High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

Today International Computer Concepts (ICC) announced that it has upgraded the company's ICC Vega line of high-frequency trading servers with the latest Broadwell-E microarchitecture from Intel. After extensive testing, the Vega servers featuring overclocked Intel Core i7 processors are ready to ship to customers.The post ICC Updates Overclocked Vega Financial Servers with Broadwell-E appeared first on insideHPC.

This week at the Flash Memory Summit, One Stop Systems showcased the OCP Flash Storage Array (OCP-FSA), supporting up to 500TB of Flash storage in a 2U form factor. Designed to comply with the Open Rack Standards set by the Open Compute Project, the OCP-FSA is one of the first 500TB Flash Storage Arrays in 2U rack space.The post One Stop Systems Showcases Open Compute Flash Array with 500 TB in 2U appeared first on insideHPC.

"A quantum computer cannot just be created from just trapping ions, it is necessary to move the information (the ions) between different locations in a trap, for example between calculation and storage regions. Our group has developed a method which allows the means to confidently control the motion of individual ions and shuttle an ion to any position in a ion trap microchip. By developing traps that generate complex electrical fields, it is possible to push and pull the ions by varying the strength of these fields, making it possible to manipulate single ions around corners! Right now, we are in the process of developing full scale architectures that contain all the necessary features for a full scale quantum computer."The post Video: Quantum Computing – The World’s Most Incredible Machines appeared first on insideHPC.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is leading three new centers of innovation funded through the National Science Foundation’s Industry/University Cooperative Research Centers (I/UCRC) program.The post NSF Centers for Innovation Focus on Machine Learning, Genomics and More appeared first on insideHPC.

"We have been working on developing a number of tools that enable users to quantify power and performance in both software and hardware, and then design a more efficient system. We can also utilize the tools to predict the performance of a piece of software on a system that may not be available or does not yet exist – the aim is to take the guesswork away from novel system design."The post Adept Project Explores HPC Energy Efficiency appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Seagate announced the Nytro XF1230 SATA SSD, an energy-efficient drive specifically designed to meet the performance and reliability requirements of today’s cloud data centers. "SSDs in enterprise data centers provide extremely fast data access in a small footprint, while consuming very little energy. No SSD in its class does this better than Seagate’s latest addition to the Nytro product line,” said Brett Pemble, Seagate’s general manager and vice president of SSD products. “This is a critical addition to our growing SSD portfolio and an answer to what our enterprise customers have been asking for: a highly reliable, very low-latency SATA SSD that’s also energy efficient. It also means more people get more value from more data for lower cost.”The post Seagate Rolls Out Energy-Efficient SATA SSD For Enterprise Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

Scientists at Argonne have discovered a self-healing, diamond-like material that could revolutionize the design of future automotive engines. “This is a very unique discovery, and one that was a little unexpected,” said Ali Erdemir, the Argonne Distinguished Fellow who leads the team. “We have developed many types of diamond-like carbon coatings of our own, but we’ve never found one that generates itself by breaking down the molecules of the lubricating oil and can actually regenerate the tribofilm as it is worn away.”The post Argonne Discovers Self-healing Diamond-like Carbon appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Bright Computing announced that the Electronics Research Institute (ERI) and Brightskies Technologies have chosen the full suite of Bright technology to manage its HPC, big data, and cloud infrastructure. "Using Bright Computing’s technologies, we were able to showcase how to provision a virtual HPC cluster or big data cluster over cloud as extensions to the existing cluster or on demand as per users’ requests," said Dr. Khaled Elamrawi, President of Brightskies Technologies. “This was very powerful and clearly addressed the challenges that ERI were facing.”The post Bright Computing Powers Electronics Research Institute appeared first on insideHPC.

IBM scientists have created randomly spiking neurons using phase-change materials to store and process data. This demonstration marks a significant step forward in the development of energy-efficient, ultra-dense integrated neuromorphic technologies for applications in cognitive computing.The post IBM Phase-Change Device Imitates Functionality of Neurons appeared first on insideHPC.

"At the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute we are exploring ways to provide the immediacy and flexibility of interactive computing within the batch-scheduled, tightly controlled world of traditional cluster supercomputing. As Jupyter Notebook has gained in popularity, the steps needed to use it within such an environment have proven to be a barrier to entry even as increasingly powerful Python tools have developed to take advantage of large computational resources. JupyterHub to the rescue! Except out of the box, it doesn't know anything about resource types, job submission, and so on. We developed BatchSpawner and friends as a general JupyterHub backend for batch-scheduled environments. In this talk I will walk through how we have deployed JupyterHub to provide a user-friendly gateway to interactive supercomputing."The post Video: JupyterHub as an Interactive Supercomputing Gateway appeared first on insideHPC.

The ability to develop applications independent of the hardware availability at run time is a very important concept that enables developers to take advantage of the latest and greatest processing and coprocessing power. Without having to make run time checks on hardware availability is critical to a smooth running HPC environment.The post Using Libraries in Offload Mode appeared first on insideHPC.

Thomas Lippert presented this talk at The Digital Future conference. "The Human Brain Project brings together neuroscientists, physicians, computer scientists, physicists, mathematicians and computer specialists from internationally respected scientific institutions in 23 countries. Their goal is to simulate the complete human brain within the next ten years using a supercomputer of the future. The simulation will be accurate in every detail, and will take in aspects such as genetics, the molecular level and the interaction of whole cell clusters."The post Simulation and Data Sciences in the Exascale, Neuromorphic and Quantum Computing Era appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Curtiss-Wright’s Defense Solutions division announced that it is collaborating with Dolphin Interconnect Solutions to bring Dolphin’s eXpressWare PCIe Software Suite to the embedded aerospace and defense market. Available separately or as part of Curtiss-Wright’s OpenHPEC Accelerator Suite of best-in-class software tools, this PCIe Fabric Communications suite speeds and simplifies the design of high-speed, low-latency PCIe fabric-based peer-to-peer communications in OpenVPX-based High Performance Embedded Computing (HPEC) systems for demanding Radar, SIGINT and EW applications.The post Curtiss-Wright & Dolphin Speed HPEC System Fabric appeared first on insideHPC.

Orange Silicon Valley and CocoLink Corp have built a functional prototype of what they're calling "the world's highest density Deep Learning Supercomputer in a box." Using the CoCoLink KLIMAX 210 server, they were able to load 20 overclocked GPUs in a single 4U rack unit.The post GPUs Power World’s Highest Density Deep Learning Supercomputer in a Box appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Bright Computing released Version 7.3 of Bright Cluster Manager and Bright OpenStack. With enhanced support for containers, the new release has enhanced integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), improvements to the interface with the Ceph distributed object store and file system, and a variety of other updates that make deployment and configuration easier and more intuitive.The post Bright Cluster Manager 7.3 Enhances Container Support appeared first on insideHPC.

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center and Colorado State University have launched a new website to track seasonal hurricane forecasts and the evolution of hurricane activity. The website shows the average number of hurricanes that are expected to affect the North Atlantic and those that have already occurred in the current season and the previous ones since 1966. A color code indicates the degree of activity forecast for the upcoming hurricane season.The post BSC Powers New Hurricane Threat Tracker appeared first on insideHPC.

Given the compute and data intensive nature of deep learning which has significant overlaps with the needs of the high performance computing market, theTOP500 list provides a good proxy of the current market dynamics and trends. From the central computation perspective, today’s multicore processor architectures dominate the TOP500 with 91% based on Intel processors. However, looking forwards we can expect to see further developments that may include core CPU architectures such as OpenPOWER and ARM.The post The Core Technologies for Deep Learning appeared first on insideHPC.

"Improving diversity at conferences should be high up on the agenda for everyone. It is generally accepted that diversity in the workforce is a good thing: improving the representation of women in teams improves the overall performance of the teams, seeing women in positions that were traditionally male dominated helps to overcome the negative stereotypes that women are not suited to these roles as well as providing visible role models for future generations."The post Addressing Diversity at EuroMPI appeared first on insideHPC.

Today SC16 announced that Katharine Frase has been selected as the SC16 Keynote Speaker. "We are thrilled to have such an experienced pioneer and leader address pressing issues across so many industry fronts,” says John West, SC16 General Chair from the Texas Advanced Computing Center. “Her discussion will be thought-provoking to everyone in the room – from industry veterans to those new to the field.”The post SC16 Keynote to Focus on Cognitive Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

XSEDE reports that this year's International Summer School on HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences was a rousing success. "This program is an excellent mix of high performance computing knowledge and meeting international people involved in the field. There are a lot of training programs in the USA, but very few of them combine it with interaction of international colleagues and immersion in another culture.”The post International HPC Summer School Prepares Next Generation appeared first on insideHPC.

Steve Oberlin from Nvidia presented this talk at The Digital Future conference. "Oberlin will discuss machine learning and neural networks, explore a few advanced applications based on deep learning algorithms, discuss the foundation and architecture of representative algorithms, and illustrate the pivotal role GPU acceleration is playing in this exciting and rapidly expanding field."The post Steve Oberlin Presents: Accelerating Understanding – Machine Learning & Intelligent Applications appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Penguin Computing announced that it is delivering an energy-efficient, HPC cluster to the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The new cluster, based on Penguin Computing’s Relion server family was first delivered in April 2016 and has been incrementally expanding throughout the year. The cluster was named Chinook in honor of deceased UAF employee Kevin Engle, who was known for his passion for salmon and Alaska. Engle was a research programmer and ground station manager at UAF’s Geographic Information Network of Alaska.The post Penguin Computing Powers Chinook Cluster at University of Alaska Fairbanks appeared first on insideHPC.

"We have partnered with Liqid to provide our customers with a leading option for enterprise-class flash storage. OSS is one of the only companies currently producing expansion products as dense as this FSA. By combining our PCIe expertise with Liqid's PCIe flash storage and software expertise, we have created a state-of-the-art flash array that can provide fast response time, high-availability, and high-speed data processing in data centers, cloud environments, mega websites, and high-performance applications."The post One Stop Systems Partners with Liqid on 3U Flash Storage Array appeared first on insideHPC.

The National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), Australia's high-performance supercomputer, cloud and data repository, has received a $7M boost from the Australian Government, matched by the NCI Collaborating partners. "The NCI predicts that the $14M investment will provide a 30 per cent increase in NCI’s computational capability. In addition, it will allow the NCI to continue to provide a robust service for nationally significant research data across a range of disciplines, including the earth and environmental sciences, medical research, astronomy and materials science."The post NCI in Australia Receives $14 Million Investment appeared first on insideHPC.

Cray's Steve Scott presented this talk at The Digital Future Conference. "Research and development at Cray is guided by our adaptive supercomputing vision. This vision is focused on delivering innovative, next-generation products that integrate diverse processing technologies into a unified architecture, enabling customers to surpass today’s limitations and meeting the market’s demand for realized performance."The post Cray’s Steve Scott Presents: Supercomputing Technologies and Trends: Where do we go from here? appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Panasas introduced ActiveStor 20, its latest generation hybrid scale-out NAS appliance, featuring a 65 percent increase in flash and a 25 percent increase in hard drive capacity. High-density flash drives and 10 terabyte (TB) HGST Ultrastar He10 helium-based hard drives deliver superior unstructured sequential file and mixed-workload performance with rapid access to large and small files alike. Scalabiltity increases to more than 45 petabytes (PB) in a single namespace and performance ramps up to 360 gigabytes per second (GB/s) and 2.6M IOPS.The post Panasas Rolls Out ActiveStor 20 appeared first on insideHPC.

The inaugural Misha Mahowald Prize for Neuromorphic Engineering has been awarded to the TrueNorth project, led by Dr. Dharmendra S. Modha at IBM Research. "The Misha Mahowald Prize recognizes outstanding achievement in the field of neuromorphic engineering. Neuromorphic engineering is defined as the construction of artificial computing systems which implement key computational principles found in natural nervous systems. Understanding how to build such systems may enable a new generation of intelligent devices, able to interact in real-time in uncertain real-world conditions under severe power constraints, as biological brains do."The post IBM TrueNorth Project wins Inaugural Misha Mahowald Prize appeared first on insideHPC.

Raj Hazra presented this talk at ISC 2016. "As part of the company's launch of the Intel Xeon Phi processor, Hazra describes how how cognitive computing and HPC are going to work together. "Intel will introduce and showcase a range of new technologies helping to fuel the path to deeper insight and HPC’s next frontier. Among this year’s new products is the Intel Xeon Phi processor. Intel’s first bootable host processor is specifically designed for highly parallel workloads. It is also the first to integrate both memory and fabric technologies. A bootable x86 CPU, the Intel Xeon Phi processor offers greater scalability and is capable of handling a wider variety of workloads and configurations than accelerator products."The post Raj Hazra Presents: Driving to Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.

Today NVM Express, Inc. released the results of its fifth NVM Express (NVMe) Plugfest. The event was a distinct success, with the highest attendance to date. "NVM Express is quickly being adopted as a high performance interface standard for PCIe SSDs, and compatibility among different products is essential for greater market adoption," said Frank Shu, VP of R&D, Verification Engineering & Compatibility Test at Silicon Motion Inc. "We are proud of having our products successfully pass through the NVMe Plugfest in ensuring compliance to the specification as well as interoperability with other NVMe products."The post Record Participation Sets Stage for next NVM Express Plugfest appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from PASC16, Annick V. Renevey from ETH Zurich describes her award-winning poster on peptide simulations at CSCS.The post Video: PASC16 Poster on Peptide Simulation appeared first on insideHPC.

Today, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced two major awards to establish Scientific Software Innovation Institutes (S2I2). The awards, totaling $35 million over 5 years, will support the Molecular Sciences Software Institute and the Science Gateways Community Institute, both of which will serve as long-term hubs for scientific software development, maintenance and education. "The institutes will ultimately impact thousands of researchers, making it possible to perform investigations that would otherwise be impossible, and expanding the community of scientists able to perform research on the nation's cyberinfrastructure," said Rajiv Ramnath, program director in the Division of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure at NSF."The post NSF to Invest $35 million in Scientific Software appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the University of Maryland (UMD) and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) announced a strategic partnership to provide HPC resources for use in higher education and research communities. As a result of this synergistic partnership, students, professors, engineers and researchers will have unprecedented access to technologies that enable scientific discovery and innovation.The post University of Maryland and U.S. Army Research Lab to Collaborate on HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory will add its computational know-how to the battle against cancer through several new projects recently announced at the White House Cancer Moonshot Summit. "ORNL brings to the table our world-class resources in high-performance computing, including the Titan supercomputer, as well as leading experts in the data sciences and neutron analysis, to the fight against cancer,” said ORNL’s Joe Lake, deputy for operations at the HDSI."The post ORNL Supercomputers to Boost National Cancer Moonshot appeared first on insideHPC.

Tony Hey from the Science and Technology Facilities Council presented this talk at The Digital Future conference in Berlin. "Increasingly, scientific breakthroughs will be powered by advanced computing capabilities that help researchers manipulate and explore massive datasets. The speed at which any given scientific discipline advances will depend on how well its researchers collaborate with one another, and with technologists, in areas of eScience such as databases, workflow management, visualization, and cloud computing technologies."The post Tony Hey Presents: The Fourth Paradigm – Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery appeared first on insideHPC.

This week the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released the Strategic Plan for the NSCI Initiative. "The NSCI strives to establish and support a collaborative ecosystem in strategic computing that will support scientific discovery and economic drivers for the 21st century, and that will not naturally evolve from current commercial activity,” writes Altaf Carim, William Polk, and Erin Szulman from the OSTP in a blog post.The post White House Releases Strategic Plan for NSCI Initiative appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from PASC16, Andrew Lumsdaine from Indiana University gives his perspectives on the conference. "The PASC16 Conference, co-sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), brings together research across the areas of computational science, high-performance computing, and various domain sciences."The post Video: Andrew Lumsdaine on Computing Trends at PASC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today SIGHPC announced the first-ever recipients of the ACM SIGHPC/Intel Computational and Data Science Fellowship. The fellowship is funded by Intel and was announced at the high performance computing community’s SC conference in November of last year. Established to increase the diversity of students pursuing graduate degrees in data science and computational science, the fellowship […]The post 14 Students Awarded SIGHPC/Intel Computational and Data Science Fellowships appeared first on insideHPC.

The MVAPICH User Group (MUG) meeting has issued its Call for Participation and Student Travel Support. The event takes place August 15-17 in Columbus, Ohio. "Student travel grant support is available for all students (Ph.D./M.S./Undergrad) from U.S. academic institutions to attend MUG '16 through a funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF)."The post Call for Participation & Student Travel Support: MVAPICH User Group appeared first on insideHPC.

"We present a procedure of implementing the intermediate profiling for openQCD code that will enable the global reduction of the cost of profiling and optimizing this code commonly used in the lattice QCD community. Our approach is based on well-known SimGrid simulator, which allows for fast and accurate performance predictions of the codes on HPC architectures. Additionally, accurate estimations of the program behavior on some future machines, not yet accessible to us, are anticipated."The post Video: Platform Independent Profiling of a QCD Code appeared first on insideHPC.

"OpenPOWER is all about creating a broad ecosystem with opportunities to accelerate your workloads. For the Cognitive Cup, we provide two types of accelerators: GPUs and FPGAs. GPUs are used by the Deep Learning framework to train your neural network. When you want to use the neural network during the “classification” phase, you have a choice of Power CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs."The post Enter Your Machine Learning Code in the Cognitive Cup appeared first on insideHPC.

The University of Cincinnati is seeking a Computer & Information Analyst in our Job of the Week.The post Job of the Week: Computer & Information Analyst at University of Cincinnati appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from ISC 2016, Dave Sundstrom from Hewlett Packard Enterprise describes the newly enhanced HPE Software Stack for High Performance Computing. "The HPE Core HPC Software Stack is a complete software set for the creation, optimization, and running of HPC applications. It includes development tools, runtime libraries, a workload scheduler, and cluster management, integrated and validated by Hewlett Packard Enterprise into a single software set. Core HPC Stack uses the included HPC Cluster Setup Tool to simplify and speed the installation of an HPC cluster built with HPE servers."The post Video: HPE Enhances Software Stack for High Performance Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

"Native execution is good for application that are performing operations that map to parallelism either in threads or vectors. However, running natively on the coprocessor is not ideal when the application must do a lot of I/O or runs large parts of the application in a serial mode. Offloading has its own issues. Asynchronous allocation, copies, and the deallocation of data can be performed but it complex. Another challenge with offloading is that it requires memory blocking. Overall, it is important to understand the application, the workflow within the application and how to use the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor most effectively."The post Offloading vs Native Execution on Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessors appeared first on insideHPC.

"It's great to have these incredible servers and incredible processors, but if you don't have the people to run them - if you don't have the people that are passionate about supercomputing, we would never get there from here."Behind all of this magnificent technology are the fantastic faculty, researchers, interns, our corporate partners that are part of this, the National Science Foundation, there are people behind all of the success of the TACC. I think that's the point we can never forget."The post Podcast: UT Chancellor William McCraven on What Makes TACC Successful appeared first on insideHPC.

"With our latest innovations incorporating Intel Xeon Phi processors in a performance and density optimized Twin architecture and 100Gbps OPA switch for high bandwidth connectivity, our customers can accelerate their applications and innovations to address the most complex real world problems."The post Supermicro Now Shipping Intel Xeon Phi Systems with Omni-Path appeared first on insideHPC.

Olaf Weber from SGI presented this talk at LUG 2016. "In collaboration with Intel, SGI set about creating support for multiple network connections to the Lustre filesystem, with multi-rail support. With Intel Omni-Path and EDR Infiniband driving to 200Gb/s or 25GB/s per connection, this capability will make it possible to start moving data between a single SGI UV node and the Lustre file system at over 100GB/s."The post Video: Matching the Speed of SGI UV with Multi-rail LNet for Lustre appeared first on insideHPC.

Deep learning is a method of creating artificial intelligence systems that combine computer-based multi-layer neural networks with intensive training techniques and large data sets to enable analysis and predictive decision making. A fundamental aspect of deep learning environments is that they transcend finite programmable constraints to the realm of extensible and trainable systems. Recent developments in technology and algorithms have enabled deep learning systems to not only equal but to exceed human capabilities in the pace of processing vast amounts of information.The post The Industrialization of Deep Learning – Intro appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the FlyElephant team announced the release of the FlyElephant 2.0 platform for High Performance Computing. Versioin 2.0 enhancements include: internal expert community, collaboration on projects, public tasks, Docker and Jupyter support, a new file storage system and work with HPC clusters.The post FlyElephant 2.0 Improves HPC Collaboration Features appeared first on insideHPC.

This week, the Helix Nebula Science Cloud (HNSciCloud) launched a €5.3 million tender for the establishment of a European hybrid cloud platform. The purpose of the platform is to support the deployment of high-performance computing and big-data capabilities for scientific research. "The European Cloud Initiative will unlock the value of big data by providing world-class supercomputing capability, high-speed connectivity and leading-edge data and software services for science, industry and the public sector,” said Günther H. Oettinger, Commissioner for the Digital Economy and Society.The post Seeking Bids for Helix Nebula Science Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

In this CCTV video, Alberto Alonso describes his new supercomputer, Breogan, that has the ability to modernize Mexico's antiquated stock market.Since it was launched in February, the Breogan computer has generated $475,000 for his company GACS. The algorithm it uses is much faster than the computers in Mexico’s stock exchange. "What makes the Breogan computer so unique, is that it finds attractive opportunities in the market and it buys and sells automatically when it sees a trading opportunity."The post Video: Breogan Supercomputer Brings High Speed Trading to Mexico appeared first on insideHPC.