High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

Today Mellanox announced that SysEleven in Germany used the company's 25/50/100GbE Open Ethernet solutions to build a new SSD-based, fully-automated cloud datacenter. "We chose the Mellanox suite of products because it allows us to fully automate our state-of-the-art Cloud data center,” said Harald Wagener, CTO, SysEleven. “Mellanox solutions are highly scalable and cost effective, allowing us to leverage the Company’s best-in-class Ethernet technology that features the industry’s best bandwidth with the flexibility of the OpenStack open architecture.”The post Mellanox Ethernet Solutions Power Germany’s Most Advanced Cloud Datacenter appeared first on insideHPC.

The Department of Energy has funded $3.8 million fro 13 new industry projects as part of its HPC4Mfg program. "We're excited about this second round of projects because companies are bringing forward challenges that we can help address, which result in advancing innovation in U.S. manufacturing and increasing our economic competitiveness," said LLNL mathematician Peg Folta, the director of the HPC4Mfg Program.The post DOE Funds 13 HPC4Mfg Clean Energy Projects appeared first on insideHPC.

Indiana University plans to unveil three new HPC resources at a launch event on Sept 1: Jetstream, Big Red II+, and Diet. "With these new systems, IU continues to provide our researchers the leading-edge computational tools needed for the scale of today’s research problems," said Brad Wheeler, IU vice president for IT and CIO. "Each of these systems is quite distinct in its purpose to meet the needs of our researchers and students."The post Indiana University to Launch Three New HPC Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

Thomas Schulthess presented this talk at the MVAPICH User Group. "Implementation of exascale computing will be different in that application performance is supposed to play a central role in determining the system performance, rather than just considering floating point performance of the high-performance Linpack benchmark. This immediately raises the question as to what the yardstick will be, by which we measure progress towards exascale computing. I will discuss what type of performance improvements will be needed to reach kilometer-scale global climate and weather simulations. This challenge will probably require more than exascale performance."The post Exascale Computing – What are the Goals and the Baseline? appeared first on insideHPC.

Seven women who work in IT departments at research institutions around the country have been selected to help build and operate the high performance SCinet conference network at SC16. The announcement came from the Women in IT Networking at SC program, also known as WINS.The post WINS Program Selects Seven Women to Help Build SCinet at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

We'd like to invite our readers to participate in our new HPC Customer Experience Survey. It's an effort to better understand our readers and what is really happening out there in the world of High Performance Computing. "This survey should take less than 10 minutes to complete. All information you provide will be treated as private and kept confidential."The post Requesting Your Input on the HPC Customer Experience Survey appeared first on insideHPC.

Today SGI announced a significant investment in extreme scale software research at the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC), a top European center. The investment highlights the commitment of SGI to the European software research community. These resources, including SGI application software and supercomputing hardware expertise, will assist scientists as they explore issues related to climate change, weather forecasting, and environmental research among many other topics.The post SGI Opens European Research Centre at ICHEC in Ireland appeared first on insideHPC.

"Galaxies are complex—many physical processes operate simultaneously, and over a huge range of scales in space and time. As a result, accurately modeling the formation and evolution of galaxies over the lifetime of the universe presents tremendous technical challenges. In this talk I will describe some of the important unanswered questions regarding galaxy formation, discuss in general terms how we simulate the formation of galaxies on a computer, and present simulations (and accompanying published results) that the Enzo collaboration has recently done on the Blue Waters supercomputer. In particular, I will focus on the transition from metal-free to metal-enriched star formation in the universe, as well as the luminosity function of the earliest generations of galaxies and how we might observe it with the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope."The post Simulating the Earliest Generations of Galaxies with Enzo and Blue Waters appeared first on insideHPC.

Karl Schulz from Intel presented this talk at the 4th Annual MVAPICH User Group meeting. "Today, many supercomputing sites spend considerable effort aggregating a large suite of open-source projects on top of their chosen base Linux distribution in order to provide a capable HPC environment for their users. This presentation will introduce a new, open-source HPC community (OpenHPC) that is focused on providing HPC-centric package builds for a variety of common building-blocks in an effort to minimize duplication, implement integration testing to gain validation confidence, incorporate ongoing novel R&D efforts, and provide a platform to share configuration recipes from a variety of sites."The post OpenHPC – Community Building Blocks for HPC Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

Coming in the second half of 2016: The HPE Apollo 6500 System provides the tools and the confidence to deliver high performance computing (HPC) innovation. The system consists of three key elements: The HPE ProLiant XL270 Gen9 Server tray, the HPE Apollo 6500 Chassis, and the HPE Apollo 6000 Power Shelf. Although final configurations and performance are not yet available, the system appears capable of delivering over 40 teraflop/s double precision, and significantly more in single or half precision modes.The post HPE Solutions for Deep Learning appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at why it’s so difficult for new processor architectures to gain traction in HPC and the datacenter. Plus, we introduce a new regular feature for our show: The Catch of the Week.The post Radio Free HPC Looks at Alternative Processors for High Performance Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, students describe their learning experience at the 2016 PRACE Summer of HPC program in Barcelona. "The PRACE Summer of HPC is a PRACE outreach and training program that offers summer placements at top HPC centers across Europe to late-stage undergraduates and early-stage postgraduate students. Up to twenty top applicants from across Europe will be selected to participate. Participants spend two months working on projects related to PRACE technical or industrial work and produce a report and a visualization or video of their results."The post Students Learn Supercomputing at the Summer of HPC in Barcelona appeared first on insideHPC.

SC16 has extended the application deadline for its Impact Showcase, a forum designed to show attendees why HPC Matters in the real world. Submissions are now due Sept. 15.The post There’s Still Time to Show Why HPC Matters in the SC16 Impact Showcase appeared first on insideHPC.

Over at the SC16 Blog, JP Vetters writes that planning for the SCinet high-bandwidth conference network is a multiyear process. "The success of any large conference depends on the, often unseen, hard work of many. During the last quarter century, the SCinet team has strived to perfect its routine so that conference-goers can experience a smoothly run Show."The post SCinet Preps World’s Fastest Network Infrastructure at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

George Slota presented this talk at the Blue Waters Symposium. "In recent years, many graph processing frameworks have been introduced with the goal to simplify analysis of real-world graphs on commodity hardware. However, these popular frameworks lack scalability to modern massive-scale datasets. This work introduces a methodology for graph processing on distributed HPC systems that is simple to implement, generalizable to broad classes of graph algorithms, and scales to systems with hundreds of thousands of cores and graphs of billions of vertices and trillions of edges."The post Extreme-scale Graph Analysis on Blue Waters appeared first on insideHPC.

"The Simons Foundation is beginning a new computational science organization called the Flatiron Institute. Flatiron will seek to explore challenging science problems in astrophysics, biology and chemistry. Computational science techniques involve processing and simulation activities and large-scale data analysis. This position is intended to help manage and fully exploit the data and storage resources at Flatiron to further the scientific mission."The post Job of the Week: Data Operations Specialist at the Simons Foundation appeared first on insideHPC.

"This talk will discuss various system performance issues, and the methodologies, tools, and processes used to solve them. The focus is on single systems (any operating system), including single cloud instances, and quickly locating performance issues or exonerating the system. Many methodologies will be discussed, along with recommendations for their implementation, which may be as documented checklists of tools, or custom dashboards of supporting metrics. In general, you will learn to think differently about your systems, and how to ask better questions."The post Video: System Methodology—Holistic Performance Analysis on Modern Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

Today ACM announced the recipients of the 2016 ACM/IEEE George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowships. The fellowship honors exceptional PhD students throughout the world whose research focus is on high performance computing applications, networking, storage or large-scale data analytics using the most powerful computers that are currently available.The post ACM Announces George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowships appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the 4th Annual MVAPICH User Group, DK Panda from Ohio State University presents: Overview of the MVAPICH Project and Future Roadmap. "This talk will provide an overview of the MVAPICH project (past, present and future). Future roadmap and features for upcoming releases of the MVAPICH2 software family (including MVAPICH2-X, MVAPICH2-GDR, MVAPICH2-Virt, MVAPICH2-EA and MVAPICH2-MIC) will be presented. Current status and future plans for OSU INAM, OEMT and OMB will also be presented."The post Overview of the MVAPICH Project and Future Roadmap appeared first on insideHPC.

IDC has announced the featured speakers for the next international HPC User Forum. The event will take place Sept. 22 in Beijing, China.The post Speakers Announced for HPC User Forum in Beijing appeared first on insideHPC.

Researchers from the RAND Corporation and LLNL have joined forces to combine HPC with innovative public policy analysis to improve planning for particularly complex issues such as water resource management. By using supercomputer simulations, the participants were able to customize and speed up the analysis guiding the deliberations of decision makers. “In the latest workshop we performed and evaluated about 60,000 simulations over lunch. What would have taken about 14 days of continuous computations in 2012 was completed in 45 mins — about 500 times faster,” said Ed Balkovich, senior information scientist at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization.The post Report: Using HPC for Public Policy Analysis & Water Resource Management appeared first on insideHPC.

This week at the Hot Chips conference, Phytium Technology from China unveiled a 64-core CPU and a related prototype computer server. "Phytium says the new CPU chip, with 64-bit arithmetic compatible with ARMv8 instructions, is able to perform 512 GFLOPS at base frequency of 2.0 GHz and on 100 watts of power dissipation."The post Phytium from China Unveils 64-core ARM HPC Processor appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Nor-Tech announced the imminent rollout of clusters integrated with the Intel HPC Orchestrator. HPC Orchestrator is a licensed, value-add version of OpenHPC that will be supported by Intel and Nor-Tech.The post Nor-Tech to Offer Clusters with Intel HPC Orchestrator appeared first on insideHPC.

"With up to 72 processing cores, the Intel Xeon Phi processor x200 can accelerate applications tremendously. Each core contains two Advanced Vector Extensions, which speeds up the floating point performance. This is important for machine learning applications which in many cases use the Fused Multiply-Add (FMA) instruction."The post Machine Learning and the Intel Xeon Phi Processor appeared first on insideHPC.

"Spack is like an app store for HPC,” says Todd Gamblin, its creator and lead developer. “It’s a bit more complicated than that, but it simplifies life for users in a similar way. Spack allows users to easily find the packages they want, it automates the installation process, and it allows contributors to easily share their own build recipes with others.” Gamblin is a computer scientist in LLNL’s Center for Applied Scientific Computing and works with the Development Environment Group at Livermore Computing.The post Spack Tool Eases Transition to Next-Gen Scientific Simulations appeared first on insideHPC.

"Clear trends in the past and current petascale systems (i.e., Jaguar and Titan) and the new generation of systems that will transition us toward exascale (i.e., Aurora and Summit) outline how concurrency and peak performance are growing dramatically, however, I/O bandwidth remains stagnant. In this talk, we explore challenges when dealing with I/O-ignorant high performance computing systems and opportunities for integrating I/O awareness in these systems."The post Video: Exploring I/O Challenges at Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.

"High performance computing continues to underwrite the progress of research using computational methods for the analysis and modeling of complex phenomena,” said Vint Cerf and John White, ACM Award Committee co-chairs, in a statement. “This year’s finalists illustrate the key role that high performance computing plays in 21st Century research. The Gordon Bell Award committee has worked diligently to select from many choices, those most deserving of recognition for this year. Like everyone else, we will be eager to learn which of the nominees takes the top prize for 2016.”The post Finalists Announced for Gordon Bell Prize in HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Mellanox announced the opening of its new APAC headquarters and solutions centre in Singapore. The Company’s new APAC headquarters will feature a technology solution centre for showcasing the latest technologies from Mellanox, in addition to an executive briefing facility. The solution centre will feature the innovative solutions enabled by latest Mellanox technologies including HPC, Cloud, Big Data, and storage.The post Mellanox Opens New Singapore Headquarters to Strengthen HPC in Asia appeared first on insideHPC.

When the history of HPC is viewed in terms of technological approaches, three epochs emerge. The most recent epoch, that of co-design systems, is new and somewhat unfamiliar to many HPC practitioners. Each epoch is defined by a fundamental shift in design, new technologies, and the economics of the day. "A network co-design model allows data algorithms to be executed more efficiently using smart interface cards and switches. As co-design approaches become more mainstream, design resources will begin to focus on specific issues and move away from optimizing general performance."The post The Evolution of HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Intel and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) have recently created two new Centers of Excellence (CoE) to help customers gain hands-on experience with High Performance Computing (HPC). This plus collaboration with customers on implementing the latest technology solutions are highlights being celebrated by the two companies on the one-year anniversary of their alliance.The post Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Intel Alliance Delivers New Centers of Excellence for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Today, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced a $110 million award to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and 18 partner institutions to continue and expand activities undertaken through the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE).The post NSF Awards $110 Million for XSEDE 2.0 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Avere Systems and Cycle Computing announced a technology integration that enables hybrid high-performance computing (HPC) in popular public cloud computing environments. By integrating the Avere vFXT Edge filer cloud bursting technology with Cycle Computing’s CycleCloud offering, users are now able to launch an Avere tiered file system on demand linked directly with the CycleCloud managed scalable compute nodes through cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.The post Avere Systems Teams with Cycle Computing for High Performance Multi-cloud Orchestration appeared first on insideHPC.

The Fujitsu Journal has posted details on a recent Hot Chips presentation by Toshio Yoshida about the instruction set architecture (ISA) of the Post-K processor. "The Post-K processor employs the ARM ISA, developed by ARM Ltd., with enhancements for supercomputer use. Meanwhile, Fujitsu has been developing the microarchitecture of the processor. In Fujitsu's presentation, we also explained that our development of mainframe processors and UNIX server SPARC processors will continue into the future. The reason that Fujitsu is able to continuously develop multiple processors is our shared microarchitecture approach to processor development."The post Fujitsu Unveils Processor Details for Post-K Computer appeared first on insideHPC.

Over at the ARM Community Blog, Nigel Stephens writes that the company has introduced scalable vector extensions (SVE) their A64 instruction set to bolster high performance computing. Fujitsu is developing a new HPC processor conforming to ARMv8-A with SVE for the Post-K computer.The post ARM Ramps up for HPC with SVE Scalable Vector Extensions appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the 2016 Blue Waters Symposium, GPU Performance Nuggets – Carl Pearson and Simon Garcia De Gonzalo from the University of Illinois present: GPU Performance Nuggets. "In this talk, we introduce a pair of Nvidia performance tools available on Blue Waters. We discuss what the GPU memory hierarchy provides for your application. We then present a case study that explores if memory hierarchy optimization can go too far."The post Tutorial: GPU Performance Nuggets appeared first on insideHPC.

Today SimScale in Germany announced a partnership with Autodesk, a leader in 3D design and fabrication software. The SimScale add-in for Autodesk Fusion 360 aims at improving the design engineering workflow between the design (CAD) and virtual testing phases (CAE). With the help of the add-in, users creating their 3D models in Autodesk Fusion 360 will be able to push their geometry directly to an existing CFD, FEA, or thermal analysis project on SimScale, where they can simulate it in the cloud.The post SimScale Integrates with Autodesk Fusion 360 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, ORNL researchers use supercomputers to simulate nanomanufacturing, the process of building microscopic devices atom by atom. Simulated here is the construction of a 250-nanometer 3-D cube by focused electron beam induced deposition.The post Video: Combining Simulation & Experiment for Nanoscale 3-D Printing appeared first on insideHPC.

For the first time, SC16 will offer childcare in the convention center to registered attendees and exhibitors. "This will provide an opportunity for the family to be together while one or both parents enjoy either parts or all of the conference. Of course, it is entirely optional, but we listened to our audience and this seemed to be a growing need. I realize this is a small step, but hopefully it is the first of many more small steps to come."The post SC16 Welcomes Families with On-Site Childcare appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the OpenPOWER Foundation announced that their inaugural OpenPOWER Summit Europe will take place Oct. 26-28 in Barcelona, Spain. Held in conjunction with OpenStack Europe, the OpenPOWER Summit Europe, the event will feature speakers and demonstrations from the OpenPOWER ecosystem, including industry leaders and academia sharing their technical solutions and state of the art advancements.The post OpenPOWER Summit Europe Comes to Barcelona Oct. 26-28 appeared first on insideHPC.

Wen-mei Hwu from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign presented this talk at the Blue Waters Symposium. "In the 21st Century, we are able to understand, design, and create what we can compute. Computational models are allowing us to see even farther, going back and forth in time, learn better, test hypothesis that cannot be verified any other way, and create safe artificial processes."The post Video: What is Driving Heterogeneity in HPC? appeared first on insideHPC.

Six application development teams from NERSC gathered at Intel in early August for a marathon “dungeon session" designed to help tweak their codes for the next-generation Intel Xeon Phi Knight’s Landing manycore architecture and NERSC’s new Cori supercomputer. “We try to prepare ahead of time to bring the types of problems that can only be solved with the experts at Intel and Cray present—deep questions about the architecture and how applications use the Xeon Phi processor. It’s all geared toward optimizing the codes to run on the new manycore architecture and on Cori.”The post NERSC Dungeon Session Speeds Code for Cori Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

Today IBM announced the opening of the first OpenPOWER Research Facility (OPRF) at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. The OPRF will help drive the country's National Knowledge Network initiative to interconnect all institutions of higher learning and research with a high-speed data communication network, facilitating knowledge sharing and collaborative research and innovation. "Open collaboration is driving the next wave of innovation across the entire system stack, allowing clients and organizations to develop customized solutions to capitalize on today's emerging workloads,' said Monica Aggarwal, Vice President, India Systems Development Lab (ISDL), IBM Systems. "The OPRF will enable Indian companies, universities and government organizations to build technologies indigenously using the high-performance POWER processor, helping to drive the national IT agenda of India," she added.The post IIT in Bombay Opens the First OpenPOWER Research Facility appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team reviews the recent 2016 Intel Developer Forum. “How will Intel return to growth in the face of a declining PC market? At IDF, they put the spotlight on IoT and Machine Learning. With new threats rising from the likes of AMD and Nvidia, will Chipzilla make the right moves? Tune in to find out.”The post Radio Free HPC Looks at IDF 2016 appeared first on insideHPC.

Over at the SC16 Blog, Elizabeth Leake writes that there will be a bit of a housing crunch in Salt Lake City this year during the world's largest supercomputing conference.The post SC16 Facing Housing Crunch in Salt Lake City appeared first on insideHPC.

This week Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang hand-delivered one of the company's new DGX-1 Machine Learning supercomputers to the OpenAI non-profit in San Francisco. “The DGX-1 is a huge advance,” OpenAI Research Scientist Ilya Sutskever said. “It will allow us to explore problems that were completely unexplored before, and it will allow us to achieve levels of performance that weren’t achievable.”The post Nvidia Donates DGX-1 Machine Learning Supercomputer to OpenAI Non-profit appeared first on insideHPC.

Norbert Eicker from the Jülich Supercomputing Centre presented this talk at the SAI Computing Conference in London. "The ultimate goal is to reduce the burden on the application developers. To this end DEEP/-ER provides a well-accustomed programming environment that saves application developers from some of the tedious and often costly code modernization work. Confining this work to code-annotation as proposed by DEEP/-ER is a major advancement."The post Taming Heterogeneity in HPC – The DEEP-ER take appeared first on insideHPC.

Altair's new Data Center GPU Management Tool is now available to Nvidia HPC Customers. With the wide adoption of Graphics Processing Units, customers are addressing vital work in fields including artificial intelligence, deep learning, self-driving cars, and virtual reality now have the ability to improve the speed and reliability of their computations through a new technology collaboration with Altair to integrate PBS Professional.The post Making Life Easier with Altair Data Center GPU Management Tool appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the 2016 Intel Developer Forum, Diane Bryant describes the company's efforts to advance Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Along the way, she offers a sneak peak at the Knights Mill processor, the next generation of Intel Xeon Phi slated for release sometime in 2017. "Now you can scale your machine learning and deep learning applications quickly – and gain insights more efficiently – with your existing hardware infrastructure. Popular open frameworks newly optimized for Intel, together with our advanced math libraries, make Intel Architecture-based platforms a smart choice for these projects."The post Video: Intel Sneak Peek at Knights Mill Processor for Machine Learning appeared first on insideHPC.

A new iBook by Dr. Stephen Perrenod looks at 72 Beautiful Galaxies. With a Foreword written by our own Rich Brueckner from insideHPC, the iPad "book" offers an interactive way to explore the universe. "In 72 Beautiful Galaxies we take you on a trip from relatively near to very far away in the universe, with images of 72 galaxies - and beyond that you will also see hundreds of galaxies as they are found in clusters."The post New iBook brings us 72 Beautiful Galaxies appeared first on insideHPC.

There is still time to register for the 2016 Hot Interconnects Conference, which takes place August 24-26 at Huawei in Santa Clara, California. The keynote speaker this year is Kiran Makhijan, Senior Research Scientist, Network Technology Labs at the Huawei America Research Center. Her talk is entitled: Cloudcasting - Perspectives on Virtual Routing for Cloud Centric Network Architectures.The post Hot Interconnects Conference Comes to Santa Clara Aug 24-26 appeared first on insideHPC.