Inside HPC & AI News | High-Performance Computing & Artificial Intelligence

Today E4 Computer Engineering from Italy showcased a new PetaFlops-Class Open Compute Server with "remarkable energy efficiency" based on the IBM POWER architecture. "Finding new ways of making easily deployable and energy efficient HPC solutions is often a complex task, which requires a lot of planning, testing and benchmarking - said Cosimo Gianfreda CTO, Co-Founder, E4 Computer Engineering. - We are very lucky to work with great partners like Wistron, as their timing and accuracy means we have all the right conditions to have effective time-to-market. I strongly believe that the performance on the node, coupled with the power monitoring technology, will receive a wide acceptance from the HPC and Enterprise community.”The post E4 Computer Engineering’s Showcases New Petascale OCP Platform appeared first on insideHPC.

"Would you like to help manage and develop a state-of-the-art High Performance Compute (HPC) facility to enable cutting-edge biomedical research? This is an exciting opportunity to gain skills and experience as part of a friendly team supporting research staff and students at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology (KIR). The KIR is a world-class research centre located in new premises next to the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford."The post Job of the Week: HPC System Administrator at University of Oxford appeared first on insideHPC.

Today IBM announced it has created the world’s smallest magnet using a single atom – and stored one bit of data on it. Currently, hard disk drives use about 100,000 atoms to store a single bit. The ability to read and write one bit on one atom creates new possibilities for developing significantly smaller and denser storage devices, that could someday, for example, enable storing the entire iTunes library of 35 million songs on a device the size of a credit card.The post Podcast: IBM Researchers Store Data on a Single Atom appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Atos announced record SPEC benchmark performance on its bullion x86 servers. Performed with a 16-socket configuration, this benchmark demonstrates that the high-end enterprise bullion x86 servers perform at exceptional levels and thus the most powerful in the world in terms of speed and memory.The post Atos Bullion Breaks Record for SPEC Performance appeared first on insideHPC.

"This video is from the opening session of the "Introduction to Programming Pascal (P100) with CUDA 8" workshop at CSCS in Lugano, Switzerland. The three-day course is intended to offer an introduction to Pascal computing using CUDA 8."The post Introduction to GPUs in HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

With the release of Intel Parallel Studio XE 2017, the focus is on making applications perform better on Intel architecture-based clusters. Intel MPI Library 2017, a fully integrated component of Intel Parallel Studio XE 2017, implements the high-performance MPI-3.1 specification on multiple fabrics. It enables programmers to quickly deliver the best parallel performance, even if you change or upgrade to new interconnects, without requiring changes to the software or operating environment.The post Intel MPI Library 2017 Focuses on Intel Multi-core/Many-Core Clusters appeared first on insideHPC.

Today, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Ingrasys announced a new industry standard design to accelerate Artificial Intelligence in the next generation cloud. "Powered by eight NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs in each chassis, HGX-1 features an innovative switching design based on NVIDIA NVLink interconnect technology and the PCIe standard, enabling a CPU to dynamically connect to any number of GPUs. This allows cloud service providers that standardize on the HGX-1 infrastructure to offer customers a range of CPU and GPU machine instance configurations."The post Nvidia Brings AI to the Cloud with the HGX-1 Hyperscale GPU Accelerator appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS) Consortium announced that Intel Corporation has joined their membership-based foundation. "As a consortium member, Intel plans to improve integration between iRODS, the free open source software for data virtualization, data discovery, workflow automation, and secure collaboration, and Lustre, an open source parallel distributed file system used for computing on large-scale high performance computing clusters. Membership in the consortium is a first step in offering an integrated tiered solution to Lustre end-users that allows them to easily move data sets from HPC systems into less costly long-term storage systems, where the data can be managed, shared and kept secure using iRODS."The post Intel Joins iRODS Consortium to Better Integrate Lustre appeared first on insideHPC.

"GPUs potentially offer exceptionally high memory bandwidth and performance for a wide range of applications. The challenge in utilizing such accelerators has been the difficulty in programming them. Enter GPU Hackathons; Our mentors come from national laboratories, universities and vendors, and besides having extensive experience in programming GPUs, many of them develop the GPU-capable compilers and help define standards such as OpenACC and OpenMP."The post How GPU Hackathons Bring HPC to More Users appeared first on insideHPC.

Weather and climate simulation services could soon be run in Europe rather than the UK as it was announced that the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is proposing to move its supercomputing capabilities to a new data centre located in Italy.The post Will ECMWF Move Supercomputing to Italy? appeared first on insideHPC.

"Do you need to compress your software development cycles for services deployed at scale and accelerate your data-driven insights? Are you delivering solutions that automate decision making & model complexity using analytics and machine learning on Spark? Find out how a pre-integrated analytics platform that’s tuned for memory-intensive workloads and powered by the industry leading interconnect will empower your data science and software development teams to deliver amazing results for your business. Learn how Cray’s supercomputing approach in an enterprise package can help you excel at scale."The post Compressing Software Development Cycles with Supercomputer-based Spark appeared first on insideHPC.

Registration is now open for the 32nd ISC High Performance conference. Attendees can save over 45 percent off the onsite registration fee by registering between now and May 10 for the full conference pass. "The organizers advise attendees and exhibitors to plan their travel and housing as early as possible. A lot of travel happens in Europe in June and it is best to reserve your accommodation now."The post Plan Your Travel and Stay For ISC 2017 appeared first on insideHPC.

Registration is now open for ISC 2017 with discounted Early Bird rates. As the largest high performance computing forum in Europe, ISC 2017 takes place June 18-22 in Frankfurt, Germany. "First held in 1986, ISC High Performance is the world’s oldest and Europe’s most important conference and networking event for the HPC community. It offers a strong five-day technical program focusing on HPC technological development and its application in scientific fields, as well as its adoption in commercial environments."The post Registration Opens for ISC 2017 in Frankfurt appeared first on insideHPC.

Researchers at SDSC have developed a new seismic software package with Intel Corporation that has enabled the fastest seismic simulation to-date. SDSC’s ground-breaking performance of 10.4 Petaflops on earthquake simulations used 612,000 Intel Xeon Phi processor cores of the new Cori Phase II supercomputer at NERSC.The post SDSC Seismic Simulation Software Exceeds 10 Petaflops on Cori Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

“Developing a supercomputer that is many times faster than any of those currently available is clearly a challenging process and involves leveraging Fujitsu’s top hardware and software talent, as well as the help of partner companies such as ARM,” said Naoki Shinjo, SVP, Head of Next Generation Technical Computing Unit, Fujitsu.The post Fujitsu & Linaro Collaborate to Accelerate HPC on ARM appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced an agreement to acquire Nimble Storage, the California-based provider of predictive all-flash and hybrid-flash storage solutions. HPE will pay $12.50 per share in cash, representing a net cash purchase price at closing of $1.0 billion. In addition to the purchase price, HPE will assume or pay out Nimble’s unvested equity awards, with a value of approximately $200 million at closing. "Nimble Storage’s portfolio complements and strengthens our current 3PAR products in the high-growth flash storage market and will help us deliver on our vision of making Hybrid IT simple for our customers,” said Meg Whitman, President and CEO, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “And, this acquisition is exactly aligned with the strategy and capital allocation approach we’ve laid out. We remain focused on high-growth and higher-margin segments of the market.”The post HPE to Acquire Nimble Storage appeared first on insideHPC.

The use of simulation software for validation and testing is a well established process for many engineering companies – but advances in software, combined with increased pressure from competition and regulatory requirements, are driving simulation earlier into the design and concept stages of new product development. "If you can test lots of scenarios virtually, then you know that you have accounted for any possibility of it failing."The post Optimizing Vehicle Design with Simulation appeared first on insideHPC.

SCinet at SC17 has issued its Call for Applications for the Women in IT Networking (WINS) program. The WINS program is currently seeking qualified women U.S. candidates in their early to mid-career to join the SCinet volunteer workforce for SC17. Selected candidates will receive full travel support and mentoring by well-known engineering experts in the research […]The post Call for Applications: Women in IT Networking at SC17 (WINS) appeared first on insideHPC.

"IBM has invested over decades to growing the field of quantum computing and we are committed to expanding access to quantum systems and their powerful capabilities for the science and business communities," said Arvind Krishna, senior vice president of Hybrid Cloud and director for IBM Research. "Following Watson and blockchain, we believe that quantum computing will provide the next powerful set of services delivered via the IBM Cloud platform, and promises to be the next major technology that has the potential to drive a new era of innovation across industries."The post IBM to Build Commercially Available Quantum Computing Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Bright Computing announced that the Fox Chase Cancer Center is using Bright Cluster Manager for its new high-performance computing cluster. The 30-node cluster supports bioinformatics initiatives for Fox Chase's world class cancer research programs.The post Fox Chase Cancer Center Adopts Bright Cluster Manager appeared first on insideHPC.

“Electricity transformed industries: agriculture, transportation, communication, manufacturing. I think we are now in that phase where AI technology has advanced to the point where we see a clear path for it to transform multiple industries.” Specifically, Ng sees AI being particularly influential in entertainment, retail, and logistics.The post Andrew Ng on why Artificial Intelligence is the New Electricity appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Fujitsu announced that it has received RIKEN's order for the "Deep learning system," one of the largest supercomputers in Japan specializing in AI research. "NVIDIA DGX-1, the world’s first all-in-one AI supercomputer, is designed to meet the enormous computational needs of AI researchers," said Jim McHugh, VP & GM at Nvidia. "Powered by 24 DGX-1s, the RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project’s system will be the most powerful DGX-1 customer installation in the world. Its breakthrough performance will dramatically speed up deep learning research in Japan, and become a platform for solving complex problems in healthcare, manufacturing and public safety."The post Nvidia to Power Fujitsu’s New Deep Learning System at RIKEN appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Dr. Marcelo Ponce from SciNet presents: Scientific Visualization with Python. "SciNet is Canada’s largest supercomputer centre, providing Canadian researchers with computational resources and expertise necessary to perform their research on scales not previously possible in Canada. We help power work from the biomedical sciences and aerospace engineering to astrophysics and climate science."The post Video: Scientific Visualization with Python appeared first on insideHPC.

This year, the OpenMP Architecture Review Board is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the first OpenMP API specification with a pair of events: OpenMPCon and the International Conference on OpenMP (IWOMP). Both events will take place the week of September 18 at Stony Brook University in New York. "Developers attending this year’s OpenMPCon and IWOMP conferences will have the added bonus of joining us to celebrate the vital contribution OpenMP has made by enabling high-performance computing over the past two decades and will also help us to shape OpenMP’s next twenty years.” said Michael Klemm, OpenMP CEO."The post Call for Submissions: OpenMPCon & IWOMP at Stony Brook University in New York appeared first on insideHPC.

"This talk will describe Monotasks, a new architecture for the core of Spark that makes performance easier to reason about. In Spark today, pervasive parallelism and pipelining make it difficult to answer even simple performance questions like “what is the bottleneck for this workload?” As a result, it’s difficult for developers to know what to optimize, and it’s even more difficult for users to understand what hardware to use and what configuration parameters to set to get the best performance."The post Re-Architecting Spark For Performance Understandability appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Tokyo-based Startup XTREME DESIGN announced it has raised $700K of funding in its pre-series A round. Launched in early 2015, the Startup's XTREME DNA software automates the process of configuring, deploying, and monitoring virtual supercomputers on public clouds.The post XTREME DESIGN Startup Raises $700K in Funding for HPC Cloud Enablement appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the PEARC17 conference extended their Technical Paper Submission Deadline to March 13, 2017. Formerly known as the XSEDE Conference, PEARC17 will take place July 9-13 in New Orleans. "PEARC17 is open to professionals and students in advanced research computing. The PEARC17 Call for Participation contains details about each of the four technical tracks of papers. The technical track paper submissions may be full papers (strongly preferred) or extended abstracts."The post PEARC17 Extends Technical Paper Submission Deadline to March 13 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today PASC17 announced that Horst Simon will present a public lecture entitled “Supercomputers and Superintelligence” at the conference. PASC17 takes place June 26-28 in Lugano Switzerland. "In recent years the idea of emerging superintelligence has been discussed widely by popular media, and many experts voiced grave warnings about its possible consequences. This talk will use an analysis of progress in supercomputer performance to examine the gap between current technology and reaching the capabilities of the human brain. In spite of good progress in high performance computing and techniques such as machine learning, this gap is still very large. The presentation will then explore two related topics through a discussion of recent examples: what can we learn from the brain and apply to HPC, e.g., through recent efforts in neuromorphic computing? And how much progress have we made in modeling brain function? The talk will be concluded with a perspective on the true dangers of superintelligence, and on our ability to ever build self-aware or sentient computers."The post Horst Simon to Present “Supercomputers and Superintelligence” at PASC17 in Lugano appeared first on insideHPC.

The European PRACE initiative is now accepting nominations for the PRACE Ada Lovelace Award for HPC. "PRACE is happy to receive your nomination for the Award. The winner of the Award will be invited to participate in the concluding Panel Session at PRACEdays17, and will receive a cash prize of € 1 000 as well as a certificate and an engraved crystal trophy."The post Nominations Open for PRACE Ada Lovelace Award for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the 2017 HPC Advisory Council Stanford Conference, Yifan Zhang from Stanford presents: Using HPC in a Cohort Study of the Health Effects of Handgun Ownership in California. Researchers hope the study will identify characteristics of individuals at highest risk of experiencing firearm-related mortality.The post Using HPC in a Cohort Study of the Health Effects of Handgun Ownership in California appeared first on insideHPC.

The Exascale Computing Project (ECP) has selected its fifth Co-Design Center to focus on Graph Analytics — combinatorial (graph) kernels that play a crucial enabling role in many data analytic computing application areas as well as several ECP applications. Initially, the work will be a partnership among PNNL, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and Purdue University.The post Exascale Computing Project Selects Co-Design Center for Graph Analytics appeared first on insideHPC.

Today ISC 2017 announced that the conference Industrial Day on June 20 will feature a keynote by Dr. Alfred Geiger of T-Systems. With a day-long program, Industrial Day will address challenges in the industrial manufacturing, transport, and logistics sectors.The post Dr. Alfred Geiger to Keynote Industrial Day at ISC 2017 appeared first on insideHPC.

"The Amazon Web Services High Performance Computing (HPC) team is looking for Software Development Engineers (SDEs) to help drive the development of new features, functionality, and capabilities for AWS Batch. AWS Batch is developed by a newly formed team building a core set of offerings that allow our customers to plan, schedule, and execute batch computing workloads across the full range of AWS compute services and capabilities."The post Job of the Week: HPC Software Development Engineer at AWS appeared first on insideHPC.

In this slidecast, Jem Davies (VP Engineering and ARM Fellow) gives a brief introduction to Machine Learning and explains how it is used in devices such as smartphones, autos, and drones. "I do think that machine learning altogether is probably going to be one of the biggest shifts in computing that we'll see in quite a few years. I'm reluctant to put a number on it like -- the biggest thing in 25 years or whatever," said Jem Davies in a recent investor call. "But this is going to be big. It is going to affect all of us. It affects quite a lot of ARM, in fact."The post Slidecast: ARM Steps Up to Machine Learning appeared first on insideHPC.

SC17 has issues its Call for Technical Papers. The event takes place Nov 12-17 in Denver. "The Technical Papers Program at SC is the leading venue for presenting the highest-quality original research, from the foundations of HPC to its emerging frontiers. The Conference Committee solicits submissions of excellent scientific merit that introduce new ideas to the field and stimulate future trends on topics such as applications, systems, parallel algorithms, data analytics and performance modeling. SC also welcomes submissions that make significant contributions to the “state-of-the-practice” by providing compelling insights on best practices for provisioning, using and enhancing high-performance computing systems, services, and facilities."The post Call for Technical Papers: SC17 in Denver appeared first on insideHPC.

"In the past, developers would get best results if a loop was unrolled, that is, duplicating the body as many times as needed to that the operations could be operated on using full vectors. The number of iterations would reflect the hardware that the code was targeted towards. Since the application may have to run on different hardware in the future, results for todays generation of hardware may be compromised in the future. In fact, it is better to let modern compilers to the unrolling."The post Let The Compiler Do Its Thing appeared first on insideHPC.

Each summer the Ohio Supercomputer Center offers summer programs for high school students and middle school girls interested in experiencing the dynamic fields of high performance computing and networking. Applications for Summer 2017 are due April 7.The post Apply Now: OSC Summer Institute Programs Introduce Young Women to Exciting STEM Careers appeared first on insideHPC.

Intel-owned Movidius has introduced a fascinating new device called the Fathom Neural Compute Stick, a modular deep learning accelerator in the form of a standard USB stick. "The Fathom Neural Compute Stick is the first of its kind: A powerful, yet surprisingly efficient Deep Learning processor embedded into a standard USB stick. The Fathom Neural Compute Stick acts as a discrete neural compute accelerator, allowing devices with a USB port run neural networks at high speed, while sipping under a single Watt of power."The post Fathom Neural Compute Stick Enables Mobile Devices to React Cognitively appeared first on insideHPC.

"Our new SuperBlade optimizes not just TCO, but initial acquisition cost with industry-leading server density and maximum performance per watt, per square foot and per dollar,” said Charles Liang, President and CEO of Supermicro. “Our 8U SuperBlade is also the first and only blade system that supports up to 205W Xeon CPUs, NVMe drives and 100G EDR IB or Omni-Path switches ensuring that this architecture is optimized for today and future proofed for the next generation of technology advancements, including next generation Intel Skylake processors.”The post Supermicro Rolls Out New SuperBlade with EDR InfiniBand and OmniPath appeared first on insideHPC.

"As the cloud market has matured, we have begun to see the introduction of HPC cloud providers and even the large public cloud providers such as Microsoft are introducing genuine HPC technology to the cloud. This change opens up the possibility for new users that wish to either augment their current computing capabilities or take the initial plunge and try HPC technology without investing huge sums of money on an internal HPC infrastructure."The post The Long Rise of HPC in the Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

Nikolay Malitsky from Brookhaven National Laboratory presented this talk at the Spark Summit East conference. "This talk will present a MPI-based extension of the Spark platform developed in the context of light source facilities. The background and rationale of this extension are described in the paper “Bringing the HPC reconstruction algorithms to Big Data platforms.” which highlighted a gap between two modern driving forces of the scientific discovery process: HPC and Big Data technologies. As a result, it proposed to extend the Spark platform with inter-worker communication for supporting scientific-oriented parallel applications."The post Bringing HPC Algorithms to Big Data Platforms appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) published the session abstracts for its 13th Annual OFA Workshop. Sponsored by Intel, the workshop takes place March 27-31 in Austin, Texas. "The workshop will include more than 50 sessions covering a variety of critical networking topics delivered by industry experts from around the world. Additionally, the OFA has announced that Al Geist of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) will deliver a workshop keynote address on the impact of the Exascale Computing Project. The workshop program is designed to educate attendees and encourage lively exchanges among OFA members, developers, and users who share a vested interest in high performance networks."The post OFA Workshop Posts Session Abstracts for Austin Meeting in March appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from KAUST, Professor Thomas Sterling, Professor of Intelligent Systems Engineering at Indiana University, shares his thoughts on new approaches to energy efficient supercomputing. "Our technical strategy focuses on the research and development of advanced technologies for extreme-scale computing and future exascale systems, including the following key elements: Execution Models; Runtime Systems; Graph Processing; Programming Interfaces; Compilers, Libraries, and Languages; Systems Architecture (Architecture, Power/Energy, Fault Tolerance, Networking), and Extreme Scale Applications and Visualization."The post Interview: Dr. Thomas Sterling on New Approaches to Efficient Supercomputing appeared first on insideHPC.

The Second Workshop On Performance and Scalability of Storage Systems (WOPSSS) has issued its Call for Papers. The one-day workshop will be held jointly with ISC 2017 in Frankfurt, Germany. "The Workshop On Performance and Scalability of Storage Systems aims to present state-of-the-art research, innovative ideas, and experience that focus on the design and implementation of HPC storage systems in both academic and industrial worlds, with a special interest on their performance analysis. The arrival of new storage technologies and scales unseen in previous practice lead to significant loss of performance predictability. This will leave storage system designers, application developers and the storage community at large in the difficult situation of not being able to precisely detect bottlenecks, evaluate the room for improvement, or estimate the matching of applications with a given storage architecture."The post Call for Papers: Workshop On Performance and Scalability of Storage Systems (WOPSSS) appeared first on insideHPC.

"The I/O intensive nature of the Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) including virtual Firewall, virtual Evolved Packet Core (vEPC), virtual Session Border Controller (vSBC), Anti-DDoS and Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) applications have posed significant challenges to build cost-effective NFV Infrastructures that meet packet rate, latency, jitter and security requirements. Leveraging its wealth of experience in building high-performance server/storage I/O components and switching systems for High Performance Computing, Hyperscale data centers, and telecommunications operators, Mellanox has the industry’s broadest range of intelligent Ethernet NIC and switch solutions; spanning interface speeds from 10, 25, 40, 50 to 100Gb/s."The post Mellanox ConnectX-5 Sets DPDK Performance Record with 100Gb/s Ethernet appeared first on insideHPC.

SC17 is still more than eight months away, but the conference has already outsold SC16 in terms of the number of exhibits spaces sold and number of exhibitors. "As HPC’s importance only continues to grow, the most important HPC decision makers from both research and industry from all corners of the world recognize that attending SC is essential to their success,” said Bronis R. de Supinski, SC17 Exhibits Chair from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “We also spend considerable time and resources on adding new components to the exhibition that enhance both the attendee and the exhibitor experience.”The post Exhibit Sales are Booming for SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this AI Podcast, Kris Hammond from Narrative Science explains that while it’s easy to think of AI as cold, unbiased, and objective, it is also very good at repeating our own bias against us. "I am not saying that we should give ourselves over to algorithmic decision-making. We should always remember that just as the machine is free of the cognitive biases that often defeat us, we have information about the world that the machine does not. My argument is that, with intelligent systems, we now have the opportunity to be genuinely smarter."The post Podcast: How Humans Bias AI appeared first on insideHPC.

The European PRACE initiative has published a Best Practices Guide for GPU Computing. "This Best Practice Guide describes GPUs: it includes information on how to get started with programming GPUs, which cannot be used in isolation but as “accelerators” in conjunction with CPUs, and how to get good performance. Focus is given to NVIDIA GPUs, which are most widespread today."The post PRACE Publishes Best Practices for GPU Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the PASC17 Conference announced Professor Katrin Amunts plenary presentation will be entitled, “Towards the Decoding of the Human Brain.” Regarded as one of the world’s foremost neuroscientists in the field of brain mapping, Dr. Amunts is director of the Cécile and Oskar Vogt Institute of Brain Research at the University of Düsseldorf, and director of the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine at Forschungszentrum Jülich.The post Katrin Amunts to Present on Decoding the Human Brain at PASC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

“To achieve good scalability performance on the HPC scientific applications typically involves good understanding of the workload though performing profile analysis, and comparing behaviors of using different hardware which pinpoint bottlenecks in different areas of the HPC cluster. In this session, a selection of HPC applications will be shown to demonstrate various methods of profiling and analysis to determine the bottleneck, and the effectiveness of the tuning to improve on the application performance from tests conducted at the HPC Advisory Council High Performance Center.”The post Application Profiling at the HPCAC High Performance Center appeared first on insideHPC.