High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

In this video from the 2016 MSST Conference, Dave Anderson from Seagate presents: Whither Hard Disk Archives? The talk was part of a panel discussion on Data-intensive Workflows.The post Video: Whither Hard Disk Archives? appeared first on insideHPC.

"One of the most recurrent themes is that of open-source vs. proprietary code. This debate is often painted with the idealistic open-source evangelists on one side, and the business-focused proprietary software advocates on the other. This is, of course, an unfair depiction of the topic. In reality, when debating open-source vs. proprietary, several issues tend to get conflated into one argument – open-source vs. closed-source, free vs. paid-for, restrictive vs flexible licensing, supported vs. unsupported, code quality, and so on."The post Open-source vs. Proprietary – Keeping Ideology Out of the Equation appeared first on insideHPC.

"The world of artificial intelligence is rapidly evolving and affecting every aspect of our daily life. And soon this progress will be felt in the pharmaceutical industry. We set up the Pharma.AI division to help pharmaceutical companies significantly accelerate their R&D and increase the number of approved drugs, but in the process we came up with over 800 strong hypotheses in oncology, cardiovascular, metabolic and CNS space and started basic validation. We are cautious about making strong statements, but if this approach works, it will uberize the pharmaceutical industry and generate unprecedented number of QALY," said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, CEO of Insilico Medicine, Inc.The post Insilico Applies Deep Learning to Drug Discovery appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Vela Software announced that it has acquired Tecplot, a leading provider of fluid dynamics visualization and analysis software for engineers and scientists in the aerospace and oil & gas vertical markets.The post Vela Software Acquires Tecplot Fluid Dynamics Software appeared first on insideHPC.

"The process of developing HPC software requires consideration of issues in software design as well as practices that support the collaborative writing of well-structured code that is easy to maintain, extend, and support. This presentation will provide an overview of development environments and how to configure, build, and deploy HPC software using some of the tools that are frequently used in the community."The post Video: Developing, Configuring, Building, and Deploying HPC Software appeared first on insideHPC.

The TERATEC Forum 2016 will host a June 29 workshop on HPC, Connected Objects, and IoT Infrastructures. The full event takes place June 28-29 in Palaiseau, France. "Many innovations and new generation systems are based on connected things equipped with massive instrumentation and integrated within Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) infrastructure. This workshop will be focused on new HPC software and infrastructure technologies integrated within these future global smart systems."The post Teratec Forum to Spotlight HPC and IoT appeared first on insideHPC.

"Weather prediction using high performance computing relies on having physically based models of the atmosphere that can deliver forecasts well in advance of the weather actually happening. ECMWF has embarked on a scalability program together with the NWP and climate modeling community in Europe. The talk will give an overview of the principles underlying numerical weather prediction as well as a description of the HPC related challenges that are facing the NWP and climate modeling communities today."The post Weather Prediction and the Scalability Challenge appeared first on insideHPC.

The process to vectorize application code is very important and can result in major performance improvements when coupled with vector hardware. In many cases, incremental work can mean a large payoff in terms of performance. "When applications that have successfully been implemented on supercomputers or have made use of SIMD instructions such as SSE or AVX are excellent candidates for a methodology to take advantage of modern vector capabilities in servers today."The post Vectorization Steps appeared first on insideHPC.

Ansys, a provider of engineering simulation technology, has announced the release of its SeaScape architecture to help engineers accelerate the optimization of designs using a combination of elastic computation, machine learning, big data analytics and simulation technology.The post Ansys SeaHawk Brings Big Data Analytics to EDA appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Moshe Rappoport of the IBM Research THINK Lab - Zurich, takes into the world of quantum computing. He explains why the recent steps that scientists made this field are very likely just the beginning of yet another quantum leap in the history of computing. "The IBM Quantum Experience is a virtual lab where you can design and run your own algorithms through the cloud on real quantum processors located in the IBM Quantum Lab at the Thomas J Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York."The post Video: Why Quantum Computing Matters appeared first on insideHPC.

Today AMD announced the Multiuser GPU (MxGPU) for blade servers, a new graphics virtualization solution that provides workstation-class experience. Now available HPE ProLiant WS460c Gen9 blade servers, the AMD FirePro S7100X GPU is the industry’s first and only hardware-virtualized GPU that is compliant with the SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization) PCIe virtualization standard. The AMD FirePro S7100X GPU is […]The post AMD FirePro S7100X Hardware-Virtualized GPU Comes to HPE Blade Servers appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Bright Computing announced that Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning (SSSIHL) in India has chosen Bright infrastructure management technology to manage its HPC environment. This heterogeneous and hybrid cluster at SSSIHL is the first step towards achieving a self-sufficient HPC facility for the Institute’s research work, and we are pleased that Bright is […]The post Sri Sathya Sai Institute in India Chooses Bright Technology appeared first on insideHPC.

"We want to encourage and support that collaborative behavior in whatever way we can, because there are a multitude of problems in government agencies and commercial entities that seem to have high performance computing solutions. Think of bringing together the tremendous computational expertise you find from the DOE labs with the problems that someone like the National Institutes of Health is trying to solve. You couple those two together and you really can create something amazing that will affect all our lives. We want to broaden their exposure to the possibilities of HPC and help that along. It’s important, and it will allow all of us in HPC to more broadly impact the world with the large systems as well as the more moderate-scale systems."The post Disruptive Opportunities and a Path to Exascale: A Conversation with HPC Visionary Alan Gara of Intel appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Symbolic IO emerged from stealth mode with a suite of products destined to change the way industry defines storage and computing architecture, by bringing to market the first truly computational-defined storage solution. "The company’s IRIS (the Intensified RAM Intelligent Server) product will be offered in three variations: IRIS Compute, IRISVault and IRIS Store. The server solution introduces a new approach to storage and computing by rethinking how binary bits are processed and ultimately changing the way data is utilized. Symbolic’s solutions ensure that enterprise storage and compute no longer rely on media or hardware, instead “materializing” and “dematerializing” data in real-time and providing greater flexibility, performance and security."The post Symbolic IO Emerges from Stealth with First Computational-Defined Storage Solution appeared first on insideHPC.

Today CoolIT Systems announced a commercial partnership with STULZ USA. Under the agreement, the two companies will cooperate closely in delivering unique Chip-to-Atmosphere solutions across the globe.The post CoolIT Systems Partners with STULZ on Chip-to-Atmosphere Cooling appeared first on insideHPC.

The Dell HPC Community will hold their user group meeting on Monday, June 20 at the Movenpick Hotel in Frankfurt. Held in conjunction with ISC 2016, the Dell HPC Community event will feature keynote presentations by HPC experts and a networking breakfast to discuss best practices in the use of Dell HPC Systems.The post Dell HPC Community Event Coming to Frankfurt on June 20 appeared first on insideHPC.

"We took the Aries system interconnect from our supercomputers, the industry-standard architecture of our clusters, the scalable graph engine from the Urika-GD appliance, and the pre-integrated, open infrastructure of our Urika-XA system and combined them into one agile analytics platform. The Urika-GX gives our customers the tool they need to overcome their most advanced analytics challenges today, and the platform to bridge to tomorrow.”The post Cray Urika-GX System to Tackle Big Data Analytics appeared first on insideHPC.

"The promising new parameter in place of the transistor count is the perceived increase in the capacity and bandwidth of storage, driven by device, architectural, as well as packaging innovations: DRAM-alternative Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) devices, 3-D memory and logic stacking evolving from VIAs to direct silicone stacking, as well as next-generation terabit optics and networks. The overall effect of this is that, the trend to increase the computational intensity as advocated today will no longer result in performance increase, but rather, exploiting the memory and bandwidth capacities will instead be the right methodology."The post Satoshi Matsuoka Presents: The Inevitable End of Moore’s Law appeared first on insideHPC.

Today AMD, ARM, Huawei, IBM, Mellanox, Qualcomm, and Xilinx announced a collaboration to bring the CCIX high-performance open acceleration framework to data centers. The companies are collaborating on the specification for the new Cache Coherent Interconnect for Accelerators (CCIX). For the first time in the industry, a single interconnect technology specification will ensure that processors using different instruction set architectures (ISA) can coherently share data with accelerators and enable efficient heterogeneous computing – significantly improving compute efficiency for servers running data center workloads.The post CCIX Open Acceleration Framework to Coherently Share Data with Accelerators appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from ASC16, students compete in the final round of the Asia Student Cluster Challenge. "Some 175 teams from universities in North America, South America, Africa, Asia, Europe and Oceania participated in ASC16. Of these, 16 advanced to the final round held last week at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China. Armed with their custom-built systems, finalists competed on six different supercomputing application benchmarks within a 3,000W system power limit."The post Video: “What is Supercomputing?” appeared first on insideHPC.

Editor’s Note: The OpenPOWER European Summit has been officially postponed until later in 2016, but don’t miss the International Workshop on OpenPOWER for HPC on June 23 at ISC 2016. The OpenPOWER Foundation was established as a non-profit consortium to give its members the ability to innovate software/hardware solutions based on the POWER architecture. About half of […]The post OpenPOWER for HPC Workshop Coming to ISC 2016 appeared first on insideHPC.

University of Texas at Arlington physicists are preparing the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Tennessee to support the analysis of data generated from the quadrillions of proton collisions expected during this season’s Large Hadron Collider particle physics experiments.

Today the HPC Advisory Council announced its Fourth Annual RDMA Programming Competition in China. Designed to support undergraduate curriculum and talent development, this unique hands-on competition furthers students study, experience and mastery.The post HPC Advisory Council Announces 4th Annual RDMA Programming Competition appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the ISC Group announced the appointment of Prof. Dr. Jack Dongarra of University of Tennessee, USA, as the program chairman for ISC 2017. This appointment underlines the international dimension of this conference. "I am honored to be named the program chair for ISC High Performance in 2017. I have been participating and actively contributing to ISC every year over the last three decades, first as a speaker, and later as a collaborator with Hans Meuer, Erich Strohmaier, and Horst Simon as one of the TOP500 authors,” said Dongarra. “My mission as program chair for ISC 2017 is to continue to improve the quality of the ISC technical program and to help expand the HPC community.”The post ISC High Performance Announces Conference Chairs for 2017 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Lance Farrell from Science Node writes that CIPRES is a web-based gateway that allows researchers to easily explore evolutionary relationships between species using NSF supercomputers. "In the six years since it was established, CIPRES has enabled 2,300+ scientific publications, while only occupying about 1% of the NSF supercomputing resources. That’s an impressive return on investment."The post CIPRES Offers Gateway to Supercomputing Life Sciences appeared first on insideHPC.

John Shalf presented this talk at EASC2016 in Stockholm. "This talk will describe the challenges of programming future computing systems. It will then provide some highlights from the search for durable programming abstractions more closely track emerging computer technology trends so that when we convert our codes over, they will last through the next decade."The post Exascale Architecture Trends and Implications for Programming Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, ITIF hosts a hearing on the The Vital Importance of High-Performance Computing to U.S. Competitiveness and National Security. Their recently published report urges U.S. policymakers to take decisive steps to ensure the United States continues to be a world leader in high-performance computing.The post Video: The Vital Importance of HPC to U.S. Competitiveness and National Security appeared first on insideHPC.

Ohio State University is seeking a Research Computing Facilitator in our Job of the Week. "The Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) provides high-performance computing (HPC) services for Ohio’s university researchers and industrial clients. The HPC Client Services Group delivers the client experience at OSC through client engagement and administration."The post Job of the Week: Research Computing Facilitator at OSC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this TACC podcast, Ari Kahn from the Texas Advanced Computing Center and Eddie Garcia from Cloudera describe a recent Hackathon in Austin designed to tackle data challenges in the fight against the Zika virus. The Texas Advanced Computing Center provided time on the Wrangler data intensive supercomputer as a virtual workspace for the Zika hackers.The post Podcast: TACC Powers Zika Hackathon to Fight Disease appeared first on insideHPC.

"With NVIDIA GPU technology on IBM Cloud, we are one step closer to offering supercomputing performance on a pay-as-you-go basis, which makes this new approach to tackling big data problems accessible to customers of all sizes,” says Jerry Gutierrez, HPC leader for SoftLayer, an IBM Company. “We’re at an inflection point in our industry, where GPU technology is opening the door for the next wave of breakthroughs across multiple industries.”The post Nvidia M60 GPU to Speed Virtual Desktops on IBM Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

"I have been collecting massive amounts of data from my own body over the last ten years, which reveals detailed examples of the episodic evolution of this coupled immune-microbial system. An elaborate software pipeline, running on high performance computers, reveals the details of the microbial ecology and its genetic components. A variety of data science techniques are used to pull biomedical insights from this large data set. We can look forward to revolutionary changes in medical practice over the next decade."The post Larry Smarr Presents: Using Supercomputers to Reveal your Inner Microbiome appeared first on insideHPC.

The Piz Daint supercomputer spotted a large reservoir of magma right below the tiny South Korean island of Ulleung. No harm to humans is expected, but the origin of the magma pool remains unclear.The post Supercomputing Hidden Lava Lakes appeared first on insideHPC.

"Enlisting the help of World Community Grid volunteers will enable us to computationally evaluate over 20 million compounds in just the initial phase and potentially up to 90 million compounds in future phases," said Carolina Horta Andrade, Ph.D., adjunct professor at the Federal University of Goiás in Brazil and the lead researcher on the OpenZika project. "Running the OpenZika project on World Community Grid will allow us to greatly expand the scale of our project, and it will accelerate the rate at which we can obtain the results toward an antiviral drug for the Zika virus."The post IBM to Fight Zika with World Community Grid appeared first on insideHPC.

Today XSEDE announced that Dr. Pamela McCauley has been named a plenary speaker for the XSEDE16 conference. In this dynamic keynote address, McCauley will discuss the impact of innovation on individuals, nations, and the global society.The post Dr. Pam McCauley to Keynote XSEDE16 appeared first on insideHPC.

"Scientific code developers have increasingly been adopting software processes derived from the mainstream (non-scientific) community. Software practices are typically adopted when continuing without them becomes impractical. However, many software best practices need modification and/or customization, partly because the codes are used for research and exploration, and partly because of the combined funding and sociological challenges. This presentation will describe the lifecycle of scientific software and important ways in which it differs from other software development. We will provide a compilation of software engineering best practices that have generally been found to be useful by science communities, and we will provide guidelines for adoption of practices based on the size and the scope of the project."The post Video: Best Practices in HPC Software Development appeared first on insideHPC.

Steve Oberlin, chief technology officer for accelerated computing at NVIDIA, will give two NCSA 30th Anniversary Featured Lectures on May 26. The morning talk is tailored for NCSA staff, Computer Science, and Electrical and Computer Engineering students and faculty. The second talk is open to the public.The post Nvidia CTO Steve Oberlin to Discuss Rise of GPUs at NCSA 30th Anniversary appeared first on insideHPC.

Any performance improvements that could be wrung out of supercomputers by adding more power have long been exhausted. New supercomputers demand new options that will give scientists a sleek, efficient partner in making new discoveries such as the new supercomputer called Summit that's being developed and is to arrive at Oak Ridge National Lab in the next couple of years. "If necessity is the mother of invention, we'll have some inventions happening soon," says deputy division director of Argonne Leadership Computing Facility Susan Coghlan.The post Slimming Down Supercomputer Power Bills appeared first on insideHPC.

The use of vector instructions can speed up applications tremendously when used correctly. The benefit is that much more work can be done in a clock cycle than by performing the operation one at a time. The Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor was designed with strong support for vector level parallelism. "When these techniques are used either individually or in combination in different areas of the application, the performance will surely be increased, in many cases without a lot of effort."The post Using Vectors on Intel Xeon Phi appeared first on insideHPC.

D-Wave Systems will host a three-hour seminar on Quantum Computing at ISC 2016. Designed to teach HPC users more about quantum computing and how it might be applied to their most complex computing problems, the no-cost event takes place June 20 at the Frankfurt Marriott.The post Quantum Computing Seminar Coming to ISC 2016 in Frankfurt appeared first on insideHPC.

Getting started with HPC can be a challenge for SMEs, but managing a cluster doesn’t have to be a struggle. IBM’s Platform Computing group has been helping users to stand up and run clusters efficiently for years. Now, with the recently announced IBM Platform LSF Suites for Workgroups and HPC, the company has made it easier than ever to get kick the tires on High Performance Computing. "So basically, we would give you all the tools that would allow you to easily migrate from a loose collection of work stations to a small cluster environment. And we would handle the bare metal provisioning and then installing the software that you need really to manage your workload."The post Interview: Getting Started with HPC Using the New IBM LSF Platform Suites appeared first on insideHPC.

Pat McGarry from Ryft presented this talk at the HPC User Forum in Tucson. "Years in the making, the Ryft ONE combines two proven innovations in hardware and software to optimize compute, storage and I/O performance: the Ryft Hybrid FPGA/x86 Compute Platform, which leverages a massively parallel bitwise computing architecture and the Ryft Algorithmic Primitives (RAP) Library.The post Ryft: Bringing High Performance Analytics to Every Enterprise appeared first on insideHPC.

PRACEdays16 was held May 10-12 in Prague, Czech Republic. More than 220 participants joined the plenary and parallel sessions for keynote presentations and discussions about and between science, industry and HPC. "PRACEdays16 has been a success throughout with more participants, more interactions, and more awards. We clearly see the need for this conference and the entire European HPC Summit Week to be developed into the signature event for HPC in science and industry in Europe,” said Alison Kennedy Chair of the PRACE Board of Directors.The post PRACEdays16 Wraps Up in Prague appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Univa announced Navops Command, a ground breaking software suite that implements sophisticated workload placement and advanced policy management for enterprises to take full advantage of containers on any Kubernetes distribution.The post Univa Manages Enterprise Container Workloads on Kubernetes Distros appeared first on insideHPC.

Peter Bojanic presented this talk at LUG 2016 in Portland. "At LUG 2016, Seagate announced it will incorporate Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre (IEEL), a big data software platform, into its market-leading ClusterStor storage architecture for high-performance computing. The move will strengthen Seagate’s HPC data storage product line and provide customers with an additional choice of Lustre parallel file systems to help drive advancements in the HPC and big data market."The post Video: Lustre Update from Seagate Technologies appeared first on insideHPC.

Internet2 celebrated their 20th anniversary this week at the 2016 Internet2 Global Summit in Chicago. As the operator of the nation’s largest and fastest, coast-to-coast research and education infrastructure, Internet2 recognized outstanding service and contributions to its community with set of awards. "2016 marks the 20th anniversary of the founding of Internet2 and the 2016 Global Summit is an opportune time to showcase the Internet2 community’s rich history and bright future—focused on the transformation of research and education in the next 20 years and beyond."The post Internet2 Celebrates 20 Years by Recognizing Contributions to Research appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Robert Roe from Scientific Computing World describes why Nvidia is in the driver's seat for Deep Learning. "Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang's theme for the opening keynote was based on "a new computing model." Huang explained that Nvidia builds computing technologies for the most demanding computer users in the world and that the most demanding applications require GPU acceleration. 'The computers you need aren’t run of the mill. You need supercharged computing, GPU accelerated computing' said Huang."The post Nvidia in the Driver’s Seat for Deep Learning appeared first on insideHPC.

Today DataDirect Networks announced DDN Flashscale, a new family of all-flash scale-out and scale-up storage solutions, which delivers the highest performance and capacity in a cost-optimized and feature rich platform designed for Enterprise Big Data and Analytics, Web Scale Cloud, and HPC environments. "DDN Flashscale’s fast embedded PCIe fabric delivers full native performance and extreme low latency from 48 NVMe or 72 SAS or any mix of SSDs while offering cost optimized sub $1/GB all-flash storage up to 576TB, 6 Million IOPS and 60GB/s per 4U node."The post New DDN Flashscale Array Delivers NVMe Performance for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

The Flemish Supercomputer Center (VSC) is planning the deployment of a new NEC cluster that will represent Belgium’s largest investment in HPC to date. To help VSC unleash the potential of the system, Allinea software tools will be used to speed up code performance. "We are delighted to be supporting VSC in providing better education to its users around code efficiency," said David Lecomber, CEO and Founder of Allinea. "The fact of the matter is, without visibility of code performance, researchers cannot get the full value from HPC. By appreciating how their code makes a difference to project delivery, researchers can achieve more for less cost. By underlining this best practice, VSC’s approach is one that is refreshing and makes great economic sense."The post Allinea Tools to Power NEC Supercomputer at VSC in Belgium appeared first on insideHPC.

Researchers are using the Magnus supercomputer at the Pawsey Centre to explore the mysteries of two shipwrecks involved in Australia’s greatest naval disaster. "The process of generating 3D models from the photographs we’ve taken is very computationally intensive. The time it would take to process half a million photographs using our conventional techniques, using our standard computers, would take about a thousand years, so we needed to do something to bring that time down to something achievable.”The post Supercomputing 3D Shipwrecks with Magnus appeared first on insideHPC.

Tejas Karmarker from Microsoft Azure presented this talk at the HPC User Forum. "The performance and scalability of a world-class supercomputing center is now available to everyone, on demand in the cloud. Run your Windows and Linux HPC applications using high performance A8 and A9 compute instances on Azure, and take advantage of a backend network with MPI latency under 3 microseconds and non-blocking 32 Gbps throughput. This backend network includes remote direct memory access (RDMA) technology on Windows and Linux that enables parallel applications to scale to thousands of cores. Azure provides you with high memory and HPC-class CPUs to help you get results fast. Scale up and down based upon what you need and pay only for what you use to reduce costs."The post Video: Trends in HPC Cloud Computing appeared first on insideHPC.