.

Martina Naughton presented this talk at the HPC Advisory Council Spain Conference. "IBM has a strong tradition of research collaboration with academia. We go beyond the boundaries of our IBM labs to work with colleagues in universities around the world to address global grand challenge problems. We also foster collaborative research related to transformation and innovation of businesses and governments, relationships through fellowships, grants, and funding for programs of shared interest."The post Driving Collaborative Research Partnerships at IBM appeared first on insideHPC.

"The work we do involves capturing and analyzing huge environmental data sets so that the government can make informed policy decisions that protect humans and the environment,” said Ron Hines, Associate Director for Health at the EPA’s National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory in Research Triangle Park, N.C. “We have collaborated with the NCDS on some of its initiatives in the past and having a seat at its leadership table will help us connect with leading data researchers, access data resources and infrastructure, and contribute to the development of future NCDS strategies.”The post EPA Joins National Consortium for Data Science appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Numerical Algorithms Group announces the latest version of its flagship software, the NAG Library, Mark 26. In this release, NAG has introduced an Optimization Modeling Suite for linear and nonlinear semidefinite programming and general nonlinear programming. It also features new routines in the important computational areas of Nearest Correlation Matrix and Quadrature.The post Latest NAG Numerical Library Adds Optimization Modeling Suite appeared first on insideHPC.

"ISC High Performance 2017 is now open to a number of submission opportunities. Whether your interest lies in research posters, project posters, birds-of-a-feather (BoF) sessions or the PhD forum, ISC is welcoming proposals from all members of the high performance computing community. ISC High Performance is looking forward to continuing its tradition as the largest HPC conference and exhibition in Europe. It will be attended by over 3,000 academicians, industry leaders and end users from around the world. The ISC exhibition annually attracts around 150 organizations, including supercomputing, storage and network vendors, as well as universities, research centers, laboratories and international projects."The post Call for Participation: ISC 2017 in Frankfurt appeared first on insideHPC.

"With up to 72 out-of-order cores, the new Intel Xeon Phi processor delivers over 3 teraFLOPS (floating-point operations per second) of double-precision peak while providing 3.5 times higher performance per watt than the previous generation. As a bootable CPU with integrated architecture, the Intel Xeon Phi processor eliminates PCIe* bottlenecks, includes on-package high-bandwidth memory, and available integrated Intel Omni-Path fabric architecture to deliver fast, low-latency performance."The post A New Generation of Performance with Intel Xeon Phi appeared first on insideHPC.

The 3rd Annual Seagate HPC User Forum is coming to SC16 on Nov. 14. "We’re venturing well beyond legacy boundaries. Are you confused about the real future of HPC storage? Is it all flash like the hype suggests? Are reliable spinning disks still going to be relevant? Is there a better answer? Join us Monday, November 14 from 4:00 – 7:00 p.m. at Seagate’s 3rd annual HPC User Forum to get your questions answered and learn about the newest HPC direction and innovations firsthand from four industry leaders."The post Seagate HPC User Forum Coming to SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

Attention students: there is still time to enter your team into the ISC-HPCAC Student Cluster Competition. As part of the ISC 2017 conference, the Student Cluster Competition will take place June 18-22 in Frankfurt, Germany. The ISC-HPCAC Student Cluster Competition is an opportunity to showcase student expertise in a friendly yet spirited competition. The competition […]The post Apply Now for ISC 2017 Student Cluster Competition appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Dell EMC announced a new member of the Dell EMC Isilon product family. Designed around an all-flash, the Isilon scale-out family of NAS storage is designed to help IT organizations modernize their infrastructure and deliver on the capabilities of a digital business.The post Dell EMC Isilon Goes All-Flash for Unstructured Data appeared first on insideHPC.

Scientists at the University of Bristol are working with the energy industry to develop an 'early warning tool' to predict jellyfish blooms that can cause serious problems by clogging the water intakes of coastal power plants. "To achieve this we will be translating previous research using a state-of-the-art marine dispersal modeling system to simulate the transport of jellyfish blooms by ocean currents, incorporating specific biological behaviors of jellyfish."The post Simulating Jellyfish Blooms to Protect Coastal Power Stations appeared first on insideHPC.

Peter Thompson from Rogue Wave Software presented this talk at the Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing. "Purpose-built for applications using hundreds or thousands of cores, TotalView for HPC provides a set of tools that give scientific and academic developers unprecedented control over processes and thread execution, along with deep visibility into program states and data. By allowing the simultaneous debugging of many processes and threads in a single window, you get complete control over program execution: running, stepping, and halting line-by-line through code within a single thread or within arbitrary groups of processes or threads."The post TotalView: Debugging from Desktop to Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

"With the new SPICE system from SGI, we have seen a step-change in performance for our researchers and scientists doing post-processing of weather and climate data,” said Richard Bevan, Head of Operational Technology at the Met Office. “Tasks that used to take 1-2 days to complete are now done in a fraction of that time, allowing scientists to perform multiple runs in one day.”The post SGI Powers New SPICE System for Weather Forecasting at UK Met Office appeared first on insideHPC.

In a paper published today in Nature Geoscience, scientists at the Met Office have demonstrated significant advances in predicting up to one year ahead the phases of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), which drives European and North American winter variability. The NAO - a large-scale gradient in air pressure measured between low pressure around Iceland and high pressure around the Azores - is the primary driver of winter climate variability for Europe.The post UK Met Office Research Simulations Predict European Winter One Year Ahead appeared first on insideHPC.

Over at CSCS, Simone Ulmer writes that the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre is turning twenty-five. First opened in 1991, CSCS supports users from Swiss and international institutions in their top-flight research and runs computers as a service facility for research associations and MeteoSwiss.The post CSCS in Switzerland to Celebrate 25 Years of Supercomputing appeared first on insideHPC.

Georgia Tech is taking on the challenge of moving computing past the end of Moore’s Law by standing up a new interdisciplinary research center, which is known as CRNCH. "We knew that at some point physics would come into play. We hit that wall around 2005,” said Tom Conte, inaugural director of CRNCH and professor in Georgia Tech’s schools of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering.The post Moving Beyond Moore’s Law with the New CRNCH Center at Georgia Tech appeared first on insideHPC.

Designed specifically with researchers in mind, the Birmingham Environment for Academic Research (BEAR) Cloud will augment an already rich set of IT services at the University of Birmingham and will be used by academics across all disciplines, from Medicine to Archaeology, and Physics to Theology. "We are very proud of the new system, but building a research cloud isn’t easy," said Simon Thompson, Research Computing Infrastructure Architect in IT Services at the University of Birmingham. "We challenged a range of carefully-selected partners to provide the underlying technology."The post HPC Bear Cloud to Power Research at University of Birmingham appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the Microsoft Ignite Conference, Tejas Karmarkar describes how to run your HPC Simulations on Microsoft Azure - with UberCloud container technology. "High performance computing applications are some of the most challenging to run in the cloud due to requirements that can include fast processors, low-latency networking, parallel file systems, GPUs, and Linux. We show you how to run these engineering, research and scientific workloads in Microsoft Azure with performance equivalent to on-premises. We use customer case studies to illustrate the basic architecture and alternatives to help you get started with HPC in Azure."The post Slidecast: Running HPC Simulation Workflows in Microsoft Azure appeared first on insideHPC.

Many industries deploy graphics-intensive applications on single user workstations with individual GPU resources. For those who have switched to a virtualization based environment, many of the legacy desktop virtualization platforms can’t support high end GPUs or multiple GPU configurations. Together with partners like Cisco and One Stop Systems, a London-based tech start-up ebb3 has created the High Performance Virtual Computer (HPVC) to tackle this issue with the aim of creating the fastest performing solution in the world.The post The High Performance Virtual Computer for Graphics-Intensive Applications appeared first on insideHPC.

"While we often talk about the density advantages of containers, it's the opposite approach that we use in the High Performance Computing world! Here, we use exactly 1 system container per node, giving it unlimited access to all of the host's CPU, Memory, Disk, IO, and Network. And yet we can still leverage the management characteristics of containers -- security, snapshots, live migration, and instant deployment to recycle each node in between jobs. In this talk, we'll examine a reference architecture and some best practices around containers in HPC environments."The post Streamlining HPC Workloads with Containers appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the PASC17 Conference announced a track focused on Precision Medicine as Special Topic for Emerging Domains. "Precision medicine, also referred to as personalized medicine, is an emerging domain that is adding tremendous value to the study of life sciences and medical treatment. The requirements that it has for rapid – and secure – processing, analysis and management of vast quantities of data in a wide range of different medical environments make precision medicine ideally suited to high performance computing."The post PASC17 Conference to Focus on HPC & Precision Medicine appeared first on insideHPC.

The HPC Advisory Council has posted their agenda for their upcoming China Conference. The event takes place Oct. 26 in Xi'an, China. "We invite you to join us on Wednesday, October 26th, in Xi’an for our annual China Conference. This year’s agenda will focus on Deep learning, Artificial Intelligence, HPC productivity, advanced topics and futures. Join fellow technologists, researchers, developers, computational scientists and industry affiliates to discuss recent developments and future advancements in High Performance Computing."The post HPC Advisory Council China Conference Returns to Xi’an Oct. 26 appeared first on insideHPC.

This year at SC16 in Salt Lake City, Dr. Thomas Sterling from Indiana University will present: Runtime Systems Software for Future HPC: Opportunity or Distraction? "As one of the SC16 Invited Talks, this presentation will provide a comprehensive review of driving challenges, strategies, examples of existing runtime systems, and experiences. One important consideration is the possible future role of advances in computer architecture to accelerate the likely mechanisms embodied within typical runtimes. The talk will conclude with suggestions of future paths and work to advance this possible strategy."The post Thomas Sterling to Present on Runtime Systems Software for Future HPC at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

"Today’s most advanced seismic survey datasets encompass many hundreds of terabytes, and gaining insight from this data lies squarely at the convergence of supercomputing and big data,” said Barry Bolding, chief strategy officer at Cray. “The Cray supercomputers allow PGS to quickly process this data into an accurate, clear image of what’s lying underneath the sea floor, through kilometers of varied geology. This is an extraordinarily complex computational challenge, and is where PGS excels. We’re thrilled PGS continues to rely on Cray supercomputers to power the next generation of seismic processing and imaging.”The post PGS Acquires Galois Supercomputer from Cray appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the new OpenCAPI interconnect standard. "Released this week by the newly formed OpenCAPI Consortium, OpenCAPI provides an open, high-speed pathway for different types of technology – advanced memory, accelerators, networking and storage – to more tightly integrate their functions within servers. This data-centric approach to server design, which puts the compute power closer to the data, removes inefficiencies in traditional system architectures to help eliminate system bottlenecks and can significantly improve server performance."The post Radio Free HPC Looks into the New OpenCAPI Consortium appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the HPC Advisory Council Spain Conference, Addison Snell from Intersect360 Research looks back over the past 10 years of HPC and provides predictions for the next 10 years. Intersect360 Research just released their Worldwide HPC 2015 Total Market Model and 2016–2020 Forecast.The post HPC: Retrospect & Looking Towards the Next 10 Years appeared first on insideHPC.

The third Workshop on Accelerator Programming Using Directives (WACCPD) has posted their meeting agenda. Held in conjunction with SC16, the WACCPD workshop takes place Nov. 14 in Salt Lake City. "To address the rapid pace of hardware evolution, developers continue to explore and add richer features to the various (parallel) programming standards. Domain scientists continue to explore the programming and tools space while preparing themselves for future Exascale systems. This workshop explores innovative language features – their implementations, compilation & runtime scheduling techniques, performance optimization strategies, autotuning tools exploring the optimization space and so on. WACCPD has been one of the major forums for bringing together the users, developers and tools community to share their knowledge and experiences of using directives and similar approaches to program emerging complex systems."The post WACCPD Workshop at SC16 to Focus on Using Directives for Accelerators appeared first on insideHPC.

In this RCE Podcast, Brock Palen and Jeff Squyres speak with the creators of the Julia programming language for technical computing. “Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments. It provides a sophisticated compiler, distributed parallel execution, numerical accuracy, and an extensive mathematical function library. Julia’s Base library, largely written in Julia itself, also integrates mature, best-of-breed open source C and Fortran libraries for linear algebra, random number generation, signal processing, and string processing.”The post RCE Podcast Looks at the Julia Language for Technical Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

Adam Buntzman and his colleagues at the University of Arizona recently developed a tool that uses CyVerse supercomputing resources to create the first nearly comprehensive map of the human immunome, all the possible immune receptors our bodies can make. “When people go to a clinic, it’s usually because they’re already sick," Buntzman said. "If doctors could detect cancerous cells before they grow drastically out of proportion to healthy cells, patients would have much higher odds of successful cancer treatment and survival.”The post Supercomputing Cancer Diagnostics with CyVerse appeared first on insideHPC.

​Today AMD announced that the Alibaba Cloud will use AMD Radeon Pro GPU technology to help expand its cloud computing offerings and accelerate adoption of its cloud-based services. "The partnership between AMD and Alibaba Cloud will bring both of our customers more diversified, cloud-based graphic processing solutions. It is our vision to work together with leading technology firms like AMD to empower businesses in every industry with cutting-edge technologies and computing capabilities,” said Simon Hu, president of Alibaba Cloud.The post AMD GPUs to Speed Alibaba Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

Jack Dongarra presented this talk at the Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing. "ATPESC provides intensive, two weeks of training on the key skills, approaches, and tools to design, implement, and execute computational science and engineering applications on current high-end computing systems and the leadership-class computing systems of the future."The post Jack Dongarra Presents: Adaptive Linear Solvers and Eigensolvers appeared first on insideHPC.

NCI in Australia is seeking a new Director in our Job of the Week. Based in the Nation’s capital, and hosted by the Australian National University, NCI is supported by the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy, with operational funding provided through a formal collaboration of CSIRO, Bureau of Meteorology, The Australian National University […]The post Job of the week: Director at NCI in Australia appeared first on insideHPC.

"IBM has decided to double down on our commitment to open standards and enablement of industry innovation by opening up access to our CAPI technology to the entire industry. With the support of our OpenCAPI co-founders, we have created a new OpenCAPI specification that tremendously improves performance over our prior specification and IBM will be among the first to implement it with our POWER9 products expected in 2017.”The post New OpenCAPI Consortium to Boost Server Performance 10x appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Pure Storage announced the availability of petabyte-scale storage for mission-critical cloud IT, anchored by the release of the next-generation of FlashArray//m the company’s flagship all-flash storage array, which now delivers best-in-class performance with the simplicity and agility of public cloud.The post Pure Storage Introduces Petabyte Flash Arrays appeared first on insideHPC.

Today, to ready the United States for a future in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) plays a growing role, the White House is releasing a report on future directions and considerations for AI called Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence. This report surveys the current state of AI, its existing and potential applications, and the questions that progress in AI raise for society and public policy."The post White House Releases Report on the Future of Artificial Intelligence appeared first on insideHPC.

European scientists and researchers can now apply for access to PRACE supercomputing resources through the PRACE Call 14.The post European Scientists Can Access more PRACE Supercomputing Power appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the HPC Advisory Council Spain Conference, Martin Hilgeman from Dell Technologies provides a detailed overview of how to approach code optimization through providing more parallelism. "Martin Hilgeman brings perspectives of a system builder to the massively parallel performance discussion – examining the continuous advances in multi-core architectures and its impact on users and computational work."The post Video: How to Reclaim your Application Performance appeared first on insideHPC.

With the advent of the tremendous compute density of new processors, it is important to understand if an application can take advantage of multicore. "Developers should understand if an application might be ready to run in a highly vectorized or many core environment before attempting to do the work necessary to obtain the high performance that might be expected."The post Preparing Code For Parallel Execution appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, NYU researchers describe their plans to advance deep learning with their new Nvidia DGX-1 AI supercomputer. “The DGX-1 is going to be used in just about every research project we have here,” said Yann LeCun, founding director of the NYU Center for Data Science and a pioneer in the field of AI. “The students here can’t wait to get their hands on it.”The post NYU Advances Robotics with Nvidia DGX-1 Deep Learning Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Dave Hart, CISL User Services Manager presents: Cheyenne - NCAR's Next-Generation Data-Centric Supercomputing Environment. "Cheyenne is a new 5.34-petaflops, high-performance computer built for NCAR by SGI. The hardware was delivered on Monday, September 12, at the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC) and the system is on schedule to become operational at the beginning of 2017. All of the compute racks were powered up and nodes booted up within a few days of delivery."The post Cheyenne – NCAR’s Next-Gen Data-Centric Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

The PASC17 Conference has issued its Call for Submissions. Co-sponsored by ACM and SIGHPC, the event will take place June 26-28, 2017 in Lugano, Switzerland. "The PASC Conference is an interdisciplinary event in high performance computing that brings together domain science, applied mathematics and computer science – where computer science is focused on enabling the realization of scientific computation."The post Call for Papers: PASC17 Conference in Lugano appeared first on insideHPC.