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

The Penn State Institute for CyberScience (ICS) is hosting a series of free training workshops on high-performance computing techniques. These workshops are sponsored by the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE). The first workshop will be 11 a.m. to 5 p.m on Jan.17 in 118 Wagner Building, University Park.The post Penn State Institute for CyberScience to Host HPC Workshops appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Canada Foundation for Innovation announced an award of $69,455,000 through its Major Science Initiative Fund for the Compute Canada project. This award will be used to continue the operation of the national advanced research computing platform that serves more than 10,000 researchers at universities, post-secondary institutions and research institutions across Canada.The post Compute Canada Receives Funding for National Supercomputing Platform appeared first on insideHPC.

The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is seeking a Research Scientist for High Performance Computing in our Job of the Week. "The HPC group is seeking a Scientist to actively participate in challenging software and hardware research projects that will impact future High Performance Computing systems as well as constituent technologies. In particular, the researcher will be involved in research into data analytics, large-scale computation, programming models, and introspective run-time systems. The successful researcher will join a vibrant research group whose core capabilities are in Modeling and Simulation, System Software and Applications, and Advanced Architectures."The post Job of the Week: Research Scientist for HPC at PNNL appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team shares the things we're looking forward to in 2017. "From the iPhone 8 to storage innovations and camera technologies in the fight against crime, it is looking like 2017 is going to be a great year. It will also be back to the future with the return of specialized processing devices for specific application worksloads and the continuing technology wars between processors and GPUs and Omni-Path vs InfiniBand."The post Radio Free HPC Looks Forward to New Technologies in 2017 appeared first on insideHPC.

The two methods of scaling processors are based on the method used to scale the memory architecture and are called scaling-out or scale-up. Beyond the basic processor/memory architecture, accelerators and parallel file systems are also used to provide scalable performance. "High performance scale-up designs for scaling hardware require that programs have concurrent sections that can be distributed over multiple processors. Unlike the distributed memory systems described below, there is no need to copy data from system to system because all the memory is globally usable by all processors."The post Scaling Hardware for In-Memory Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature from Scientific Computing World, Cray's Barry Bolding gives some predictions for the supercomputing industry in 2017. "2016 saw the introduction or announcement of a number of new and innovative processor technologies from leaders in the field such as Intel, Nvidia, ARM, AMD, and even from China. In 2017 we will continue to see capabilities evolve, but as the demand for performance improvements continues unabated and CMOS struggles to drive performance improvements we'll see processors becoming more and more power hungry."The post Barry Bolding from Cray Shares Four Predictions for HPC in 2017 appeared first on insideHPC.

In This Week in Machine Learning podcast, Xavier Amatriain from Quora discusses the process of engineering practical machine learning systems. Amatriainis a former machine learning researcher who went on to lead the recommender systems team at Netflix, and is now the vice president of engineering at Quora, the Q&A site. "What the heck is a multi-arm bandit and how can it help us."The post Podcast: Engineering Practical Machine Learning Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

A new study led by a research scientist at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) highlights a literally shady practice in plant science that has in some cases underestimated plants’ rate of growth and photosynthesis, among other traits. "More standardized fieldwork, in parallel with new computational tools and theoretical work, will contribute to better global plant models," Keenan said.The post Supercomputing Sheds Light on Leaf Study appeared first on insideHPC.

Dr. Maria Klawe gave this Invited Talk at SC16. "Like many other computing research areas, women and other minority groups are significantly under-represented in supercomputing. This talk discusses successful strategies for significantly increasing the number of women and students of color majoring in computer science and explores how these strategies might be applied to supercomputing."The post Video: Diversity and Inclusion in Supercomputing appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, a new NASA supercomputer simulation depicts the planet and debris disk around the nearby star Beta Pictoris reveals that the planet's motion drives spiral waves throughout the disk, a phenomenon that greatly increases collisions among the orbiting debris. Patterns in the collisions and the resulting dust appear to account for many observed features that previous research has been unable to fully explain.The post Video: How an Exoplanet Makes Waves appeared first on insideHPC.

A new site developed by Tin H compares the HPC virtualization capabilities of Docker, Singularity, Shifter, and Univa Grid Engine Container Edition. "They bring the benefits of container to the HPC world and some provide very similar features. The subtleties are in their implementation approach. MPI maybe the place with the biggest difference."The post New Site Compares Docker, Singularity, Shifter, and Univa Grid Engine Container Edition appeared first on insideHPC.

Thomas Schulthess from CSCS gave this Invited Talk at SC16. "Experience with today’s platforms show that there can be an order of magnitude difference in performance within a given class of numerical methods – depending only on choice of architecture and implementation. This bears the questions on what our baseline is, over which the performance improvements of Exascale systems will be measured. Furthermore, how close will these Exascale systems bring us to deliver on application goals, such as kilometer scale global climate simulations or high-throughput quantum simulations for materials design? We will discuss specific examples from meteorology and materials science."The post Reflecting on the Goal and Baseline for Exascale Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

In this presentation from Nvidia, top AI experts from the world's most influential companies weigh in on predicted advances for AI in 2017. “In 2017, intelligence will trump speed. Over the last several decades, nations have competed on speed, intent to build the world’s fastest supercomputer," said Ian Buck, VP of Accelerated computing at Nvidia. "In 2017, the race will shift. Nations of the world will compete on who has the smartest supercomputer, not solely the fastest.”The post Experts Weigh in on 2017 Artificial Intelligence Predictions appeared first on insideHPC.

Are you planning for ISC 2017? The deadlines for submissions are fast approaching. The conference takes place June 18 - 22, 2017 in Frankfurt, Germany. "Participation in these sessions and programs will help enrich your experience at the conference, not to mention provide exposure for your work to some of the most discerning HPC practitioners and business people in the industry. We also want to remind you that it’s the active participation of the community that helps make ISC High Performance such a worthwhile event for all involved."The post Submission Deadlines for ISC 2017 are Fast Approaching appeared first on insideHPC.

Today AMD unveiled preliminary details of its forthcoming GPU architecture, Vega. Conceived and executed over 5 years, Vega architecture enables new possibilities in PC gaming, professional design and machine intelligence that traditional GPU architectures have not been able to address effectively. "It is incredible to see GPUs being used to solve gigabyte-scale data problems in gaming to exabyte-scale data problems in machine intelligence. We designed the Vega architecture to build on this ability, with the flexibility to address the extraordinary breadth of problems GPUs will be solving not only today but also five years from now. Our high-bandwidth cache is a pivotal disruption that has the potential to impact the whole GPU market," said Raja Koduri, senior vice president and chief architect, Radeon Technologies Group, AMD.The post AMD Unveils Vega GPU Architecure with HBM Memory appeared first on insideHPC.

The University of Connecticut has partnered with Dell EMC and Intel to create a high performance computing cluster that students and faculty can use in their research. With this HPC Cluster, UConn researchers can solve problems that are computationally intensive or involve massive amounts of data in a matter of days or hours, instead of weeks. The HPC cluster operated on the Storrs campus features 6,000 CPU cores, a high-speed fabric interconnect, and a parallel file system. Since 2011, it has been used by over 500 researchers, from each of the university’s schools and colleges, for over 40 million hours of scientific computation.The post Dell EMC Powers HPC at University of Connecticut appeared first on insideHPC.

"Managing the work on each node can be referred to as Domain parallelism. During the run of the application, the work assigned to each node can be generally isolated from other nodes. The node can work on its own and needs little communication with other nodes to perform the work. The tools that are needed for this are MPI for the developer, but can take advantage of frameworks such as Hadoop and Spark (for big data analytics). Managing the work for each core or thread will need one level down of control. This type of work will typically invoke a large number of independent tasks that must then share data between the tasks."The post Programming for High Performance Processors appeared first on insideHPC.

A team of international scientists have found a way to make memory chips perform computing tasks, which is traditionally done by computer processors like those made by Intel and Qualcomm. This means data could now be processed in the same spot where it is stored, leading to much faster and thinner mobile devices and computers. This type of chip is one of the fastest memory modules that will soon be available commercially.The post New ReRAM Memory Can Process Data Where it Lives appeared first on insideHPC.

Are you shopping for Public Cloud services? A new Public Cloud Services Comparison site gives a service & feature level mapping between the 3 major public clouds: Amazon Web Service, Microsoft Azure & Google Cloud. Published by Ilyas F, a Cloud Solution Architect at Xebia Group, the Public Cloud Services Comparison is a handy reference manual to help anyone to quickly learn the alternate features & services between clouds.The post New Site Lists all Comparable Features from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

In this a16z Podcast, Murray Shanahan, Azeem Azhar, and Tom Standage discuss the past, present, and future of A.I. as well as how it fits (or doesn’t fit) with machine learning and deep learning. "Where are we now in the A.I. evolution? What players do we think will lead, if not win, the current race? And how should we think about issues such as ethics and automation of jobs without descending into obvious extremes? All this and more, including a surprise easter egg in Ex Machina shared by Shanahan, whose work influenced the movie."The post a16z Podcast Looks at Artificial Intelligence and the Space of Possible Minds appeared first on insideHPC.

"Run your Windows and Linux HPC applications using high performance A8 and A9 compute instances on Azure, and take advantage of a backend network with MPI latency under 3 microseconds and non-blocking 32 Gbps throughput. This backend network includes remote direct memory access (RDMA) technology on Windows and Linux that enables parallel applications to scale to thousands of cores. Azure provides you with high memory and HPC-class CPUs to help you get results fast. Scale up and down based upon what you need and pay only for what you use to reduce costs."The post Video: Azure High Performance Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

Tamara Kolda from Sandia gave this Invited Talk at SC16. "Scientists are drowning in data. The scientific data produced by high-fidelity simulations and high-precision experiments are far too massive to store. For instance, a modest simulation on a 3D grid with 500 grid points per dimension, tracking 100 variables for 100 time steps yields 5TB of data. Working with this massive data is unwieldy and it may not be retained for future analysis or comparison. Data compression is a necessity, but there are surprisingly few options available for scientific data."The post Parallel Multiway Methods for Compression of Massive Data and Other Applications appeared first on insideHPC.

The TOP500 list is a very good proxy for how different interconnect technologies are being adopted for the most demanding workloads, which is a useful leading indicator for enterprise adoption. The essential takeaway is that the world’s leading and most esoteric systems are currently dominated by vendor specific technologies. The Open Fabrics Alliance (OFA) will be increasingly important in the coming years as a forum to bring together the leading high performance interconnect vendors and technologies to deliver a unified, cross-platform, transport-independent software stack.The post HPC Networking Trends in the TOP500 appeared first on insideHPC.

Singapore-based publisher Asian Scientist has launched Supercomputing Asia, a new print title dedicated to tracking the latest developments in high performance computing across the region and making supercomputing accessible to the layman. "Aside from well-established supercomputing powerhouses like Japan and emerging new players like China, Asian countries like Singapore and South Korea have recognized the transformational power of supercomputers and invested accordingly. We hope that this new publication will provide a unique insight into the exciting developments in this region,” said Dr. Rebecca Tan, Managing Editor of Supercomputing Asia.The post Asia’s First Supercomputing Magazine Launches from Singapore appeared first on insideHPC.

"The release of Scyld ClusterWare 7 continues the growth of Penguin’s HPC provisioning software and enables support of large scale clusters ranging to thousands of nodes,” said Victor Gregorio, Senior Vice President of Cloud Services at Penguin Computing. “We are pleased to provide this upgraded version of Scyld ClusterWare to the community for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, CentOS 7 and Scientific Linux 7.”The post Penguin Computing Releases Scyld ClusterWare 7 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC16, Janet Morss from Dell EMC and Hugo Saleh from Intel discuss how the two companies collaborated on accelerating CryoEM. "Cryo-EM allows molecular samples to be studied in near-native states and down to nearly atomic resolutions. Studying the 3D structure of these biological specimens can lead to new insights into their functioning and interactions, especially with proteins and nucleic acids, and allows structural biologists to examine how alterations in their structures affect their functions. This information can be used in system biology research to understand the cell signaling network which is part of a complex communication system."The post Dell & Intel Collaborate on CryoEM on Intel Xeon Phi appeared first on insideHPC.

To achieve high performance, modern computer systems rely on two basic methodologies to scale resources: scale-up or scale-out. The scale-up in-memory system provides a much better total cost of ownership and can provide value in a variety of ways. "If the application program has concurrent sections then it can be executed in a "parallel" fashion. Much like using multiple bricklayers to build a brick wall. It is important to remember that the amount and efficiency of the concurrent portions of a program determine how much faster it can run on multiple processors. Not all applications are good candidates for parallel execution."The post In-Memory Computing for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

We are pleased to kick off the New Year with the announcement of our new insideHPC Jobs Board. "With listings for High Performance Computing jobs from around the world, the insideHPC Jobs Board is a great resource for employers and job seekers alike. As a special promotion, you can place Job Ads for 50 percent off during January."The post Announcing the New insideHPC Jobs Board appeared first on insideHPC.

Sadasivan Shankar gave this Invited Talk at SC16. "This talk will explore six different trends all of which are associated with some form of scaling and how they could enable an exciting world in which we co-design a platform dependent on the applications. I will make the case that this form of “personalization of computation” is achievable and is necessary for applications of today and tomorrow."The post Co-Design 3.0 – Configurable Extreme Computing, Leveraging Moore’s Law for Real Applications appeared first on insideHPC.

The 3rd annual International Workshop on High-Performance Big Data Computing (HPBDC) has issued its Call for Papers. Featuring a keynote by Prof. Satoshi Matsuoka from Tokyo Institute of Technology, the event takes place May 29, 2017 in Orlando, FL.The post Call for Papers: International Workshop on High-Performance Big Data Computing (HPBDC) appeared first on insideHPC.

Remote visualization tools allow employees to dramatically improve productivity by accessing business-critical data and programs regardless of their location. Remote visualization technologies allow users to launch software applications on the server side and display the results locally, letting them leverage the bandwidth and compute power of the cluster while circumventing the latency and security risks of downloading large amounts of data onto their local client.The post Remote Visualization Accelerating Innovation Across Multiple Industries appeared first on insideHPC.

"The AI is going to flow across the grid -- the cloud -- in the same way electricity did. So everything that we had electrified, we're now going to cognify. And I owe it to Jeff, then, that the formula for the next 10,000 start-ups is very, very simple, which is to take x and add AI. That is the formula, that's what we're going to be doing. And that is the way in which we're going to make this second Industrial Revolution. And by the way -- right now, this minute, you can log on to Google and you can purchase AI for six cents, 100 hits. That's available right now."The post Video: How AI can bring on a second Industrial Revolution appeared first on insideHPC.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory is seeking a Computational Scientist in our Job of the Week. The National Center for Computational Sciences in the Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) seeks to hire Computational Scientists. We are looking in the areas of Computational Climate Science, Computational Astrophysics, Computational Materials Science, […]The post Job of the Week: Computational Scientist at ORNL appeared first on insideHPC.

In this AI Podcast, Bob Bond from Nvidia and Mike Senese from Make magazine discuss the Do It Yourself movement for Artificial Intelligence. "Deep learning isn't just for research scientists anymore. Hobbyists can use consumer grade GPUs and open-source DNN software to tackle common household tasks from ant control to chasing away stray cats."The post Podcast: Do It Yourself Deep Learning appeared first on insideHPC.

Janice Coen from NCAR gave this Invited Talk at SC16. "The past two decades have seen the infusion of technology that has transformed the understanding, observation, and prediction of wildland fires and their behavior, as well as provided a much greater appreciation of its frequency, occurrence, and attribution in a global context. This talk will highlight current research in integrated weather – wildland fire computational modeling, fire detection and observation, and their application to understanding and prediction."The post Video: Advances and Challenges in Wildland Fire Monitoring and Prediction appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team honors the Festivus tradition of the annual Airing of Grievances. Our random gripes include: the need for a better HPC benchmark suite, the missed opportunity for ARM servers, the skittish battery in the new Macbook Pro, and a lack of an industry standards body for cloud computing.The post The Festivus Airing of Grievances from Radio Free HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

"The SAGE project, which incorporates research and innovation in hardware and enabling software, will significantly improve the performance of data I/O and enable computation and analysis to be performed more locally to data wherever it resides in the architecture, drastically minimizing data movements between compute and data storage infrastructures. With a seamless view of data throughout the platform, incorporating multiple tiers of storage from memory to disk to long-term archive, it will enable API’s and programming models to easily use such a platform to efficiently utilize the most appropriate data analytics techniques suited to the problem space."The post SAGE Project Looks to Percipient Storage for Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.

Thomas Sterling presented this Invited Talk at SC16. "Increasing sophistication of application program domains combined with expanding scale and complexity of HPC system structures is driving innovation in computing to address sources of performance degradation. 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 Presents: HPC Runtime System Software for Asynchronous Multi-Tasking appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Nor-Tech announced that it is now integrating the latest release of simulation platform Abaqus into its leading-edge HPC clusters. "We have been working with SIMULIA for many years," said Nor-Tech President and CEO David Bollig. "While this relationship has been beneficial for both companies, the real winners are our clients because they are able to fully leverage the power of our clusters with Abaqus.”The post Nor-Tech Rolls Out HPC Clusters Integrated with Abaqus 2017 appeared first on insideHPC.

Over at KAUST News, Nicholas G. Demille​ writes that the Shaheen supercomputer has completed the world's first trillion cell reservoir simulation. A Saudi Aramco research team led by fellow Ali Dogru conducted the reservoir simulation using Shaheen and the company's proprietary software TeraPOWERS. The Aramco researchers were supported by a team of specialists from the KAUST Supercomputing Core Lab, with the work rendering imagery so detailed that it changed the face of natural resource exploration.The post Shaheen Supercomputer at KAUST Completes Trillion Cell Reservoir Simulation appeared first on insideHPC.

In this Intel Chip Chat, Doug Fisher from Intel describes the company's efforts to accelerate innovation in artificial intelligence. "Fisher talks about Intel's upstream investments in academia and open source communities. He also highlights efforts including the launch of the Intel Nervana AI Academy aimed at developers, data scientists, academia, and startups that will broaden participation in AI. Additionally, Fisher reports on Intel's engagements with open source ecosystems to optimize the performance of the most-used AI frameworks on Intel architecture."The post Podcast: Intel Invests Upstream to Accelerate AI Innovation appeared first on insideHPC.

"The Materials Project is harnessing the power of supercomputing together with state-of-the-art quantum mechanical theory to compute the properties of all known inorganic materials and beyond, design novel materials and offer the data for free to the community together with online analysis and design algorithms. The current release contains data derived from quantum mechanical calculations for over 60,000 materials and millions of properties."The post Video: The Materials Project – A Google of Materials appeared first on insideHPC.

"Argonne National Labs has created a process to assist in moving large applications to a new system. Their current HPC system, Mira will give way to the next generation system, Aurora, which is part of the collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne, and Livermore (CORAL) joint procurement. Since Aurora contains technology that was not available in Mira, the challenge is to give scientists and developers access to some of the new technology, well before the new system goes online. This allows for a more productive environment once the full scale new system is up."The post Building for the Future Aurora Supercomputer at Argonne appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Pointwise announced that the latest release of their CFD mesh generation software has been extended such that its Tcl-based Glyph scripting language can be called from any scripting language including Python. This new Glyph Server feature was motivated by a user’s presentation at the Pointwise User Group Meeting 2016. "The Glyph Server idea arose after talking to the customer who presented his work on ‘A Python Binding for the Pointwise Glyph Scripting Language’ at our user group meeting,” said John Chawner, Pointwise’s president. “Not only were we able to share new code with the customer to simplify his work but the conversation made us realize how to make Glyph callable from any scripting language.”The post Pointwise Adds Script Language Support for CFD Mesh Generation appeared first on insideHPC.

IDC is out with their latest Worldwide High-Performance Technical Server QView report. The QView presents the HPC market from various perspectives, including by competitive segment, vendor, cluster versus non-cluster, geography, and operating system. It also contains detailed revenue and shipment information by HPC models. "The workgroup segment, and especially the departmental segment, substantially ramped up purchases of HPC servers in the period 2012-2015, in tune with the global economic recovery."The post IDC: Worldwide HPC Server Revenue Grows 3.9% in Third Quarter appeared first on insideHPC.

"This talk reviews the history of the changing balances between computation, memory latency, and memory bandwidth in deployed HPC systems, then discusses how the underlying technology changes led to these market shifts. Key metrics are the exponentially increasing relative performance cost of memory accesses and the massive increases in concurrency that are required to obtain increased memory throughput. New technologies (such as stacked DRAM) allow more pin bandwidth per package, but do not address the architectural issues that make high memory bandwidth expensive to support."The post Memory Bandwidth and System Balance in HPC Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

With the advent of heterogeneous computing systems that combine both main CPUs and connected processors that can ingest and process tremendous amounts of data and run complex algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are beginning to take hold in a variety of industries. Massive datasets can now be used to drive innovation in industries such as autonomous driving systems, controlling power grids and combining data to arrive at a profitable decision, for example. Read how AI can now be used in various industries using the latest hardware and software.The post Artificial Intelligence Becomes More Accessible appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Daniel Gutierrez from insideBIGDATA offers up his 2017 roundup industry predictions from Big Data thought leaders. "AI, ML, and NLP innovations have really exploded this past year but despite a lot of hype, most of the tangible applications are still based on specialized AI and not general AI. We will continue to see new use-cases of such specialized AI across verticals and key business processes. These use-cases would primarily be focused on the evolutionary process improvement side of the digital transformation."The post insideBigData Industry Predictions for 2017 appeared first on insideHPC.

"Building on HPE IDOL’s history of delivering industry-leading analytics engineered for human data, IDOL Natural Language Question Answering is the industry’s first comprehensive approach to delivering enterprise class answers,” said Sean Blanchflower, vice president of engineering, Big Data Platform, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “Designed to meet the demanding needs of data-driven enterprises, this new, language-independent capability can enhance applications with machine learning powered natural language exchanThe post HPE IDOL Machine Learning Engine Adds Natural Language Processing appeared first on insideHPC.

The High Performance Computing Saudi Arabia conference has issued its Call for Posters. The event takes place March 13-15 at KAUST University.The post Call for Posters: HPC Saudi Arabia Conference at KAUST appeared first on insideHPC.