High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team previews the ancillary events around SC16 in Salt Lake City. With a full week in store, this could be the best conference yet. After our event roundup, they share their predictions for SC16 total attendance numbers.The post Radio Free HPC Does the Day-by-Day SC16 Preview Show appeared first on insideHPC.

NVIDIA is a leading provider of GPU accelerators that are used in many High Performance Computing environments. This research paper from Gabriel Consulting Group explains the need for this new generation of hardware in today's data center and looks at what new technologies actual users are looking for.The post GPU Accelerators in Today’s Data Center: Performance & Efficiency appeared first on insideHPC.

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory are playing key roles in two recently funded computing projects with the goal of developing cutting-edge scientific applications for future exascale supercomputers that can perform at least a billion billion computing operations per second – 50 to 100 times more than the most powerful supercomputers in the world today.The post SLAC & Berkeley Researchers Prepare for Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Atos in Europe announced “Atos Quantum,” an ambitious program to develop quantum computing solutions that offer unprecedented computing power, while enhancing cyber security products to face these new technologies. "Today, taking advantage of our expertise in supercomputers and cyber security, we are fully committed to the second quantum revolution that will disrupt all of our clients' business activities in the coming decades, from medicine to agriculture through finance and industries. It’s a real collective, human and technological adventure that opens up to us. For the one who liked the digital evolution they will love the quantum revolution.”The post “Atos Quantum” Program Launches in Europe appeared first on insideHPC.

NERSC is working with Cray to explore new ways to more efficiently move data in and out of Cori, a powerful supercomputer being constructed in California. "We need to take advantage of a network guru’s design for moving data for a specific experiment but have SDN do all of the bookkeeping for which compute nodes need to be connected to what networks,” said Brent Draney, group lead for the Networking, Servers and Security Group at NERSC. “I would rather see our network engineers analyze the data flow and how to meet the need instead of having to manually reconfigure the network for the demands of each job.”The post Software Defined Networking to Speed Data for Cori Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

A panel of some of the world’s leading experts will come together to discuss this next frontier of healthcare at SC16, the premier international conference showcasing HPC on Nov. 14 in Salt Lake City. “Truly transformative discoveries are happening, and those discoveries are driving powerful shifts in how we combat disease and make people’s lives better.”The post Precision Medicine is Next Frontier in HPC at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) annual conference is transforming into an independent entity designed to unite the high-performance computing and advanced digital research community. The new Practice & Experience in Advanced Research Computing conference (PEARC) will welcome all who care about using advanced digital services for research. The PEARC17 Conference will take place in New Orleans, Louisiana, July 9-13, 2017.The post XSEDE Conference Morphs into PEARC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

Workshop Papers from ISC 2016 are now available as a free download. "The 21 workshops were held on June 26, 2016 at the Frankfurt Marriott Hotel with over 600 registered attendees, about 170 presentations, and over a dozen panel discussions. These workshops provided a focused, in-depth platform with presentations, discussions, and interaction on topics related to all aspects of research, development, and application of large-scale, high-performance experimental and commercial systems."The post ISC 2016 Workshop Papers Available as Free Download appeared first on insideHPC.

Today LiquidCool Solutions (LCS) announced plans to unveil two new liquid submerged servers at SC16 in Salt Lake City. Based on a clamshell design, the SCS Submerged Cloud Server is a 2U 4-node server designed for Cloud-computing applications. The SGS, Submerged GPU Server, is a 2U dual node server designed for HPC applications that can be equipped with four GPU cards or four Xeon Phi boards. Both servers are completely fanless and require no mechanical refrigeration for cooling.The post LCS to Unveil Immersive-cooled Servers at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

"Our new SGI UV 300 capabilities will help us achieve major milestones sooner than predicted,” said Albert Park, senior director, Bioinformatics, AbbVie Stemcentrx. “The new SGI system is able to process larger quantities of data faster than ever and provides us with ease of management. We see significant advantages of having a single OS control our systems, including ease of use, lower power consumption and increased compute power. There’s no price tag for technology that can help discover a drug that will save millions of lives.”The post SGI Powers Cancer Research at AbbVie Stemcentrx appeared first on insideHPC.

'Trading firms in the STAC Benchmark Council designed the STAC-M3 suite to represent a range of performance challenges that are common in financial time-series analysis," said Peter Lankford, Director of STAC. "As data volumes grow and as the query demands from quants, machines, and regulators increase, it is more important than ever for tick database solutions to perform well at scale. Kx's kdb+, running on Dell EMC DSSD D5 and PowerEdge servers, has established performance records while testing on the largest STAC-M3 data scale so far."The post Kx Breaks STAC Benchmark Record with Dell EMC DSSD D5 appeared first on insideHPC.

Are you coming to SC16 in Salt Lake City? As far as transportation goes, SLC has gone through remarkable changes since we last visited at SC12. As you’ll learn in the Print ‘n Fly Guide to SC16 in Salt Lake City, a new light rail system will get you from the airport and all about town. At the same time, we’ll give you great tips to get around the new, unregulated taxi fares that could leave you feeling frustrated.The post Transportation Guide to SC16 in Salt Lake City appeared first on insideHPC.

SC16 returns to Salt Lake City on Nov. 13-18. The Six-day supercomputing event features internationally-known expert speakers, cutting-edge workshops and sessions, a non-stop student competition, the world’s largest supercomputing exhibition,panel discussions and much more. "No other annual event showcases the revolutionary advances and possibilities of high performance computing than the annual ACM/IEEE International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Data Storage Analysis. From the impact of HPC on the future of medicine, to its transformative power in developing countries and “smart cities.” SC is the premiere venue for presenting leading-edge HPC research."The post SC16 to Showcase Latest Advances in HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Cydney Ewald Stevens writes that Salt Lake City will soon host the return of the SC conference along with the third annual StartupHPC Workshop. "People come together at StartupHPC to learn from each other,” said founder Shahin Khan. “These are all leaders in their own right. From successful CxO’ and serial entrepreneurs to industry influencers these leaders come together each year to impart their wisdoms and experiences, share their own ‘journeys’ and help others prosper as a result.”The post Seeking Innovators for the StartupHPC Workshop at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program announced details of its fiscal year 2016 investment in supercomputing capability supporting the DOD science, engineering, test and acquisition engineering communities. The total life-cycle investment is valued at $63.7 million, including acquisition of three supercomputing systems with corresponding hardware and software maintenance services. With the addition of 10 petaFLOPS of computing capability, this procurement will increase the DOD HPCMP’s aggregate supercomputing capability to 31.1 petaFLOPS.The post HPC Modernization Program Boosts Supercomputing at DoD appeared first on insideHPC.

"Designing a new generation of hardware with such high performance needs to make sure that developers understand the basics, and are familiar with the architecture of a new system. Single thread performance with the Intel Xeon Phi processor is significantly better than previous designs. In addition, in order to speed up performance even more, vector processing, where applicable is critical in application performance. With two vector processing units (VPUs) per core, applications can execute two 512-bit vector multiply-add instructions per cycle. Each of these cores can deliver 32 double precision operations per clock cycle. The VPU executes all of the floating point operations as well as legacy instructions from SSE to AVX to the new AVX-512 instructions."The post Intel Xeon Phi Processor: A Look at the Basic Architecture appeared first on insideHPC.

"OpenStack promises to be a standard platform for creating a private cloud but it can be very difficult to configure,” said Dan Kuczkowski, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales at Bright Computing. “We are very pleased that Stony Brook, a longtime Bright customer, trusted in the Bright platform for HPC cluster management and decided to adopt Bright OpenStack as their private cloud standard.”The post Bright OpenStack Powers HPC at Stony Brook University appeared first on insideHPC.

SC16 is just around the corner and there so much to explore. On suggestion is to visit with Intel learn how you can power your breakthrough innovations and discoveries with Intel Scalable System Framework. Read on for a list of SC16 events where you can experience how Intel is transforming HPC from traditional modeling and simulation to artificial intelligence, analytics, and visualization.The post Fuel Your Insight with Intel Multiple SC16 Engagement Opportunities appeared first on insideHPC.

"The market for networking devices is undergoing a major paradigm shift, moving away from closed proprietary OEM network equipment and migrating towards open platforms that are both flexible and configurable,” said Dror Goldenberg, vice president software architecture, Mellanox Technologies. “We are in full support of this movement as evidenced by our initiative to open source the entire suite of Mellanox software for our NPS family of network processors.”The post Mellanox Launches OpenNPU for Routers, Load Balancers, and Firewalls appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Ethernet Alliance previewed their upcoming SC16 multi-vendor interoperability demo. A premier international conference for high-performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis, SC16 is an ideal backdrop for emphasizing Ethernet’s vital role in enabling supercomputing’s continued advancement and successful future.The post Ethernet Alliance Maps Out Ethernet’s Future In HPC at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

"The results of DDN’s annual HPC Trends Survey reflect very accurately what HPC end users tell us and what we are seeing in their data center infrastructures. The use of private and hybrid clouds continues to grow although most HPC organizations are not storing as large a percentage of their data in public clouds as they anticipated even a year ago. Performance remains the top challenge, especially when handling mixed I/O workloads and resolving I/O bottlenecks."The post HPC Trends Survey from DDN Reveals Rising Deployment of Flash Tiers & Private/Hybrid Clouds appeared first on insideHPC.

Scot Schultz from Mellanox writes that the company is moving the industry forward to a world-class off-load network architecture that will pave the way to Exascale. "Mellanox, alongside many industry thought-leaders, is a leader in advancing the Co-Design approach. The key value and core goal is to strive for more CPU offload capabilities and acceleration techniques while maintaining forward and backward compatibility of new and existing infrastructures; and the result is nothing less than the world’s most advanced interconnect, which continues to yield the most powerful and efficient supercomputers ever deployed."The post InfiniBand: When State-of-the-Art becomes State-of-the-Smart appeared first on insideHPC.

Today IBM announced new hybrid cloud all-flash storage solutions developed to modernize and transform storage deployments, providing a strong bridge to the development of cognitive applications. These new solutions and software allow clients to store their valuable data where it makes the best business sense.The post IBM Adds New All-Flash, Software-Defined Cloud Storage Solutions appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Kim McMahon writes that SC16 will reflect a concerted effort to improve diversity and inclusivity at the conference. "If you want to get the best ideas, you need to ask all of the smart people what they think. HPC is really hard and have big problems to solve that solutions will impact humanity. If we are only talking to one-third of the workforce, are we finding the best ideas and solutions? By tapping into the other two thirds, we get more people and ideas to solve the big HPC problems."The post A New Focus on Diversity and Inclusivity at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

Klaus Schulten, professor of physics and Beckman Institute faculty member for nearly 25 years, has died after an illness. Klaus Schulten was a frequent speaker at the SC conference series as well GTC and many others. "I enjoyed his talks very much and he was truly one of the great ones at conveying why HPC matters."The post Computational Biologist Klaus Schulten passes away appeared first on insideHPC.

John Gustafson from A*Star will keynote the third annual StartupHPC Workshop on Nov 14 in Salt Lake City with a talk on Technology Disruption. Known to many in the HPC community as the father of Gustafson’s Law, John Gustafson was kind enough to sit down with us to share his perspectives on the current state of high performance computing. "The best way to spot a Startup opportunity is to notice an established vendor that has gotten too comfortable with its large market share, and thinks it can raise profit margins and resist the downward price pressure of Moore's law."The post Interview: John Gustafson on Technology Disruption and the StartupHPC Workshop appeared first on insideHPC.

Today, SGI announced that the United States Department of Defense (DoD) has selected SGI ICE XA for two of its Army Research Laboratory Defense Supercomputing Resource Center systems. The upgrades are part of a technology insertion, known as TI-16, for their High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP). "We’re excited to partner with SGI for our TI-16 DoD program, and have full confidence in the system’s ability to provide excellent performance," said Dr. Raju Namburu, director of ARL DSRC. “Choosing the right HPC partners is crucial, as we rely on supercomputing and large-scale analytics and predictive sciences to provide the competitive edge we need to maintain our position as the nation’s premier laboratory for land forces.”The post SGI Awarded $27M Systems Contract with ARL appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Cray announced that Baylor University has selected a Cray CS400 cluster supercomputer, further demonstrating its commitment to transformative research. The Cray system will serve as the primary high performance computing platform for Baylor researchers and will be supported by the Academic and Research Computing Services group (ARCS) of the Baylor University Libraries. The Cray CS400 cluster supercomputer will replace Baylor’s current HPC system, enhancing and expanding its capacity for computational research projectsThe post Cray CS400 Supercomputer Coming to Baylor University appeared first on insideHPC.

Today DDN announced plans to showcase innovations in HPC leadership at SC16 in Salt Lake City. DDN will feature and demonstrate new advancements in flash for HPC, Lustre* parallel file system performance and security, and open and software-only object storage and burst buffer offerings.The post DDN to Demonstrate Latest HPC Technology at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced that it has completed its acquisition of SGI, a global leader in high performance solutions for compute, data analytics and data management, for $7.75 per share in cash. “This deal combines SGI’s computing strengths with HPE’s global reach,” said Antonio Neri, executive vice president and general manager, Enterprise Group, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “SGI’s technologies and services will further our position in high-performance computing and give our customers the best of data management capabilities for real time analytics.”The post Hewlett Packard Enterprise Completes Acquisition of SGI appeared first on insideHPC.

“When we started the marketplace 3 years ago the service we offered was all manual,” explained Wolfgang Gentzsch who founded UberCloud together with Burak Yenier in 2012. “But already then we were developing our HPC software container technology based on Docker which today provides a fully automated software packaging and porting environment and allows users to access their engineering workflow within seconds, at their fingertips, in any cloud. They don’t have to learn how to handle a new cloud user platform, because handling a software container provides the same look and feel identical to the engineer’s desktop.”The post UberCloud Celebrates 3rd year of its HPC Cloud Marketplace Service appeared first on insideHPC.

"Engineers and scientists can now get access to HPC resources more easily because of the Fortissimo Marketplace, a new platform for brokering high-performance computing (HPC) services. The new cloud-based marketplace offers small manufacturing businesses fast and convenient access to supercomputing services.

The Intel HPC Developer Conference at SC16 has announced its keynote speakers. Jonathan Cohen and Kai Li from Princeton will present, Going Where Neuroscience and Computer Science Have Not Gone Before. "Taking place Nov. 12-13 in Salt Lake City, the Intel HPC Developer Conference will bring together developers from around the world to discuss code modernization in high-performance computing."The post Keynotes Announced for Intel HPC Developer Conference at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this research report, we reveal recent research showing that customers are feeling the need for speed—i.e. they’re looking for more processing cores. Not surprisingly, we found that they’re investing more money in accelerators like GPUs and moreover are seeing solid positive results from using GPUs. In the balance of this report, we take a look at these finding and and the newest GPU tech from NVIDIA and how it performs vs. traditional servers and earlier GPU products.The post insideHPC Research Report on GPUs appeared first on insideHPC.

"SC16 is really unique among conferences in the HPC community. There is simply no other conference where you can go to talk with every major participant in the HPC vendor community, see the latest research results, get HPC-specific training from the authorities in our field, mentor that next generation of leaders, and attend workshops that will shape tomorrow's technology agenda."The post Changing the Face of the SC Conference Series: An Interview with SC16 General Chair John West appeared first on insideHPC.

"Unchecked data growth and data sprawl are having a profound impact on life science workflows. As data volumes continue to grow, researchers and IT leaders face increasingly difficult decisions about how to manage this data yet keep the storage budget in check. Learn how these challenges can be overcome through active data management and leveraging cloud technology. The concepts will be applied to an example architecture that supports both genomic and bioimaging workflows."The post Data Storage Best Practices for Life Science Workflows appeared first on insideHPC.

Xilinx has announced that Baidu, a Chinese language Internet search provider, is utilizing Xilinx FPGAs to accelerate machine learning applications in its datacenters in China. "Acceleration is essential to keep up with the rapidly increasing data centre workloads that support our growth," said Yang Liu, executive director at Baidu.The post FPGAs Accelerate Machine Learning at Baidu appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) in Germany announced it is co-sponsoring undergraduate students participating in the SC16 Student Cluster Competition (SCC). This year, GCS provides financial support for two German teams which were accepted for the multi-disciplinary HPC challenge integrated within the Supercomputing Conference 2016 (SC16) in Salt Lake City (Utah, USA): team […]The post GCS Supports Two German Teams for the SC16 Student Cluster Competition appeared first on insideHPC.

Today ThinkParQ in Germany announced that RAID Inc has been selected as a North American Gold Partner for distributing the BeeGFS parallel file system. This strategic partnership will help bring BeeGFS infrastructure solutions across diverse markets as Genomics, Drug Discovery, Research, Semiconductors, and Financial Services. "BeeGFS is a file system dedicated to delivering maximum I/O performance to customers,” said Sven Breuner, CEO of ThinkParQ. “Leveraging their twenty plus years of technical computing experience in solution design, RAID Inc. is positioned to impact the HPC market by deploying all-flash systems with BeeGFS.”The post RAID Inc. to Distribute BeeGFS in the U.S. appeared first on insideHPC.

"With this award, Engility expands on our long-standing partnership with the FDA to further develop their high performance computing and complex data analysis capabilities,” said Engility CEO Lynn Dugle. “We look forward to supporting the FDA’s mission to make groundbreaking treatments, such as genetics-based medicine, available to all Americans.”The post Engility to Build Up HPC at FDA appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Ace Computers from Illinois announced that the company is integrating the new Nvidia Tesla P100 accelerators into select HPC clusters. "Nvidia has been a trusted partner for many years," said Ace Computers CEO John Samborski. "We are especially enthusiastic about this P100 accelerator and the transformative effect it promises to have on the clusters we are building for enterprises, academic institutions and research facilities.”The post Ace Computers Adds NVIDIA Tesla P100 to HPC Clusters appeared first on insideHPC.

The Women in HPC network is hosting a meetup celebration at SC16. The event will take place at Nov. 15 at 7:30pm - 9:00pm at Caffé Molise in Salt Lake City. "Join us to celebrate the growing community of women in the supercomputing community and the work of WHPC. This special networking evening will include drinks and an appetizer buffet. Hosted by EPCC in collaboration with Intel, Compute Canada and McMahon Consulting, the event is a great opportunity to celebrate the work done by WHPC and meet members, founders, advocates and supporters."The post Women in HPC Celebration comes to Salt Lake City on Nov. 15 appeared first on insideHPC.

Gary Grider from LANL presented this talk at the Storage Developer Conference. "MarFS is a Near-POSIX File System using cloud storage for data and many POSIX file systems for metadata. Extreme HPC environments require that MarFS scale a POSIX namespace metadata to trillions of files and billions of files in a single directory while storing the data in efficient massively parallel ways in industry standard erasure protected cloud style object stores."The post MarFS – A Scalable Near-POSIX File System over Cloud Objects appeared first on insideHPC.

Since 2008, the Intel and Cray have rapidly increased their collaboration to the benefit of the supercomputing market and customers. "Most recently, Cray has announced win after win for its Cray XC series systems that feature the Intel Xeon Phi processor, code-named Knights Landing and Knights Hill, which offers peak performance of over half-a-petaflop per cabinet—a 2X performance boost over previous generations. Cray is leading the charge toward many-core-CPU systems that boost application performance without the aid of GPUs."The post Cray and Intel Double Down on Next-gen HPC Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

At insideHPC, are very pleased to publish the Print ‘n Fly Guide to SC16 in Salt Lake City. We designed this Guide to be an in-flight magazine custom tailored for your journey to SC16 — the world’s largest gathering of high performance computing professionals. "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 It’s Here: The Print ‘n Fly Guide to SC16 in Salt Lake City appeared first on insideHPC.

The National Institute of Aerospace Research in Romania will power its scientific and aeronautical research program with a new SGI UV system. "This is the second SGI system we have installed at INCAS,” said Costea Emil, head of Department Technical Services at INCAS. “SGI solutions have allowed us to rapidly develop and test our software prototypes and solutions. With our newest installation, we can reduce the time required to program algorithms, allowing us to focus on the key scientific problems we’re chartered to solve.”The post SGI UV Powers Romanian Aerospace Agency appeared first on insideHPC.

Are supercomputers practical for Deep Learning applications? Over at the Allinea Blog, Mark O'Connor writes that a recent experiment with machine learning optimization on the Archer supercomputer shows that relatively simple models run at sufficiently large scale can readily outperform more complex but less scalable models. "In the open science world, anyone running a HPC cluster can expect to see a surge in the number of people wanting to run deep learning workloads over the coming months."The post Will Deep Learning Scale to Supercomputers? appeared first on insideHPC.

While there have been previous generations of AVX instructions, the AVX-512 instructions can significantly assist the performance of HPC applications. "The new AVX-512 instructions have been designed with developers in mind. High level languages that are used for HPC applications, such as FORTRAN and C/C++, through a compiler will be able to use the new instructions. This can be accomplished through the use of pragmas to direct the compilers to generate the new instructions, or users can use libraries which are tuned to the new technology."The post New AVX-512 Instructions Boost Performance on Intel Xeon Phi appeared first on insideHPC.

Growing momentum was the watchword at the inaugural OpenPOWER European Summit this week, where the OpenPOWER Foundation made a series of announcements today detailing the rapid growth, adoption and support of OpenPOWER across the continent. " With today’s announcements by our European members, the OpenPOWER Foundation expands its reach, bringing open source, high performing, flexible and scalable solutions to organizations worldwide.”The post OpenPOWER Gains Momentum in Europe appeared first on insideHPC.

The Networking at SC (WINS) program officially launched today. Funded through a grant from the NSF and ESnet, the program sponsors eight career women in the research and education network community to participate in the build out and live operation of SCinet. "Not only is WINS providing hands-on engineering training to the participants but also the opportunity to present their experiences with the broader networking community throughout the year."The post NSF Sponsors Women Engineers for SCinet Buildout at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.