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

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison are developing new computer chips that combine tasks usually kept separate by design. According to assistant professor Jing Li, these “liquid silicon” chips can be configured to perform complex calculations and store massive amounts of information within the same integrated unit — and communicate efficiently with other chips. "There’s a huge bottleneck when classical computers need to move data between memory and processor,” says Li. “We’re building a unified hardware that can bridge the gap between computation and storage.”The post Liquid Silicon Could Bridge the Gap Between Computation and Storage appeared first on insideHPC.

“Watson and cognitive computing in general can serve significantly in every single arena in which we grapple with multi-layered, data-intensive problems: how to best treat cancers; how to adapt to conditions brought about by climate change; how to quickly and effectively harness new kinds of sustainable energy; how to untangle intractable governmental or community development challenges,” Frase stated. “Now more than ever, visionary thinking will drive an endless and transformative array of applications for Watson and cognitive computing in general, along with whatever comes next.”The post Video: SC16 Keynote Katharine Frase on Cognitive Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

We expect the Intel Nervana platform to produce breakthrough performance and dramatic reductions in the time to train complex neural networks,” said Diane Bryant, executive vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group at Intel. “Before the end of the decade, Intel will deliver a 100-fold increase in performance that will turbocharge the pace of innovation in the emerging deep learning space.”The post Intel Doubles Down on AI & Machine Learning appeared first on insideHPC.

"The majority of deep learning frameworks provide good out-of-the-box performance on a single workstation, but scaling across multiple nodes is still a wild, untamed borderland. This discussion follows the story of one researcher trying to make use of a significant compute resource to accelerate learning over a large number of CPUs. Along the way we note how to find good multiple-CPU performance with Theano* and TensorFlow*, how to extend a single-machine model with MPI and optimize its performance as we scale out and up on both Intel Xeon and Intel Xeon Phi architectures."The post Scaling Machine Learning Software with Allinea Tools appeared first on insideHPC.

The Intel Xeon Phi processor supports different types of memory, and can organize this into three types of memory mode. The new processor from Intel contains two type of memory, MCDRAM and DDR memory. These different memory subsystems are complimentary but can be used in different ways, depending on the application that is being executed. "By using these two types of memory in the same system gives flexibility to the overall system and will show an increase in performance for almost any application."The post Memory Modes For Increased Performance on Intel Xeon Phi appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC16, Yugendra Guvvala, VP of Technology at RAID Inc. describes the company's new Dashboard software. The Dashboard provides a single pane of glass to manage your high performance Lustre storage pools. "Scaling to tens of petabytes and thousands of clients – considered a best filesystem for storage by many – Lustre is a high performance storage architecture for clusters. The central component of this architecture is the Lustre shared file system, which is currently available for Linux, providing a POSIX-compliant UNIX file system interface. RAID, Inc. offers custom Lustre solutions with installation & 24/7 support."The post Manage Your Lustre HPC Storage with the new Dashboard from RAID Inc. appeared first on insideHPC.

As an HPC technology vendor, Mellanox is in the business of providing the leading-edge interconnects that drive many of the world's fastest supercomputers. To learn more about what's new for SC16, we caught up with Michael Kagan, CTO of Mellanox. "Moving InfiniBand beyond EDR to HDR is critical not only for HPC, but also for the numerous industries that are adopting AI and Big Data to make real business sense out the amount of data available and that we continue to collect on a daily basis."The post What’s Next for HPC? A Q&A with Michael Kagan, CTO of Mellanox appeared first on insideHPC.

"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,” said John Hamill, Vice President of WW Sales and Marketing. “This need is exactly what Asetek’s distributed cooling architecture provides.”The post Asetek Sports Eight Installations on the TOP500 Supercomputer List appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Nimbix announced the immediate availability of the Xilinx SDAccel development environment for on-demand development, testing, and deployment of FPGA-accelerated workflows in the Nimbix Cloud, powered by JARVICE. The SDAccel development environment combines the industry's first architecturally optimizing compiler supporting any combination of OpenCL, C, and C++ kernels, along with libraries, development boards and industry standard development and run‐time experience for FPGAs.The post Nimbix & Xilinx Accelerate FPGA-Based Workloads in the Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

SC16 will the 29th supercomputing event in the conference series, a long tradition that brings some 10,000 HPC professionals to Salt Lake City this week. While many of us regulars have attended for years, there is a hearty group of 18 SC Perennials that have managed to attend every conference since the beginning. The SC Perennials are very young at heart," said conference committee member Mike Bernhardt. "And we stand tall with our motto, 'We Keep Coming Back.'" If you're in Salt Lake City this week and see someone wearing the SC Perennial pin, please see hello.The post It’s #SC16, and the SC Perennials Keep Coming Back! appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC16, Figen Ulgen from Intel and Maurizio Davini from the IT Center University of Pisa describe the newly announced Intel® HPC Orchestrator software. "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 Video: Announcing the New Intel® HPC Orchestrator Software appeared first on insideHPC.

Today RAID Inc announced a strategic go to market partnership with SwiftStack, the leader in object storage for the enterprise. This officially ratified partnership augments the RAID Inc. portfolio of technical computing and data center infrastructure solutions by adding SwiftStack's object storage platform to its Ability Storage solutions, ultimately allowing a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) for all. "State of the art advancements in computing require a storage architecture that traditional SAN or NAS infrastructure was never designed for," said Don Jaworski, CEO of SwiftStack. "Our partnership with RAID Inc. gives HPC audiences a modern storage architecture that supports data-centric workflows and enables an infrastructure cost model that meets both the durability and budget requirements of those organizations."The post RAID Inc. & SwiftStack Deliver HPC Object Storage at Scale appeared first on insideHPC.

"Maximizing value of data in the kinds of extraordinary environments represented by supercomputing is all about being able to handle extreme, unpredictable storage bandwidth and capacity needs at scale,” said Ken Claffey, vice president and general manager, Seagate HPC systems business. “Seagate’s ClusterStor 300N expands on our proven, engineered systems approach that delivers performance efficiency and value for HPC environments of any size, using a hybrid technology architecture to handle tough workloads at a fraction of the cost of all-flash approaches.”The post Video: Seagate Launches ClusterStor 300N Platform at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

The HPC Innovation Excellence Award recognizes noteworthy achievements by users of high performance computing technologies. The program's main goals are to showcase return on investment (ROI) and scientific success stories involving HPC; to help other users better understand the benefits of adopting HPC and justify HPC investments, especially for small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs); to demonstrate the value of HPC to funding bodies and politicians; and to expand public support for increased HPC investments.The post IDC Announces HPC Innovation Excellence Awards appeared first on insideHPC.

The K-Computer in Japan continues to top the Graph 500 ranking of the world’s fastest supercomputers. The latest list was released today at SC16 in Salt Lake City. "The Graph 500 measures performance against three kernels: search, optimization (single-source shortest path), and edge-oriented. Results on these kernels are informative for application performance in business areas as diverse as cybersecurity, medical informatics, social networks, data enrichment, and symbolic networks such as the human brain."The post K-Computer Leads Graph 500 List of World’s Fastest Supercomputers appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the Intel HPC Developer Conference, Prabhat from NERSC describes how high performance computing techniques are being used to scale Machine Learning to over 100,000 compute cores. "Using TB-sized datasets from three science applications: astrophysics, plasma physics, and particle physics, we show that our implementation can construct kd-tree of 189 billion particles in 48 seconds on utilizing ∼50,000 cores."The post Machine Learning and HPC Converge at NERSC appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Dell EMC announced new HPC cloud offerings, software, systems and customer success, continuing its focus on democratizing HPC for enterprises of all sizes, optimizing HPC technology innovations and advancing the HPC community. "The global HPC market forecast exceeds $30 billion in 2016 for all product and services spending, including servers, software, storage, cloud, and other categories, with continued growth expected at 5.2 percent CAGR through 2020,” said Addison Snell, CEO, Intersect360 Research. “Bolstered by its combination with EMC, Dell will hold the number-one position in total HPC revenue share heading into 2017.”The post Dell EMC Advances in Cloud, Software and Systems at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

Couldn't make it SC16? Tune in right here on insideHPC to watch all the Nvidia Theater talks this week. "Come join NVIDIA at SC16 to learn how AI supercomputing is breaking open a world of limitless possibilities. This is an era of multigenerational discoveries taking place in a single lifetime. See how other leaders in the field are advancing computational science across domains, get free hands-on training with the newest GPU-accelerated solutions, and connect with NVIDIA experts."The post Watch the Wednesday Livestream from Nvidia Booth at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

"This is the sixth list produced for the emerging benchmark designed to complement the traditional High Performance LINPACK (HPL) benchmark used as the official metric for ranking the TOP500 systems. The first HPCG list was announced at ISC’14 two and a half years ago, containing 15 entries, the SC’15 list had 60 and ISC’16 had 80. The current list contains more than 100 entries as HPCG continues to gain traction in the HPC community."The post HPCG Performance List Released at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

"We have assembled a comprehensive display of technology and OEM solutions to address all liquid cooling requirements in the global HPC market,” said CoolIT Systems CEO and CTO Geoff Lyon. “Our partnership with STULZ provides the market with the benefits of a single vendor to implement and service HPC cooling solutions in over 140 countries – truly a unique offering.”The post CoolIT Systems Showcases HPC Liquid Cooling at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today ThinkParQ announced the immediate availability of BeeGFS version 6.0. As the first release in a new versioning scheme, release 6.0 is the direct successor of the 2015.03 release series, which was in fact the 5th BeeGFS major release. "This new release is another big step for the development of BeeGFS”, says Christian Mohrbacher, development lead of BeeGFS. “In combination with the high availability features of the BeeGFS storage service, which were introduced in the 2015.03 major release last year, fully fault-tolerant storage systems can now be built by solely using BeeGFS-internal functionality.”The post BeeGFS Updates with built-in Metadata High-Availability appeared first on insideHPC.

Today One Stop Systems announced two new deep learning appliances that leverage the NVIDIA NVLink. One Stop Systems’ deep learning appliances are designed for augmented performance in machine learning and deep learning applications. These appliances provide the ultimate power for performing deep learning training and exploring neural networks,” said Steve Cooper, OSS CEO. “The OSS-PASCAL4 and OSS-PASCAL8 […]The post One Stop Systems Introduces a New Line of GPU Accelerated Servers for Deep Learning at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

"InfiniBand's advantages of highest performance, scalability and robustness enable users to maximize their data center return on investment. InfiniBand was chosen by far more end-users compared to a proprietary offering, resulting in a more than 85 percent market share. We are happy to see our open Ethernet adapter and switch solutions enable all of the 40G and the first 100G Ethernet systems on the TOP500 list, resulting in overall 194 systems using Mellanox for their compute and storage connectivity."The post Mellanox Brings HDR to SC16 while Dominating Today’s TOP500 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the Intel HPC Developer Conference, Justin Gottschlich, PhD from Intel describes how the company doubling down on Anomaly Detection using Machine Learning and Intel technologies. "In this talk, we present future research directions at Intel Labs using deep learning for anomaly detection and management. We discuss the required machine learning characteristics for such systems, ranging from zero positive learning, automatic feature extraction, and real-time reinforcement learning. We also discuss the general applicability of such anomaly detection systems across multiple domains such as data centers, autonomous vehicles, and high performance computing."The post Using Machine Learning to Avoid the Unwanted appeared first on insideHPC.

Demonstrating Asetek’s adaptability to any data center cooling need, HPC installations from around the world are currently on display at SC16 in Salt Lake City, Utah November 14-17. Servers from these installations featuring Asetek liquid cooling will be on display including servers installed at Oakforest-PACS, the highest Performance Supercomputer System in Japan.The post Asetek’s Adaptable Liquid Cooling on Display at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

Watch this video of Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang's talk from SC16 in Salt Lake City. Can't make it to the show? Tune in right here on insideHPC to watch Nvidia talks all this week. "See how other leaders in the field are advancing computational science across domains, get free hands-on training with the newest GPU-accelerated solutions, and connect with NVIDIA experts."The post Video: Jen-Hsun Huang Keynote from the Nvidia Booth at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Aquila announced a liquid-cooled edge data center co-development program featuring the first ruggedized modular edge data center developed around the Aquarius liquid cooled compute platform. This platform combines TAS’s industry-leading efficient modular data centers with Aquarius’s liquid cooled compute, switching, and storage to address the need for small modular data centers.The post Aquila and TAS Energy Launch Liquid Cooled Edge Data Center Solution appeared first on insideHPC.

The new TOP500 list is out, and Rad is Free HPC is here podcasting the scoop in their own special way. With two new systems in the TOP10, there are many different perspectives to share. "The Cori supercomputer, a Cray XC40 system installed at Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), slipped into the number 5 slot with a Linpack rating of 14.0 petaflops. Right behind it at number 6 is the new Oakforest-PACS supercomputer, a Fujitsu PRIMERGY CX1640 M1 cluster, which recorded a Linpack mark of 13.6 petaflops."The post Radio Free HPC Reviews the New TOP500 appeared first on insideHPC.

FPGAs will become increasing important for organizations that have a wide range of applications that can benefit from performance increases. Rather than a brute force method to increasing performance in a data center by purchasing and maintaining racks of hardware and associated costs, FPGAs may be able to equal and exceed the performance of additional servers, while reducing costs as well.The post Can FPGAs Help You? appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Seagate Technology introduced the ClusterStor 300N storage system with Nytro Intelligent I/O Manager, the newest addition to its family of scale-out storage systems for high-performance computing and the first with a flash cache accelerator. “Seagate’s ClusterStor 300N expands on our proven, engineered systems approach that delivers performance efficiency and value for HPC environments of any size, using a hybrid technology architecture to handle tough workloads at a fraction of the cost of all-flash approaches.”The post Seagate Accelerates ClusterStor with Flash appeared first on insideHPC.

Welcome to the Mobile Edition for the Print ‘n Fly Guide to SC16 in Salt Lake City. Inside this guide you will find technical features on supercomputing, HPC interconnects, and the latest developments on the road to exascale. It also has great recommendations on food, entertainment, and transportation in SLC.The post Mobile Edition: Print ‘n Fly Guide to SC16 in Salt Lake City appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Penguin Computing announced several important achievements of its Penguin Computing On-Demand (POD) HPC cloud service, including a recent 50 percent increase in capacity and plans to double POD’s total capacity in Q1 2017. The upgrade will include new Intel Xeon processors and Intel Omni-Path architecture. “Rapid demand for and growth in our POD business reflects the significant benefits customers are experiencing, particularly since we announced availability of the OCP-compliant Tundra platform on POD late last year,” said Tom Coull, President and CEO, Penguin Computing. “With the Tundra platform, our customers have greater capacity due to faster scaling combined with increased performance and streamlined costs. Tundra on POD also highlights the growth and maturing market role of open computing, with thousands of high-speed, cost-efficient cores available to meet customers’ needs for faster, easier deployment of capacity at a low cost.”The post Omni Path Comes to Penguin Computing On-Demand appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the Intel HPC Developer Conference, Ananth Sankaranarayanan from Intel describes how the company is optimizing Machine Learning frameworks for Intel platforms. Open source frameworks often are not optimized for a particular chip, but bringing Intel's developer tools to bear can result in significant speedups. For meaningful impact and business value, organizations require that the time to train a deep learning model be reduced from weeks to hours. In this talk, we will present the details of the optimization and characterization of Intel-Caffe and the support of new deep learning convolutional neural network primitives in the Intel Math Kernel Library."The post Accelerating Machine Learning on Intel Platforms appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Cray announced the launch of the Cray XC50 supercomputer – the company’s fastest supercomputer ever with a peak performance of one petaflop in a single cabinet. "Supercomputing applications are evolving to include more deep learning algorithms, and with this evolution, the uses for GPUs in our systems are increasing, enabling our customers to use new analytics techniques to gain insight from increasingly large and complex data,” said Ryan Waite, Cray senior vice president of products. “The new Cray XC50 system represents a major advancement in our supercomputing capabilities. It provides the highest performance density of any Cray supercomputer, and gives customers the computational resources they need to take on larger, more complex workloads, as well as the next generation of scientific challenges.”The post New Cray XC50 Delivers 1 Petaflop Per Cabinet appeared first on insideHPC.

If the keys to health, longevity, and a better overall quality of life are encoded in our individual genetic make-up then few advances in the history of medicine can match the significance and potential impact of the Human Genome Project. Instigated in 1985 and since that time, the race has been centered on dramatically improving the breadth and depth of genomic understanding as well as reducing the costs involved in sequencing, storing, and processing an individual’s genomic information.The post Enabling Personalized Medicine through Genomic Workflow Acceleration appeared first on insideHPC.

"We go to the show for the technology, the engineering, the science, and the math. It’s HPCMatters and STEM. The vendors are showcasing their technology and the science their technology has enabled. The research exhibits are showing how they are contributing to the scientific process with the largest supercomputers that have cool names. That’s what’s so great about SC: It brings together many of the brilliant minds behind these technologies."The post Top 10 Things to Love About HPC and the SC16 Conference appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC16, Dr. Eng Lim Goh from HPE/SGI discusses new trends in HPC Energy Efficiency and Deep Learning. "SGI's leadership in data analytics derives from deep expertise in High Performance Computing and over two decades delivering many of the world's fastest supercomputers. Leveraging this experience and SGI's innovative shared and distributed memory computing solutions for data analytics enables organizations to achieve greater insight, accelerate innovation, and gain competitive advantage."The post Fireside Chat: Dr. Eng Lim Goh on New Trends in HPC Energy Efficiency & Deep Learning appeared first on insideHPC.

"Adaptive Computing is driving up our customers’ productivity by helping them gain true insight into how their resources are being used, how to handle future capacity planning, and the service levels they are delivering to their most critical projects,” says Marty Smuin, CEO of Adaptive Computing. “This latest solution helps deliver the insights that organizations need in order to eliminate waste, avoid unnecessary delays, and make the changes that will align resources to better achieve organizational goals.”The post Adaptive Computing Rolls Out New Reporting & Analytics Tool appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, Jason Stowe from Cycle Computing provides an update on the world of HPC in the Cloud. After that, he describes how the company is augmenting its software capabilities so that more users can take advantage of HPC for their toughest computing challenges. “Our CycleCloud V6 further optimizes what is already unique about its predecessor, bringing unmatched scalability, provisioning, and data management in a secure process. We are extremely pleased to bring V6 to market.”The post Podcast: How Cycle Computing is Riding the Wave of HPC in the Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

"Real-time-analytics and Big Data environments are extremely demanding and the network is critical in linking together the extra high performance IBM POWER based servers and Tencent Cloud’s massive amounts of data,”said Amir Prescher, Sr. Vice President, Business Development, at Mellanox Technologies. “Tencent Cloud developed an optimized hardware/software platform to achieve new computing records, showing that Mellanox’s 100Gb/s Ethernet technology can deliver total infrastructure efficiency and improves application performance, making them ideal for Big Data applications.”The post Tencent Cloud Breaks World Record for Data Sorting with IBM & Mellanox appeared first on insideHPC.

One of the primary conversations these days in the field of networking is whether it is better to onload network functions onto the CPU or better to offload these functions to the interconnect hardware. "Onloading interconnect technology is easier to build, but the issue becomes the CPU utilization; because the CPU must manage and execute network operations, it has less availability for applications, which is its primary purpose."The post Offloading vs. Onloading: The Case of CPU Utilization appeared first on insideHPC.

Deep learning is one of the hottest topics at SC16. Now, DK Panda and his team at Ohio State University have announced an exciting new High-Performance Deep Learning project that aims to bring HPC technologies to the DL field. "Availability of large data sets like ImageNet and massively parallel computation support in modern HPC devices like NVIDIA GPUs have fueled a renewed interest in Deep Learning (DL) algorithms. This has triggered the development of DL frameworks like Caffe, Torch, TensorFlow, and CNTK. However, most DL frameworks have been limited to a single node. The objective of the HiDL project is to exploit modern HPC technologies and solutions to scale out and accelerate DL frameworks."The post DK Panda Team Launches High-Performance Deep Learning Project appeared first on insideHPC.

This version of COMPSs, available from today, updates the result of the team’s work in the last years on the provision of a set of tools that helps developers to program and execute their applications efficiently on distributed computational infrastructures such as clusters, grids and clouds. COMPSs is a task based programming model known for notably improving the performance of large scale applications by automatically parallelizing their execution.The post BSC Releases COMPSs Version 2.0 at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today OpenSFS, the nonprofit organization dedicated to the success of the Lustre file system, announced organizational changes to give its users—the researchers and scientists who use Lustre every day—more of a say in how OpenSFS moves forward. "Now the time has come for those who rely most on Lustre—its users—to guide OpenSFS into the future," said Stephen Simms, OpenSFS president and manager, high performance file systems at Indiana University.The post OpenSFS Reinvents Itself with a Focus on Lustre Users appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Appentra Solutions announced that the company will participate in the Emerging Technologies Showcase at SC16. As an HPC startup, Appentra was selected for its Parallware technology, an LLVM-based software technology that assists in the parallelization of scientific codes with OpenMP and OpenACC. "The new Parallware Trainer is a great tool for providing support to parallel programmers on their daily work,” said Xavier Martorell, Parallel Programming Models Group Manager at Barcelona Supercomputing Center.The post Appentra Solutions will be part of SC16 Emerging Technologies Showcase appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP) today announced that it has selected four co-design centers as part of a 4 year, $48 million funding award. The first year is funded at $12 million, and is to be allocated evenly among the four award recipients. “By targeting common patterns of computation and communication, known as “application motifs”, we are confident that these ECP co-design centers will knock down key performance barriers and pave the way for applications to exploit all that capable exascale has to offer.”The post Exascale Computing Project Announces $48 Million to Establish Four Exascale Co-Design Centers appeared first on insideHPC.

“We chose to work with CoolIT Systems because their solutions are modular and robust, and as a result the most flexible and efficient for our situation,” says Keith Vanderlinde, Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto. “With the custom liquid cooling solution, we can drastically reduce CHIME’s energy consumption and squeeze additional processing out of the GPUs.”The post Custom Liquid Cooling to Support Canada’s Largest Radio Telescope appeared first on insideHPC.

Researchers and staff from the U.S. Department of Energy’s national laboratories will showcase some of DOE’s best computing and networking innovations and techniques at SC16 in Salt Lake City. "Computational scientists working for various DOE laboratories have been in involved in the conference since its 1988 beginnings, and this year’s event is no different. Experts from 14 national laboratories will be sharing a booth featuring speakers, presentations, demonstrations, discussions and simulations."The post DOE to Showcase Leadership in HPC at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

Intel Omni-Path Architecture (Intel OPA) volume shipments started a mere nine months ago in February of this year, but Intel’s high-speed, low-latency fabric for HPC has covered significant ground around the globe, including integration in HPC deployments making the Top500 list for June 2016. Intel’s fabric makes up 48 percent of installations running 100 Gbps fabrics on the Top500 June list, and they expect a significant increase in Top500 deployments, including one that could end up in the stratosphere among the top ten machines on the list.The post Intel Omni-Path Architecture Fabric, the Choice of Leading HPC Institutions appeared first on insideHPC.