High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

While all users of HPC technology want the fastest performance available, price and power consumption always seem to come into play, whether in the initial planning or at a later time. Standard performance measures exist that may or may not relate to an end user’s application mix, but it is important to understand the various benchmark results that go into determining the performance of a CPU, a server or an overall cluster.The post InsideHPC Guide To Flexible HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

SC16 has announced the winner of their Test of Time Award. This year the winning paper "Automatically Tuned Linear Algebra Software" by Clint Whaley and Jack Dongarra. The paper, which has received hundreds of citations with new citations still appearing, is about ATLAS - an autotuning, optimized implementation of the Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS).The post 1998 ATLAS Paper Wins SC16 Test of Time Award appeared first on insideHPC.

ISC 2016 is only a week away, and the conference expects to host over 3000 supercomputing professionals from around the world. To bring some of the highlights home, the conference is planning to livestream video from the HPCAC-ISC Student Cluster Competition Awards Session.The post ISC to Livestream Student Cluster Awards Ceremony appeared first on insideHPC.

OCF in the UK reports that the company continues to expand its operations. The high performance computing integrator is recruiting a number of new staff to meet the growing appetite and demand for HPC and data analytics solutions across universities, research institutes and commercial businesses in the UK.The post OCF Staffs Up Largest HPC Delivery Team in the UK appeared first on insideHPC.

Gleb Budman from Backblaze presented this talk at the 2016 MSST Conference. "For Q1 2016 we are reporting on 61,590 operational hard drives used to store encrypted customer data in our data center. In Q1 2016, the hard drives in our data center, past and present, totaled over one billion hours in operation to date. That’s nearly 42 million days or 114,155 years worth of spinning hard drives. Let’s take a look at what these hard drives have been up to."The post Learnings from Operating 200 PB of Disk-Based Storage appeared first on insideHPC.

David Bolton from Slashdot shows how ‘embarrassingly parallel’ code can be sped up over 2000x (not percent) by utilizing Intel tools including the Intel Python compiler and OpenMP. "The Intel Distribution for Python* 2017 Beta program is now available. The Beta product adds new Python packages like scikit-learn, mpi4py, numba, conda, tbb (Python interfaces to Intel Threading Building Blocks) and pyDAAL (Python interfaces to Intel Data Analytics Acceleration Library). "The post Video: Speeding Up Code with the Intel Distribution for Python appeared first on insideHPC.

Lawrence Livermore National Lab is seeking an Associate Director for Computation in our Job of the Week. LLNL seeks to fill the position of Associate Director (AD) for Computation, a position key to the continued success of LLNL’s world-premier high performance computing, computer science, and data science enterprise. The AD for Computation is responsible for […]The post Job of the Week: Associate Director for Computation at Livermore appeared first on insideHPC.

Argonne Distinguished Fellow Paul Messina has been tapped to lead the Exascale Computing Project, heading a team with representation from the six major participating DOE national laboratories: Argonne, Los Alamos, Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, Oak Ridge and Sandia. The project will focus its efforts on four areas: Applications, Software, Hardware, and Exascale Systems.The post Paul Messina on the New ECP Exascale Computing Project appeared first on insideHPC.

Intel is offering a 4-part summer series of developer training workshops at Stanford University to introduce high performance computing tools.The post Intel Developer Summer Workshops Coming to Stanford appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the ACM Association for Computing Machinery announced the election of new officers who will lead the organization for a two-year term beginning July 1. Heading the new team will be incoming President Vicki L. Hanson. Hanson is a Distinguished Professor of Computing at Rochester Institute of Technology, and Professor and Chair of Inclusive Technologies at University of Dundee. Joining Hanson as Vice President will be Cherri M. Pancake, Professor Emeritus and Intel Faculty Fellow in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University; and, as Secretary/Treasurer, Elizabeth Churchill, Director of User Experience at Google.The post ACM Elects First All-Female Leadership Team appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the PASC16 conference, Patrick Sanan from USi Lugano & ETC Zurich presents: Extreme-Scale Multigrid Components within PETSc. "Elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs) frequently arise in continuum descriptions of physical processes relevant to science and engineering. Multilevel preconditioners represent a family of scalable techniques for solving discrete PDEs of this type and thus are the method of choice for high-resolution simulations."The post Video: Extreme-Scale Multigrid Components within PETSc appeared first on insideHPC.

In this WKAR podcast, Andy Keen from Michigan State University describes MSU's new Laconia supercomputer. The $3-million system is part of a cluster that’s run by their ICER High Performance Computing Center. "It’s an exciting time for the computational sciences at MSU,” said iCER Director Kennie Merz. “Our researchers are poised to tackle transformative problems ranging from the discovery of new drugs to understanding the universe we live in.”The post Podcast: Laconia Supercomputer Coming to MSU appeared first on insideHPC.

While HPC has its roots in academia and government where extreme performance was the primary goal, high performance computing has evolved to serve the needs of businesses with sophisticated monitoring, pre-emptive memory error detection, and workload management capabilities. This evolution has enabled “production supercomputing,” where resilience can be sustained without sacrificing performance and job throughput.The post insideHPC Guide to Production Supercomputing appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Bright Computing announced a partnership with ProfitBricks, the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) company based in Germany. "Cloud-based solutions are increasingly appealing as they offer a cost-effective alternative to traditional on-premise solutions," said Petra-Maria Grohs, CSO EMEAA at ProfitBricks. "Infrastructure is no exception and we are excited at the level of interest we are seeing in moving HPC and Big Data environments into the cloud, in order to unlock cost and time savings.”The post Bright Computing Partners with ProfitBricks for Elastic HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

"Directives can be used as hints to the compiler to vectorize a loop. The developer would have better knowledge of any dependencies that a compiler, which must adhere to a number of rules when deciding if a loop can be vectorized. Directives force the compiler to vectorize, based on the knowledge of the developer, thus, if something does not work correctly, it is the responsibility of the developer to fix it, rather than blame the compiler."The post Compiler Directives for High Performance Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

"The performance expectations placed on data centers today are unprecedented and require organizations to make infrastructure decisions that meet today’s demands while anticipating future growth needs,” said Kevin Deierling, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies. “Mellanox’s 25GbE adapters are designed to serve as direct replacement for commonly deployed 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters. For example, just one port of 25GbE delivers 2.5 times more bandwidth per link, consumes less power, requires half the cabling, and half the switch ports versus multiple 10GbE ports, and thus enables application acceleration at a lower cost.”The post Mellanox Rolls Out ConnectX-4 25 Gb/s Ethernet Adapters appeared first on insideHPC.

"Storage technologies are quickly innovating to reduce latency, providing a significant performance improvement for today's cutting-edge applications. NVM Express (NVMe) is a significant step forward in high-performance, low-latency storage I/O and reduction of I/O stack overheads. NVMe over Fabrics is an essential technology to extend NVMe storage connectivity such that NVMe-enabled hosts can access NVMe-enabled storage anywhere in the datacenter, ensuring that the performance of today's and tomorrow's solid state storage technologies is fully unlocked, and that the network itself is not a bottleneck."The post Specification Released for NVM Express over Fabrics appeared first on insideHPC.

"We live in an era in which the creation of new data is growing exponentially such that every two days we create as much new data as we did from the beginning of mankind until the year 2003. One of the greatest scientific challenges of the 21st century is to effectively understand and make use of the vast amount of information being produced. Visual data analysis will be among our most important tools to understand such large and often complex data. In this talk, I will present state-of-the-art visualization techniques, applied to important Big Data problems in science, engineering, and medicine."The post Chris Johnson Presents: Big Data Visual Analysis appeared first on insideHPC.

Are you coming to ISC 2016? There's a new helpful Attendee Guide available that includes information on getting there, agenda planning tools, an attendee list, and most everything else you might need to get the most out of your visit to Frankfurt.The post ISC 2016 Attendee Guide is a Great Resource for Frankfurt appeared first on insideHPC.

"The US, like the EU and other countries, is engaged in a national initiative that aims to deploy exascale computing platforms early in the next decade. The outlines of such platforms are starting to emerge. We shall survey, in our talk, the current roadmap for exascale computing and the main challenges this roadmap entails. We shall also discuss the likely evolution of HPC beyond exascale, in the "post-Moore" era."The post Marc Snir Presents: Exascale Computing and Beyond appeared first on insideHPC.

Today NVIDIA unveiled a comprehensive global program to support the innovation and growth of startups that are driving new breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and data science. "The NVIDIA Inception Program provides unique tools, resources and opportunities to the waves of entrepreneurs starting new companies, so they can develop products and services with a first-mover advantage."The post NVIDIA Inception Program Offers Tools for Deep Learning appeared first on insideHPC.

SGI has been positioned by Gartner in the "Visionaries" quadrant of the May 2016 Magic Quadrant for Modular Servers. "Visionaries have an ambitious vision of the future and are making significant investments in the development of unique technologies. "The post Gartner Positions SGI in “Visionaries” Quadrant for Modular Servers appeared first on insideHPC.

"The Women in IT Networking at SC (WINS) program was developed as a means for addressing the prevalent gender gap that exists in Information Technology particularly in the fields of network engineering and high performance computing. The 2015 program* enabled five talented early to mid-career women from diverse regions of the U.S. research and education community IT field to participate in the ground-up construction of SCinet, one of the fastest and most advanced computer networks in the world."The post Call for Participation: Women in IT Networking at SC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

"The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center recently added Bridges to its lineup of world-class supercomputers. Bridges is designed for uniquely flexible, interoperating capabilities to empower research communities that previously have not used HPC and enable new data-driven insights. It also provides exceptional performance to traditional HPC users. It converges the best of High Performance Computing (HPC), High Performance Data Analytics (HPDA), machine learning, visualization, Web services, and community gateways in a single architecture."The post Building Bridges to the Future appeared first on insideHPC.

Over at SGI, Gabriel Broner writes that the company's big memory SGI UV 300 and SGI UV 30EX servers are now available with the Intel Xeon processor E7-8800 v4 and E7-4800 v4 product families. Using the new processors enabled SGI to again set new overall world records with results of 80.1 for SPECompG_base2012, and 84.2 for SPECompG_peak2012.The post SGI Sets New SPEC OMP World Record with Intel Xeon E7 V4 appeared first on insideHPC.

IDC will hold a pair of simultaneous events on Tuesday, June 21 at 7:30am - 10:00am at ISC 2016 in Frankfurt. "IDC cordially invites you and other HPC community members to attend our annual HPC market update breakfast briefing at the ISC'16 conference in Frankfurt. This year, for the first time, we will hold two different events - the annual update on the whole HPC market, and at the request of the ISC organizers, a separate presentation focused on the HPC market for industry/commerce."The post IDC to Host a Pair of Special Events at ISC 2016 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today One Stop Systems announced that its the GPUltima product line now employs Bright Computing's HPC Cluster Manager software. Bright Computing is a provider of comprehensive software solutions for provisioning and managing HPC clusters. Where conventional computer cluster systems use CPUs as the primary data processor, the GPUltima employs numbers of GPU cards, providing 10 times the performance by adding thousands more cores," said Steve Cooper, CEO of One Stop Systems. "The GPUltima is completely 'application-ready', configured and tested to the customer's specifications, so that the customer can begin processing immediately. The unique cluster management and monitoring software and the service and support packages that accompany the GPUltima make this a user-friendly system that allows the customer to begin his work without having to configure the cluster."The post Bright Cluster Manager Comes to GPUltima from One Stop Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

New HPC products and technologies. Compelling demos. Insights from top Intel HPC architects. More than 60 presentations from Intel and industry experts. Additional details about Intel® Scalable System Framework. Intel will have something for everyone at this year’s International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt, Germany.The post See What’s New from Intel at ISC 2016 appeared first on insideHPC.

"Dell is proud to collaborate with South Africa’s CSIR on the delivery of the fastest HPC system in Africa. The Lengau system will provide access and open doors to help drive new research, new innovations and new national economic benefits,” said Jim Ganthier, vice president and general manager, Engineered Solutions, HPC and Cloud at Dell. “While Lengau benefits from the latest technology advancements, from performance to density to energy efficiency, the most important benefit is that Lengau will enable new opportunities and avenues in research, the ability to help spur private sector growth in South Africa and, ultimately, help enable human potential.”The post Dell Powers 1 Petaflop Lengau Supercomputer for CHPC in South Africa appeared first on insideHPC.

Our in-depth series on Intel architects continues with this profile of Mark Seager, a key driver in the company's mission to achieve Exascale performance on real applications. "Creating and incentivizing an exascale program is huge. Yet more important, in Mark’s view, NCSI has inspired agencies to work together to spread the value from predictive simulation. In the widely publicized Project Moonshot sponsored by Vice President Biden, the Department of Energy is sharing codes with the National Institutes of Health to simulate the chemical expression pathway of genetic mutations in cancer cells with exascale systems."The post With the Help of Dijkstra’s Law, Intel’s Mark Seager is Changing the Scientific Method appeared first on insideHPC.

Bret Weber from DDN presented this talk at the 2016 MSST Conference. "SSDs and all flash arrays are being marketed as a panacea. This may be true if you’re a small to medium enterprise that simply needs more performance for email servers or wants to speed-up just a few hundred VMs. But, for Enterprise At-scale and High Performance Computing environments, identifying and removing I/O bottlenecks is much more complex than simply exchanging spinning disk drives with flash devices. Aside from performance – efficiency, scalability and integration are also critical success factors in larger and non-standard environments. In this domain, selecting a partner with the tools, technology and experience to holistically examine and optimize your entire I/O path can deliver orders of magnitude greater acceleration and competitive advantage to your organization."The post Video: Adoption Trends for Solid State in Big Data Sites appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Intel announced the new Intel Xeon processor E7-8800/4800 v4 processor family for High Performance Data Analytics. Designed with the enterprise in mind, the Intel Xeon processor E7 v4 family offers robust performance, the industry’s largest memory capacity per socket, advanced reliability and hardware enhanced security for real-time analytics so that businesses can rapidly gain actionable insights from massive and complex data sets.The post Intel Ramps up HPDA with New Xeon E7 v4 Family of Processors appeared first on insideHPC.

Today ThinkParQ from Germany announced certification of BeeGFS over Intel Omni-Path Architecture (OPA). “Without a doubt, Intel has made a big leap in performance with the new 100Gbps OPA technology compared to previous interconnect generations," said Sven Breuner, CEO of ThinkParQ. "The fact that we didn’t need to modify even a single line of the BeeGFS source code to deliver this new level of throughput, confirms that the BeeGFS internal design is really future-proof.”The post BeeGFS Certified on Intel Omni-Path at 12GB/s per server appeared first on insideHPC.

Chris Mason from Acceleware presented this talk at GTC 2016. "This session will focus on real life examples including an RF powered contact lens, a wireless capsule endoscopy, and a smart watch. The session will also outline the basics of the subgridding algorithm along with the GPU implementation and the development challenges. Performance results will illustrate the significant reduction in computation times when using a localized subgridded mesh running on an NVIDIA Tesla GPU."The post Video: Using GPUs for Electromagnetic Simulations of Human Interface Technology appeared first on insideHPC.

The MVAPICH User Group (MUG) meeting has issued its Call for Presentations. The event takes place August 15-17 in Columbus, Ohio.The post Call for Presentations: MVAPICH User Group (MUG) Meeting appeared first on insideHPC.

"Newton's explanation of planetary orbits is one of the greatest achievements of science. We will follow Feynman's approach to show how the motion of the planets around the sun can be calculated using computers and without using Newton's advanced mathematics. This talk will convince you that doing physics with Python is way more fun than the way you did physics in high school or university."The post Video: Computational Physics with Python appeared first on insideHPC.

The Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation has released the HSA 1.1 specification, significantly enhancing the ability to integrate open and proprietary IP blocks in heterogeneous designs. The new specification is the first to define the interfaces that enable IP blocks from different vendors to communicate, interoperate and collectively compose an HSA system.The post HSA 1.1 Specification Adds Multi-Vendor Architecture Support appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Scot Schultz from Mellanox and Terry Myers from HPE write that the two companies are collaborating to push the boundaries of high performance computing. "So while every company must weigh the cost and commitment of upgrading its data center or HPC cluster to EDR, the benefits of such an upgrade go well beyond the increase in bandwidth. Only HPE solutions that include Mellanox end-to-end 100Gb/s EDR deliver efficiency, scalability, and overall system performance that results in maximum performance per TCO dollar."The post HPE and Mellanox: Advanced Technology Solutions for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Researchers from Michigan State University are using the Mira supercomputer to perform large-scale 3-D simulations of the final moments of a supernova’s life cycle. While the 3-D simulation approach is still in its infancy, early results indicate that the models are providing a clearer picture than ever before of the mechanisms that drive supernova explosions.The post Supercomputing Supernova Explosions on Mira appeared first on insideHPC.

"IBM has developed new scale-up and scale-out systems — with 16 million neurons — that will be presented in Dr Modha's pioneering research talk. Watson wins at Jeopardy and enters industrial applications while AlphaGo defeats the human Go champion. No day goes by before the dooms day prediction of AI infused Robots taking over our world comes up in the news. Visions of HAL and Terminator coming alive? Will Artificial Intelligence make us obsolete?"The post Video: Will AI & Robotics Make Humans Obsolete? appeared first on insideHPC.

"Because water can transport heat 25 times more efficiently than air, ‘Triton’ can run high performing components faster and more efficiently than traditional air-cooled systems. Its ability to sub-cool the processor and operate at higher frequencies means that Triton can deliver up to 59% greater performance than the popular Intel Xeon processor E5-2680v4 for similar costs."The post Dell Unveils Triton Liquid Cooling Technology appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) today announced the immediate availability of the TPCx-BB benchmark. The benchmark is designed to measure the performance of Hadoop based systems including MapReduce, Apache Hive, and Apache Spark Machine Learning Library (MLlib).The post New TPCx-BB Benchmark Compares Big Data Analytics Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

Over at the Dell HPC Community, Jim Ganthier writes that TACC is planning to deploy its 18 Petflop Stampede 2 supercomputer based on Dell servers running Intel Knights Landing processors. "Stampede 2 will do more than just meet growing demand from those who run data-intensive research. Imagine the discoveries that will be made as a result of this award and the new system. Now more than ever is an exciting time to be in HPC."The post Stampede 2 Supercomputer at TACC to Sport 18 Petaflops appeared first on insideHPC.

Today LBNL released version 2.0 of its innovative Singularity container software.The post Singularity 2.0 Software Makes Linux Applications More Portable appeared first on insideHPC.

"One of the benefits of our ClusterStor modular architecture is its flexibility - we can deliver a very comparable performance with either Lustre or Spectrum Scale on the same extensible architecture. There are two key reasons for that balance of performance and flexibility. Firstly, we have a unique scale out storage architecture with a distributed processing model, meaning you’re not tied to a centralized legacy RAID controller hardware. Secondly, there is no proprietary hardware or RAID firmware in the system. All the software runs in a standard Linux environment, so we are able to take our software stack and it is really agnostic as to whether we are running with Lustre or SS."The post Interview: Ken Claffey on Seagate HPC Innovation On Deck at ISC 2016 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today IBM expanded its portfolio of software-defined infrastructure solutions with cognitive features to help clients improve the management of computing resources to achieve faster, results from data-driven applications and analytics. As part of the announcement, the company has rebranded its Platform computing software as IBM Spectrum Computing. "IBM Spectrum Computing software includes IBM Spectrum Conductor, IBM Spectrum LSF and IBM Spectrum Symphony. The expanded software-defined computing portfolio complements the IBM Spectrum Storage software-defined storage family."The post Platform Rebrands as IBM Spectrum Computing with Focus on HPDA appeared first on insideHPC.

For maximum performance, data needs to flow into and out of the vectorization units. There are a few things to remember regarding laying out the data to gain high performance. These include, data layout, alignment, prefetching, and store operations. "Prefetching is also extremely important in HPC applications that use coprocessors. If the vectors are aligned, then the data can be streamed to the math units very efficiently, with data being prefetched, rather than the system having to load registers from various memory storage."The post Data Layout for High Performance appeared first on insideHPC.

"In the past, researchers often had to wait in line for the computing power for scientific discovery. With Alces Flight, you can take your compute projects from 0 to 60 in a few minutes. Researchers and scientists can quickly spin up multiple nodes with pre-installed compilers, libraries, and hundreds of scientific computing applications. Flight comes with a catalog of more than 750 built-in scientific computing applications, libraries and versions, covering nearly everything from engineering, chemistry and genomics, to statistics and remote sensing."The post Alces Flight from AWS Lets You Build a “Self-service Supercomputer in Minutes” appeared first on insideHPC.

Denver-based Boom Technology is leveraging Rescale’s cloud-based simulation and optimization system to enable a rebirth of supersonic passenger travel. "Rescale’s cloud platform is a game-changer for engineering. It gives Boom computing resources comparable to building a large on premise HPC center. Rescale lets us move fast with minimal capital spending and resources overhead,” Joshua Krall, Co-founder & CTO.The post Rescale HPC Cloud to Foster Return of Supersonic Travel appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Mellanox announced the BlueField family of programmable processors for networking and storage applications. "As a networking offload co-processor, BlueField will complement the host processor by performing wire-speed packet processing in-line with the network I/O, freeing the host processor to deliver more virtual networking functions (VNFs),” said Linley Gwennap, principal analyst at the Linley Group. “Network offload results in better rack density, lower overall power consumption, and deterministic networking performance.”The post Mellanox Introduces BlueField SoC Programmable Processors appeared first on insideHPC.