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

"Over the past two years, InfiniCortex has clearly demonstrated that IB can perform over trans-continental distances, exploiting this technology to create a “Galaxy of Supercomputers,” a worldwide IB network spanning sites across Asia, Europe and North America. Initiated and led by A*STAR CRC in Singapore, the project hit its first major breakthrough at SC14, showcasing a first-time-ever 100G IB transcontinental connection from Singapore to the SC14 venue in New Orleans."The post InfiniCortex and the Renaissance in Polish Supercomputing appeared first on insideHPC.

The HPC Advisory Council Stanford Conference has issued its Call for Papers and Presentations. The event takes place Feb. 7-8 in Palo Alto, CA. "We invite submissions introducing a wide range of topics, levels and considerations in HPC architectures, applications and usage - from fundamentals to the latest advances and hot topic areas. Submissions can be proposed as papers or presentation only (without papers)."The post Call for Participation: HPC Advisory Council Stanford Conference in February appeared first on insideHPC.

Sven Oehme, Chief Research Strategist at IBM presented this talk at the DDN User Group. "Since 2007, DDN has sustained a highly strategic partnership with IBM to drive our mutual HPC technology vision to the next level. By leveraging a close working relationship with IBM, DDN provides the performance and capacity systems that help deliver IBM’s Spectrum Scale (formerly known as GPFS) into the most demanding environments."The post Big Lab Problems Solved with Spectrum Scale: Innovations for the Coral Program appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Mellanox announced that one of China’s leading intelligent speech and language technologies’ companies, iFLYTEK, has chosen Mellanox’s end-to-end 25G and 100G Ethernet solutions based on ConnectX adapters and Spectrum switches for their next generation machine learning center. The partnership between Mellanox and iFLYTEK will enable iFLYTEK to achieve a high speech recognition rate of 97 percent.The post Mellanox 25G/100G Ethernet Speeds Speech Recognition at iFLYTEK appeared first on insideHPC.

The International Conference on Massive Storage Systems and Technology (MSST 2017) has issued its Call for Participation. The event takes place May 15-19, 2017 in Santa Clara, California. "MSST 2017 will dedicate five days to computer-storage technology, including a day of tutorials, two days of invited papers, two days of peer-reviewed research papers, and a vendor exposition."The post Call for Participation: MSST 2017 in Santa Clara appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Bill Mannel, VP & GM, High-Performance Computing and Big Data, HPE & Dr. Eng Lim GoH, PhD, SVP & CTO of SGI join Dave Vellante & Paul Gillin at HPE Discover 2016. "The combined HPE and SGI portfolio, including a comprehensive services capability, will support private and public sector customers seeking larger high-performance computing installations, including U.S. federal agencies as well as enterprises looking to leverage high-performance computing for business insights and a competitive edge.”The post Interview: Bill Mannel and Dr. Eng Lim Goh on What’s Next for HPE & SGI appeared first on insideHPC.

Here’s a recap of SC16 announcements from Intel that are designed to provide even more powerful capabilities to address HPC challenges like energy efficiency, system complexity, and the ability for simplified workload customization. In supercomputing, one size certainly does not fit all. Intel’s new and updated technologies take a step forward in addressing these issues, allowing users to focus more on their applications for HPC, not the technology behind it.The post New Intel Technologies Highlighted in SC16 Announcements appeared first on insideHPC.

"New Radeon Instinct accelerators will offer organizations powerful GPU-based solutions for deep learning inference and training. Along with the new hardware offerings, AMD announced MIOpen, a free, open-source library for GPU accelerators intended to enable high-performance machine intelligence implementations, and new, optimized deep learning frameworks on AMD’s ROCm software to build the foundation of the next evolution of machine intelligence workloads."The post New AMD Radeon Instinct Rolls Out to Accelerate Machine Intelligence appeared first on insideHPC.

“The competition is an opportunity to showcase the world’s brightest computer science students’ expertise in a friendly, yet spirited competition,” said Martin Meuer, managing director of the ISC Group. “We are very pleased to host these 12 compelling university teams from around the world. We look forward to this very engaging competition and wish the teams good luck.”The post 12 Teams to Compete in ISC 2017 Student Cluster Competition appeared first on insideHPC.

PRACEdays17 has issued its Call for Contributions. The event takes place May 15-17 in Barcelona. "PRACE would like to receive contributions for presentations of excellent scientific merit from scientists and researchers from academia and industry. Past and present users of PRACE resources are highly encouraged to send in a contribution based on their PRACE-supported projects."The post Call for Contributions: PRACEdays17 in Barcelona appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the future of Operating Systems in the new world of computing. In a world that seems to be moving to the cloud and microservices, what will happen to the monolithic OS we have come to know and love?The post Radio Free HPC Looks at the Past and Future of the OS appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC16, Dan Dowling from Penguin Computing describes the company's momentum with Nine CTS-1 supercomputers on the TOP500. The systems were procured under NNSA’s Tri-Laboratory Commodity Technology Systems program, or CTS-1, to bolster computing for national security at Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories. The resulting deployment of these supercomputing clusters is among world’s largest Open Compute-based installations, a major validation of Penguin Computing’s leadership in Open Compute high-performance computing architecture.The post Penguin Computing Lands 9 CTS-1 Open Compute Project Supercomputers on the TOP500 appeared first on insideHPC.

When the latest version of the Graph 500 list was released Nov. 16 at the SC16 conference, there were two new entries in the top 10, both contributed by Khaled Ibrahim of Berkeley Lab’s Computational Research Division. "Ibrahim explains that such workloads, known as communication-bound applications are typically the most difficult to scale on HPC systems. But finding a way to scale up their performance can have a big payoff by reducing the computational “expense,” or amount of computing time needed to solve a problem."The post Precisely Tuned Data-Intensive Algorithms Ascend the Graph500 appeared first on insideHPC.

"The pharmaceutical industry trend toward joint ventures and collaborations has created a need for new platforms in which to work together. We'll dive into architectural decisions for building collaborative systems. Examples include how such a platform allowed Human Longevity, Inc. to accelerate software deployment to production in a fast-paced research environment, and how Celgene uses AWS for research collaboration with outside universities and foundations."The post Building a Platform for Collaborative Scientific Research on AWS appeared first on insideHPC.

The Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV) is taking part in the European PHENOMEN project, which kicked off last September. Funded through the FET-Open program, it aims to lay the foundations of a new information technology. "PHENOMEN is a ground-breaking project that will combine advances in photonics, mechanics and electronics to develop the first optically-driven phonon sources and detectors, all at the nano scale."The post European PHENOMEN Project to Develop First Optically-driven Phonon Sources and Detectors appeared first on insideHPC.

Pamela Hill from NCAR/UCAR presented this talk at the DDN User Group at SC16. "With the game-changing SFA14K, NCAR now has the storage capacity and sustained compute performance to perform sophisticated modeling while substantially reducing workflow bottlenecks. As a result, the organization will be able to quickly process mixed I/O workloads while sharing up to 40 PBs of vital research data with a growing scientific community around the world."The post NCAR’s Evolving Infrastructure for Weather and Climate Research appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the DOE Exascale Computing Project announced the following changes to their strategic plan. The ECP project now plans to deploy the first Exascale system in the U.S. in 2021, a full 1-2 years earlier than previously planned. This system will be built from a "novel architecture" that will be put out for bid in the near future. According to Argonne’s Paul Messina, Director, Exascale Computing Project, "It won't be something out there like quantum computing, but we are looking for new ideas in terms of processing and networking technologies for the machine."The post New Plan: ECP Project to Deploy First Exascale System by 2021 appeared first on insideHPC.

The Supercomputing Frontiers 2017 conference in Singapore has issued its Call for Papers. As Singapore’s annual international HPC conference, Supercomputing Frontiers provides a platform for thought leaders from both academia and industry to interact and discuss visionary ideas, important global trends and substantial innovations in supercomputing. The event takes place March 13-16, 2017.The post Call for Papers: Supercomputing Frontiers 2017 in Singapore appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC16, Abdul Hamid Al Halabi from Nvidia describes how the company is accelerating Deep Learning for Healthcare. "From Electronic Health Records (EHR) to wearables, every year the flood of heterogeneous healthcare data increases exponentially. Deep learning has the power to unlock the potential within this data.Harnessing the power of GPUs, healthcare and medical researchers are able to design and train more sophisticated neural networks—networks that can accelerate high-throughput screening for drug discovery, guide pre-operative strategies, or work in conjunction with traditional techniques and apparatus to detect invasive cancer cells in real-time during surgery."The post Nvidia Powers Deep Learning for Healthcare at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) announced that Professor Dr. Britta Nestler of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) has been awarded the prestigious Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize 2017 from Germany’s Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). The award is in recognition of Professor Nestler’s internationally acknowledged research in computer based materials sciences and her efforts in the development of new […]The post German Scientists Win Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize for 2017 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC16, Don Clegg from Supermicro describes the company's broad range of HPC solutions. “Innovation is at the core of Supermicro product development and benefits the HPC community with first-to-market integration of advanced technology such as our 1U with four and 4U with eight Pascal P100 SXM2 GPUs or 4U with ten PCI-e GPU systems, hot-swap U.2 NVMe, upcoming fabric technologies like Red Rock Canyon and PCI-E switches, as well as new architecture designs like our new high-density BigTwin system design.”The post Supermicro Showcases Versatile HPC Solutions at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this Nvidia podcast, Bryan Catanzaro from Baidu describes how machines with Deep Learning capabilities are now better at recognizing objects in images than humans. “AI gets better and better until it kind of disappears into the background,” says Catanzaro — NVIDIA’s head of applied deep learning research — in conversation with host Michael Copeland on this week’s edition of the new AI Podcast. “Once you stop noticing that it’s there because it works so well — that’s when it’s really landed.”The post Podcast: Where Deep Learning Is Going Next appeared first on insideHPC.

SGI’s Data Management Framework (DMF) software - when used within personalized medicine applications – provides a large-scale, storage virtualization and tiered data management platform specifically engineered to administer the billions of files and petabytes of structured and unstructured fixed content generated by highly scalable and extremely dynamic life sciences applications.The post The SGI Data Management Framework for Personalized Medicine appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the PASC17 Conference announced that Matthias Troyer from Microsoft Research will give this year’s public lecture on the topic “Towards Quantum High Performance Computing.” The event will take place June 26-28 in Lugano, Switzerland.The post Matthias Troyer from Microsoft to Speak on Quantum Computing at PASC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

Prof. Taisuke Boku from the University of Tsukuba & JCAHPC presented this talk at the DDN User Group at SC16. "Thanks to DDN’s IME Burst Buffer, researchers using Oakforest-PACS at the Joint Center for Advanced High Performance Computing (JCAHPC) are able to improve modeling of fundamental physical systems and advance understanding of requirements for Exascale-level systems architectures. With DDN’s advanced technology, JCAHPC has achieved effective I/O performance exceeding 1TB/s in writing tens of thousands of processes to the same file."The post Oakforest-PACS: Overview of the Fastest Supercomputer in Japan appeared first on insideHPC.

Libraries that are tuned to the underlying hardware architecture can increase performance tremendously. Higher level libraries such at the Intel Data Analytics Acceleration Library (Intel DAAL) can assist the developer with highly tuned algorithms for data analysis as well as machine learning. Intel DAAL functions can be called within other, more comprehensive frameworks that deal with the various types of data and storage, increasing the performance and lowering the development time of a wide range of applications.The post Optimizing Your Code for Big Data appeared first on insideHPC.

"Over the past 15 years, a number of factors have resulted in an increase in the frequency, intensity, and operational impact of sand and dust storms in the Middle East and surrounding areas,” said Bob Richard, vice president, ARINC Direct for Rockwell Collins. “Integrating high-resolution forecast information into our flight and international trip support services will provide safety and performance benefits for business aviation operators in the region.”The post Supercomputing Sandstorm Forecasts at BSC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC16, Bill Nitzberg provides an update on the Open Source release of PBS Professional workload management software. After that, Jeremie Bourdoncle announces the new Altair PBS Cloud. "Altair is excited to announce the upcoming availability of Altair PBS Cloud, its latest appliance solution to further cloud computing for organizations. Altair PBS Cloud is the solution to build and run high-performance computing (HPC) appliances for both public clouds, private clouds, and bare-metal infrastructure. Altair will release Altair PBS Cloud in the first quarter of 2017 following conclusion of a private preview."The post Altair Moves Forward with Open Source PBS Pro and PBS Cloud at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Cray announced the results of a deep learning collaboration with Microsoft CSCS designed to expand the horizons of running deep learning algorithms at scale using the power of Cray supercomputers. "Cray’s proficiency in performance analysis and profiling, combined with the unique architecture of the XC systems, allowed us to bring deep learning problems to our Piz Daint system and scale them in a way that nobody else has,” said Prof. Dr. Thomas C. Schulthess, director of the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS). “What is most exciting is that our researchers and scientists will now be able to use our existing Cray XC supercomputer to take on a new class of deep learning problems that were previously infeasible.”The post Cray Collaborates with Microsoft & CSCS to Scale Deep Learning appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC16, Roy Kim from Nvidia describes how the company is bringing in a new age of AI with accelerated computing for Deep Learning applications. "Deep learning is the fastest-growing field in artificial intelligence, helping computers make sense of infinite amounts of data in the form of images, sound, and text. Using multiple levels of neural networks, computers now have the capacity to see, learn, and react to complex situations as well or better than humans. This is leading to a profoundly different way of thinking about your data, your technology, and the products and services you deliver."The post GPUs & Deep Learning in the Spotlight for Nvidia at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today DDN announced that Yahoo Japan has deployed an active archive system jointly developed by DDN and IBM Japan. The new system allows Yahoo! JAPAN to cache dozens of petabytes of data from its OpenStack Swift storage solution in a Japan-based data center, and transfer data to a U.S.-based data center at an astonishing rate of 50 TB of data per day – thus enabling energy cost savings of 74 percent due to lower energy rates in the United States versus Japan, while ensuring fast data access regardless of location.The post DDN and IBM Team on 50 TB per Day, Inter-Continental Active Archive Solution appeared first on insideHPC.

The OpenFabrics Alliance Workshop 2017 has issued their Call for Sessions. The event will take place March 27-31, 2017 in Austin, Texas. "An ongoing collaboration between OpenFabrics Software (OFS) producers and users is necessary to address difficult network challenges. The 13th Annual OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) Workshop is a key industry event encouraging a dialogue that is geared toward strengthening high-performance networks end-to-end and represents a joint effort among open source networking community members."The post Call for Sessions: Open Fabrics Workshop 2017 in Austin appeared first on insideHPC.

"Individual institutions or organizations will have opportunities to deploy storage locally and can federate their local repository into the national system,” says Dr. Greg Newby, Compute Canada’s Chief Technology Officer. “This provides enhanced privacy and sharing capabilities on a robust, country-wide solution with improved data security and back-up. This is a great solution to address the data explosion we are currently experiencing in Canada and globally.”The post How Researchers Will Benefit from Canada’s National Data Cyberinfrastructure appeared first on insideHPC.

The Cobham Technical Services Opera software is helping Tokamak Energy to reduce the very high costs associated with prototyping a new fusion power plant concept," said Paul Noonan, R&D Projects Director for ST40. "After we have built our new prototype, we hope to have assembled some profoundly exciting experimental and theoretical evidence of the viability of producing fusion power from compact, high field, spherical tokamaks."The post Cobham Opera Simulation Software Moves Tokamak Closer to Fusion Energy appeared first on insideHPC.

"With up to eight high performance NVIDIA GPUs designed for maximum transfer bandwidth, the HPE Apollo 6500 is purpose-built for HPC and deep learning applications. Its high ratio of GPUs to CPUs, dense 4U form factor and efficient design enable organizations to run deep learning recommendation algorithms faster and more efficiently, significantly reducing model training time and accelerating the delivery of real-time results, all while controlling costs."The post HPE Apollo 6500 for Deep Learning appeared first on insideHPC.

Have you ever wondered why your HPC installation is not performing as you had envisioned ? You ran small simulations. You spec’d out the CPU speed, the network speed and the disk drive speed. You optimized your application and are taking advantage of new architectures. But now as you scale the installation, you realize that the storage system is not performing as expected. Why ? You bought the latest disk drives and expect even better than linear performance from the last time you purchased a storage system. Read how you can get increased efficiency of your storage system.The post Increasing the Efficiency of Storage Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

Using a unique computational approach to rapidly sample proteins in their natural state of gyrating, bobbing, and weaving, a research team from UC San Diego and Monash University in Australia has identified promising drug leads that may selectively combat heart disease, from arrhythmias to cardiac failure.The post Supercomputing Drug Discovery to Combat Heart Disease appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team reviews the results from SC16 Student Cluster Competition. "This year, the advent of clusters with the new Nvidia Tesla P100 GPUs made a huge impact, nearly tripling the Linpack record for the competition. For the first-time ever, the team that won top honors also won the award for achieving highest performance for the Linpack benchmark application. The team “SwanGeese” is from the University of Science and Technology of China. In traditional Chinese culture, the rare Swan Goose stands for teamwork, perseverance and bravery."The post Radio Free HPC Reviews the SC16 Student Cluster Competition Configurations & Results appeared first on insideHPC.

"With demand for graduates with AI skills booming, we’ve released the NVIDIA Deep Learning Teaching Kit to help educators give their students hands on experience with GPU-accelerated computing. The kit — co-developed with deep-learning pioneer Yann LeCun, and largely based on his deep learning course at New York University — was announced Monday at the NIPS machine learning conference in Barcelona. Thanks to the rapid development of NVIDIA GPUs, training deep neural networks is more efficient than ever in terms of both time and resource cost. The result is an AI boom that has given machines the ability to perceive — and understand — the world around us in ways that mimic, and even surpass, our own."The post NVIDIA Launches Deep Learning Teaching Kit for University Professors appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Mellanox announced that NIH, the U.S. National Institute of Health’s Center for Information Technology, has selected Mellanox 100G EDR InfiniBand solutions to accelerate Biowulf, the largest data center at NIH. The project is a result of a collaborative effort between Mellanox, CSRA, Inc., DDN, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. "The Biowulf cluster is NIH’s core HPC facility, with more than 55,000 cores. More than 600 users from 24 NIH institutes and centers will leverage the new supercomputer to enhance their computationally intensive research."The post NIH Powers Biowulf Cluster with Mellanox EDR 100Gb/s InfiniBand appeared first on insideHPC.

"The complexity and high costs of architecting and maintaining streaming analytics solutions often make it difficult to get new projects off the ground. That’s part of the reason Kx, a leading provider of high-volume, high-performance databases and real-time analytics solutions, is always interested in exploring how new technologies may help it push streaming analytics performance and efficiency boundaries. The Intel Xeon Phi processor is a case in point. At SC16 in Salt Lake City, Kx used a 1.2 billion record database of New York City taxi cab ride data to demonstrate what the Intel Xeon Phi processor could mean to distributed big data processing. And the potential cost/performance implications were quite promising."The post Kx Streaming Analytics Crunches 1.2 Billion NYC Taxi Data Points using Intel Xeon Phi appeared first on insideHPC.

"Phase one at CINECA, an academic consortium, was completed in May 2016 – coming in at 1.7 Petaflops, which at the time it was the largest Intel Omni-Path Fabric system in the world. Lenovo and CINECA are pleased to announce the delivery and installation of phase two, a 3,600 node Intel Xeon Phi processor which is interconnected with 100Gb Intel Omni-Path fabric – delivering 6.2 Petaflops of performance."The post Lenovo Boosts Marconi Supercomputer to 6.2 Petaflops with Intel Xeon Phi appeared first on insideHPC.

"Researchers can run one cluster for 10,000 hours or 10,000 clusters for one hour anytime, from anywhere, and both cost the same in the cloud. And with the availability of Public Data Sets in Amazon S3, petabyte scale data is instantly accessible in the cloud. Attend and learn how to build HPC clusters on the fly, leverage Amazon’s Spot market pricing to minimize the cost of HPC jobs, and scale HPC jobs on a small budget, using all the same tools you use today, and a few new ones too."The post Building HPC Clusters as Code in the (Almost) Infinite Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Fujitsu today announced the completion of the Oakforest-PACS supercomputer at the Joint Center for Advanced High Performance Computing (JCAHPC), which is jointly run by the University of Tokyo and the University of Tsukuba, and that operations have commenced today. This new supercomputer is comprised of FUJITSU Server PRIMERGY CX600 M1 x86 servers. It uses […]The post Fujitsu Starts of Operations for Japan’s Fastest Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

"Software Defined Visualization (SDVis) is an open source initiative from Intel and industry collaborators to improve the visual fidelity, performance and efficiency of prominent visualization solutions – with a particular emphasis on supporting the rapidly growing “Big Data” usage on workstations through HPC supercomputing clusters without the memory limitations and cost of GPU based solutions. Existing applications can be enhanced using the high performing parallel software rendering libraries OpenSWR, Embree, and OSPRay. At the Intel HPC Developer Conference, Amstutz provided an introduction to this initiative, its benefits, a brief descriptions of accomplishments in the past year and talk about the changes made to Intel provided libraries in the past year."The post Intel Xeon Phi with Software Defined Visualization at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

ANSYS, HLRS and Cray have pushed the boundaries of supercomputing by achieving a new supercomputing milestone by scaling ANSYS software to 172,032 cores on the Cray XC40 supercomputer, hosted at HLRS, running at 82 percent efficiency. This is nearly a 5x increase over the record set two years ago when Fluent was scaled to 36,000 cores. "This record-setting scaling of ANSYS software on the Cray XC40 supercomputer at HLRS proves that close collaborations with customers and partners can produce exceptional results for running complex simulations," said Fred Kohout, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Cray.The post Cray Sets New Supercomputing Record with HLRS and Ansys appeared first on insideHPC.

Submissions for ISC 2017 Research Paper Sessions are now being accepted through December 16, 2016. The deadline has been extended to accommodate current submissions from engineers and scientists in academia, industry and government. "The ISC research paper sessions provide first-class open forums for engineers and scientists in academia, industry and government to present and discuss issues, trends and results that will shape the future of high performance computing."The post Submissions for ISC 2017 Research Papers Due December 16 appeared first on insideHPC.

How is Hewlett Packard Enterprise reinventing the fundamental architecture on which all computers have been built for the past 60 years? In this video, HPC describes the evolution of The Machine research project - one of the largest and most complex research projects in the company’s history – and how HPE demonstrated the world’s first Memory-Driven Computing architecture.The post Video: Behind the Machine at HPE appeared first on insideHPC.

The Euro-Par 2017 conference has issued its Call for Papers. The conference takes place Aug. 28 – Sept. 1, 2017 in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. Euro-Par is the prime European conference covering all aspects of parallel and distributed processing, ranging from theory to practice, from small to the largest parallel and distributed systems and infrastructures, from […]The post Call for Papers: EuroPar 2017 in Santiago de Compostela appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC16, Ben Sander from AMD presents: HIP and CAFFE Porting and Profiling with AMD's ROCm. "We are excited to present ROCm, the first open-source HPC/Hyperscale-class platform for GPU computing that’s also programming-language independent. We are bringing the UNIX philosophy of choice, minimalism and modular software development to GPU computing. The new ROCm foundation lets you choose or even develop tools and a language run time for your application. ROCm is built for scale; it supports multi-GPU computing in and out of server-node communication through RDMA."The post HIP and CAFFE Porting and Profiling with AMD’s ROCm appeared first on insideHPC.