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

In this video from SC16, Brad Merchant from RAID Inc. describes the company's new Lustre ZFS Building Block. "RAID Inc. offers a suite of building block product families that can be purchased individually or in conjunction with other RAID products to solve customer’s needs in the most demanding data-storage environments. Each product is customized to address customer’s individual requirements of performance, reliability, scalability and price. Each product is put through extensive testing and a burn-in/staging process which ensures customers will receive a solution designed to function as specified in their unique environment."The post RAID Inc. Steps up with ZFS on Lustre at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

"Storage performance has been one of the biggest challenges in developing supercomputers. To meet the demands for storage performance, IME was introduced to the Oakforest-PACS on a massive scale, the first such introduction in the world,” said Osamu Tatebe, lead, public relations, JCAHPC / professor, Center for Computational Sciences, University of Tsukuba. “We are very pleased that we could achieve effective I/O performance exceeding 1 TB per second in writing tens of thousands of processes to the same file. With this new storage technology, we believe that we will be able to contribute to society with the further development of computational science, big data analysis and machine learning.”The post DDN IME Burst Buffer Exceeds 1 TB/s for Japan’s Fastest Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

"When designing an application that contains many threads and less cores than threads, it is important to understand what is the optimal number of threads that should be assigned to a core. This value should be parameterized, in order to easily run tests to determine which is the optimum value for a given machine. One thread per core on the Intel Xeon Phi processor will give the highest performance per thread. When the number of threads per core is set at two or four, the individual thread performance may be lower, but the aggregate performance will be greater."The post Best Threads Per Core with Intel Xeon Phi appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC16, Silicon Mechanics CTO Daniel Chow describes how the company brings value and performance to its HPC customers. "When looking for a leading solutions integrator to couple disparate hardware and software products into a “HPC Built For You” solution, that will keep up with the evolution and disruptive forces in technology – the Experts at Silicon Mechanics are here to help you."The post Silicon Mechanics: HPC Built for You at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

In life sciences, perhaps more than any other HPC discipline, simplicity is key. The SGI solution meets this requirement by delivering a single system that scales to huge capabilities by unifying compute, memory, and storage. Researchers and scientists in personalized medicine (and most life sciences) are typically not computer science experts and want a simple development and usage model that enables them to focus on their research and projects.The post SGI UV as a Converged Compute and Data Management Platform appeared first on insideHPC.

"At SC16, DDN demonstrated centralized storage implementations that accelerate financial and scientific analytics by 5x – extracting maximum efficiency, value and ROI in real-world customer environments using DDN products and solutions with open and commercial software including OpenStack and Hadoop. In addition to the demonstrations, DDN also highlighted its customer use cases with other open and commercial software such as Informatica, SAS GRID, R and Ab Initio, among others."The post DDN Re-Energizes HPC Workflows at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

Accelerated computing continues to gain momentum as the HPC community moves towards Exascale. Our recent Tesla P100 GPU review shows how these accelerators are opening up new worlds of performance vs. traditional CPU-based systems and even vs. NVIDIA’s previous K80 GPU product. We've got benchmarks, case studies, and more in the insideHPC Research Report on GPU Accelerators.The post NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU Review appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, SC17 General Chair Bernd Mohr write that the conference will focus on making connections. "We are very confident, that SC17 will once again be THE gathering of scientists, engineers, researchers, educators, programmers, system administrators and developers that is unequaled in the world—for an exceptional program of technical presentations, papers, workshops, informative tutorials, timely research posters and Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) sessions, all connected by a world-class exhibition."The post Bernd Mohr on how #hpcconnects on the Road to SC17 appeared first on insideHPC.

"As seen at installations included on both the Green500 and Top500 lists, Asetek’s distributed liquid cooling architecture enables cluster energy efficiency in addition to sustained and un-throttled cluster performance,” said John Hamill, Vice President of WW Sales and Marketing. “Around the world, data centers are increasingly using Asetek technology for High Performance Computing while reducing energy costs.”The post Asetek Lands Nine Installations on the Green500 appeared first on insideHPC.

"Huawei has increasingly become more prominent in the HPC market. It has successfully deployed HPC clusters for a large number of global vehicle producers, large-scale supercomputing centers, and research institutions. These show that Huawei’s HPC platforms are optimized for industry applications which can help customers significantly simplify service processes and improve work efficiency, enabling them to focus on product development and research."The post Huawei Showcases HPC Solutions at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC16, Gabriel Broner from SGI describes the company's full breadth of HPC solutions. Recently acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, SGI's product technologies such as the SGI ICE XA system and SGI UV big memory systems will continue to offer unique value for HPC customers on the road to Exascale. "Will this be a good marriage? Well, this reporter got to spend some time with HPE, SGI, and their joint customers at the recent HP-CAST user group meeting, and all indications are that this combinations will be a powerful force in HPC moving forward."The post SGI Paves the Way to the Future with HPE at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

"As performance demands continue to evolve in both HPC and enterprise cloud applications, the IBTA saw an increasing need for new enhancements to InfiniBand’s network capabilities, support features and overall interoperability,” said Bill Magro, co-chair of the IBTA Technical Working Group. “Our two new InfiniBand Architecture Specification updates satisfy these demands by delivering interoperability and testing upgrades for EDR and FDR, flexible management capabilities for optimal low-latency and low-power functionality and virtualization support for better network scalability.”The post New InfiniBand Architecture Specifications Extend Virtualization Support appeared first on insideHPC.

"Learn how you can cost effectively accelerate innovation with a secure private cloud environment, hosted and managed by Dell and R Systems Bare Metal Solution. The HPC infrastructure consists of Dell processing, power, storage and memory capacity. R Systems provides white-glove HPC services with custom solutions in your choice of locations, including their company-owned data centers in Champaign, Illinois located at the University of Illinois’ Research Park. R Systems offers complete Dell hardware-based systems, as well as custom engagements/configurations based on specific business needs."The post How Dell EMC Delivers HPC Cloud with R-Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Barcelona Supercomputing Center announced plans to MareNostrum 4, a 13.7 Petaflop supercomputer that will be 12.4 times more powerful than the current MareNostrum 3 system. In a contract valued at almost €30 million, IBM will integrate in one sole machine using its own technologies alongside those of Lenovo, Intel, and Fujitsu.The post 13.7 Petaflop MareNostrum 4 Supercomputer Coming to BSC appeared first on insideHPC.

"Avere Hybrid Cloud is a groundbreaking solution that changes the economics and functionality of data storage and computing. Avere Hybrid Cloud enables companies to leverage public and private storage clouds, IaaS, and elastic compute for workloads previously limited to on-premises high-performance (HPC) storage systems. With Avere Systems, you can achieve unlimited performance scaling, eliminate latency and cut storage costs by more than 50%."The post Avere Speeds Hybrid Cloud at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today HPE announced today a comprehensive initiative that brings together the best of on-premises performance, application availability, and control with the convenience and agility of public cloud consumption models.The post HPE Goes All-Flash for Public Cloud with 3PAR, Lowers Long Term Storage Costs with Spectra Logic appeared first on insideHPC.

SGI, Bright Computing, and DDN recently announced that the UK Met Office has selected the three HPC vendors to provide HPC for its new Scientific Processing and Intensive Compute Environment (SPICE) system. SPICE will enable weather and climate researchers to dramatically reduce time required to analyze massive amounts of climate simulation data.The post SGI and DDN Power UK Met Office SPICE System for Weather and Climate Research appeared first on insideHPC.

"The HPC Community demands performance, transparency, and value—exactly what Red Hat and open source offer. Red Hat is the standard choice for Linux in HPC clusterers worldwide. But it doesn't stop there--our cloud, virtualization, storage, platform and service-oriented solutions bring real freedom and collaboration to federal, state, local, and academic programs. And Red Hat’s worldwide support, training and consulting services bring the power of open source to your agency. We are a part of a larger community working together to drive innovation."The post For HPC, Red Hat Offers Much More than just Linux appeared first on insideHPC.

"Intel HPC Orchestrator simplifies the installation, management, and ongoing maintenance of an HPC system by reducing the amounft of integration and validation effort required to run an HPC system software stack. With Intel HPC Orchestrator, based on the OpenHPC system software stack, you can take advantage of the innovation driven by the open source community - while also getting peace of mind from Intel® support across the HPC system software stack."The post Simplify Cluster Deployment with Intel HPC Orchestrator appeared first on insideHPC.

Nvidia's Bill Dally will keynote HiPINEB 2017 - the 3rd IEEE International Workshop on High-Performance Interconnection Networks in the Exascale and Big-Data Era. The event takes place Feb. 5, 2017 in Austin, Texas and will be held in conjunction with the IEEE HPCA Conference.The post Nvidia’s Bill Dally to Keynote HiPINEB 2017 Exascale Workshop appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, CoolIT Systems CEO & CTO, Geoff Lyon, and STULZ ATS President, Joerg Desler, discuss high density Chip-to-Atmosphere™ data center liquid cooling solutions for organizations big or small. When integrated, CoolIT Systems’ DCLC™ solutions can capture 85% and more of the servers’ heat directly into liquid. Complimenting DCLC™, STULZ precision air cooling products capture the balance of the lower density heat. A considerable benefit forms when the total heat energy from both systems is consolidated, transported outside and then dissipated or recaptured for reuse, to heat nearby buildings, for example.The post CoolIT Systems and STULZ Debut High Density Chip-to-Atmosphere Data Center Liquid Cooling appeared first on insideHPC.

As data center sprawl is now understood to be expensive and may not deliver performance increases for all types of applications, new technologies are coming to the rescue. A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by a customer or a designer after manufacturing – hence "field-programmable". While the use of GPUs and HPC accelerators are generally understood today, there are a number of misconceptions about FPGAs that need to be understood.The post FPGA Myths appeared first on insideHPC.

As announced at SC16, Chinese HPC vendor Sugon has built a new datacenter in Slovenia based around the Arctur-2 system, Sugon's first installation in continental Europe and a major milestone in the company's globalization strategy. "Arctur-2 is Sugon's flagship hyperconverged HPC & Cloud computing infrastructure. According to Sugon, the system was designed and built to fit various and diverse usage scenarios, from general use Cloud Computing to HPC computing as well as Big Data analytics. By converging different types of servers into single entity we achieved high performance, energy efficiency and seamless management, Sugon is able to provide an HPC on demand to its customers."The post Sugon Moves HPC as a Service to Europe with Arctur-2 Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

In this time-lapse video, engineers build the Owens cluster at the Ohio Supercomputing Center. "Named after Olympic track star Jesse Owens, the new Owens Cluster is be powered by Dell PowerEdge servers featuring the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v4 product family, include storage components manufactured by DDN and an EDR interconnect provided by Mellanox. The center earlier had acquired NetApp software and hardware for home directory storage."The post Video: Building the Owens Cluster at OSC appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Russia's RSC Group announced that the company has achieved a record compute density of 1.41 Pflops per rack using direct liquid cooling and Intel Xeon Phi processors. "RSC supported the TUM student team from Munich with 8 nodes mobile cluster based on RSC Tornado direct liquid cooled architecture. This computing system provided stable operation of computing nodes in “hot water” mode at +63 °С cooling agent temperature at node inputs and had the following configuration: 72-cores Intel Xeon Phi 7290 processors, Intel S7200AP server boards, Intel SSD DC S3500 Series M.2 340 GB solid-state drives, switch and adapters based on Intel Omni-Path high-speed fabric, highly efficient Micron DDR4-2400 VLP 16-32 GB memory modules."The post RSC Tornado Breaks Record with 1.41 Petaflops per Rack appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Jeff Hollingsworth from SIGHPC and Michele De Lorenzi from CSCS invite you to submit papers, minisymposia proposals and posters to the PASC17 Conference, an interdisciplinary conference in HPC that brings together domain science, applied mathematics and computer science. PASC17 will be held June 26-28, 2017 in Lugano, Switzerland.The post Video: PASC17 Conference Seeks Papers, Minisymposia, and Posters appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Japan announced plans to build a 130 Petaflop (half precision) supercomputer for deployment in 2017. And while such a machine would not surpass the current #1 93 Petaflop Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer in China, it would certainly propel Japan to the top of an all new category of supercomputing leadership. "ABCI is an open innovation platform with computing resources of more than hundred petaflops for world-class AI R&D. Through industry and academia collaboration, Algorithms, Big Data, and Computing Power will be leveraged in a single common public platform. ABCI will rapidly accelerate the deployment of AI into real businesses and society."The post Japan to Build 130 Petaflop ABCI Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

"In the long run, if you need orders of magnitude more bandwidth than is currently available there’s a set of technologies that are sometimes referred to as processor in memory – I call it processor at memory – technologies that involves cheaper processors distributed out to adjacent to the memory chips. Processors are cheaper, simpler, lower power. That could allow a significant reduction in cost to build the systems, which allows you to build them a lot bigger and therefore deliver significantly higher memory bandwidth. That’s a very revolutionary change.”The post Podcast: John McCalpin Surveys HPC System Memory Bandwidth appeared first on insideHPC.

Researchers from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center have received the award for Best Paper of the MEMSYS 2016 conference. "This study confirms that improvements in the memory system can have significant impact on the real world, improving power and energy, performance, and/or dollar cost. The MEMSYS program committee liked the study especially because, in contrast to most of the prior research, it can be applied immediately in the production systems, and it requires no changes to the system architecture, Operating System, system software or applications.”The post BSC Paper: Scale-in on Large-memory Nodes to Save Energy appeared first on insideHPC.

The numbers are in for SC16, the international supercomputing conference that wrapped up last week in Salt Lake City. The conference drew more than 11,100 registered attendees and featured a technical program spanning six days. "The SC16 Exhibition was the largest in the history of the conference, with 349 exhibitors from industry, academia and research organizations from around the world."The post Full Rundown of SC16 Stats, World Records, and Awards appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the Intel HPC Developer Conference, Akira Sano from Supermicro describes the company's Machine Learning Solutions on Intel Architecture. "Our server systems, subsystems and accessories are architecturally designed to provide high levels of reliability, quality and scalability, thereby enabling our customers benefits in the areas of compute performance, density, thermal management and power efficiency to lower their overall total cost of ownership."The post Video: Supermicro Showcases Machine Learning Solutions on Intel Architecture appeared first on insideHPC.

Today CERN announced that it has selected T-Systems and Huawei to design, prototype the pilot phase of the Helix Nebula Science Cloud. T-Systems and Huawei will develop a solution based on its Open Telekom Cloud public cloud service launched in March 2016 and which currently supports workloads from various leading enterprises, SMEs and public sector organizations.The post CERN Selects T-Systems and Huawei for Helix Nebula Science Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC16, Steve Branton from Asetek describes the company's innovative liquid cooling systems for high performance computing. Unlike one-size-fits-all approaches, the flexibility of Asetek distributed liquid cooling technology enables OEMs to provide a fit-to-need strategy that is compelling to the elite members of the supercomputing community. “With the accelerating trend of higher wattages and the continuing requirement of high density, the need for adaptable, cost effective, and reliable liquid cooling is accelerating among those striving to obtain TOP500 status. This need is exactly what Asetek’s distributed cooling architecture provides.”The post Asetek Liquid Cooling Delivers Savings and Flexibility for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

A weather science team from China has won 2016 ACM Gordon Bell Prize for their research project, “10M-Core Scalable Fully-Implicit Solver for Nonhydrostatic Atmospheric Dynamics.” The winning team presented a method for calculating atmospheric dynamics on the world's fastest computer, the 93 Petaflop Sunway TaihuLight system. "On the road to the seamless weather-climate prediction, a major obstacle is the difficulty of dealing with various spatial and temporal scales. The atmosphere contains time-dependent multi-scale dynamics that support a variety of wave motions.”The post Chinese Research Team Wins Gordon Bell Prize using #1 Sunway TaihuLight Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC16, Joe Yaworsky describes how Intel Omni Path is gaining traction on the TOP500. As the interconnect for the Intel Scalable System Framework, Omni-Path is focused on delivering the best possible application performance. "In the nine months since Intel Omni-Path Architecture (Intel OPA) began shipping, it has become the standard fabric for 100 gigabit systems. Intel OPA is featured in 28 of the top 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world announced at Supercomputing 2016 and now has 66 percent of the 100Gb market. Top500 designs include Oakforest-PACS, MIT Lincoln Lab and CINECA."The post Why Intel Omni-Path is Growing Fast on the TOP500 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC16, Bill Mannel from Hewlett Packard Enterprise describes how the company is gaining momentum in the HPC space as the leading vendor on the TOP500. With the recent acquisition of SGI, HPE is moving forward with broader range of solutions for high performance computing. "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 Hewlett Packard Enterprise Gains Momentum with SGI Acquisition at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

Scientists have taken the closest look yet at molecule-sized machinery called the human preinitiation complex. It basically opens up DNA so that genes can be copied and turned into proteins. The science team formed from Northwestern University, Berkeley National Laboratory, Georgia State University, and UC Berkeley. They used a cutting-edge technique called cryo-electron microscopy and combined it with supercomputer analysis. They published their results May of 2016 in the journal Nature.The post Podcast: Combining Cryo-electron Microscopy with Supercomputer Simulation appeared first on insideHPC.

"Atos is incredibly proud to see the concrete results of the Tera1000 project," said Philippe Vannier, CTO in the Atos Group. "Today we are taking a major step on the road towards exaflops. Undoubtedly, the interconnect technologies will provide a crucial contribution in achieving exaflops performance. With BXI, Atos is confirming its leadership in the field of supercomputers and beyond in the processing of very large volumes of data."The post First-phase Bull sequana Supercomputer at CEA is Number 55 on TOP500 appeared first on insideHPC.

"Most of the IT innovation that is happening today is with a cloud-first model,” said Joris Poort, co-founder and CEO of Rescale. “We’re building a platform that can satisfy and accelerate the ideas of the world’s top scientists and thinkers. From automotive design to drug discovery and even actual rocket science, we’re empowering our customers as leaders in their respective fields, to accomplish more and innovation faster.”The post Rescale Adds HPC and AI Capabilities via the IBM Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC16, Nate Parada from One Stop Systems describes the company's new High Density Compute Accelerator (HDCA) for Deep Learning. "The CA16000 High Density Compute Accelerator with sixteen NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators is used for a variety of HPC applications including oil and gas exploration and financial services. Completely integrated with the GPUs most suited for a specific application, it's easy installation and tested reliability makes it superior to alternative products."The post Video: One Stop Systems Takes GPU Density to the Next Level at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

A workflow to support genomic sequencing requires a collaborative effort between many research groups and a process from initial sampling to final analysis. Learn the 4 steps involved in pre-processing.The post High-Throughput Genomic Sequencing Workflow appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Asia Supercomputer Community announced that the world's fastest supercomputer, Sunway TaihuLight, will be used by students in the upcoming 2017 ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge. "The teams will design and build a cluster under 3000W to conduct a benchmark test, a mystery app, and other applications involving the latest technologies. Prizes and awards will be based on single applications and overall performances."The post ASC17 Student Competitors to Gain Access to #1 Sunway TaihuLight Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC16, Paul Messina and Stephen Lee describe the mission, status, and recent milestones of the Exascale Computing Project. Now entering its second year, the ECP recently announced that it has selected four co-design centers as part of a 4 year, $48 million funding award. It also announced the selection of 35 software development proposals representing 25 research and academic organizations.The post Exascale Computing Project Gains Momentum Entering Year 2 appeared first on insideHPC.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory is seeking a Science Writer and Communications Specialist in our Job of the Week. "This person will lead ECP writing efforts and coordinate additional services of US Department of Energy (DOE) lab resources and contractors as necessary. ECP is a collaboration between two DOE organizations: the Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration."The post Job of the Week: Science Writer and Communications Specialist at ORNL appeared first on insideHPC.

SC17 General Chair Bernd Mohr introduced the theme of the upcoming conference with these fine words: "One connection can change your life. Our community is making millions of connections every day: by bringing together people at workshops, conferences, in research teams and projects, by connecting extreme-scale supercomputers to instruments and visualization and data analytics systems, by inspiring collaborations between different fields of science And all with the goal of making the greatest impact on society and changing our world I invite you to continue on this journey of creating meaningful connections at SC17."The post SC17 Preview turns the Spotlight on Making Connections appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Cycle Computing announced that Dell EMC will offer its software and services as an option with Dell EMC HPC Systems.At Dell EMC, we are constantly looking for the best ways to serve our customers, and Cycle Computing is a valuable addition to our HPC offerings," said Jim Ganthier, senior vice president, Validated Solutions, and HPC organization, Dell EMC. "With Cycle, Dell EMC will be the first to offer 'crate to cloud' for HPC in a matter of hours and will help our customers accelerate time to results while reducing cost and complexity."The post Dell EMC & Cycle Computing to offer Cloud Software and Services for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Silicon Mechanics announced the opening of the 6th Annual Research Cluster Grant (RCG) program. "We hope you will consider this opportunity to support your research by submitting a proposal or by forwarding this to others in your department who could benefit from this grant. The RCG is open to all United States and Canadian qualified post-secondary institutions, university-affiliated research institutions, non-profit research institutions and researchers at federal labs with university affiliations. Submissions will be reviewed for merit and related impacts. Further details on the grant rules and the technical specifications of the cluster itself are available on our Research Cluster Grant website."The post Win a Cluster for your Institution with the 2017 Research Cluster Grant appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC16, Steve Conway from IDC moderates a panel discussion on Precision Medicine. "Recently, DOE Secretary Moniz, VA Secretary MacDonald, NCI Director Lowy and the GSK CEO Andrew Witty announced that the Nation’s leading supercomputers would be applied to the challenge of the Cancer Moonshot initiative. This partnership of nontraditional groups, collectively see the path to unraveling the complexities of cancer through the power of new machines, operating systems, and applications that leverage simulations, data science and artificial intelligence to accelerate bringing precision oncology to the patients that are waiting. This initiative is one of many research efforts in the race to solve some of our most challenging medical problems."The post Video: For Precision Medicine, HPC Matters at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

"Huawei's new-generation FusionServer X6000 HPC platform, based on the Intel Scalable System Framework, provides the balanced performance, scalability, and flexibility to efficiently handle a wide range of HPC workloads," said Hugo Saleh, Director of Marketing and Enabling, Intel Scalable Datacenter Solutions. "The FusionServer X6000 is a great example of how Intel Xeon processors and Intel Omni-path architecture can combine to build industry leading solutions with innovative fabric features that optimize performance, resiliency, and traffic movement."The post Huawei Showcases FusionServer X6000 at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

If you were not able to attend SC16, have we got a video for you! Courtesy of Asetek, this time-lapse walk-through of the exhibit hall sure looks familiar to this reporter who spent the last four days shooting over 50 interviews.The post Video: Time-Lapse Walk-Through of SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.