High-Performance Computing News Analysis | 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.

Dr. Marc Snir discusses why Argonne is participating in the OpenHPC Community. "OpenHPC can be a good mechanism to make sure all the pieces of open source software in HPC fit well together. It’s an important initiative that can bring together the HPC open source software community. It can make sure that a full stack of HPC software is available in a useful manner to the user community."The post Marc Snir on Why Argonne is Part of the OpenHPC Community appeared first on insideHPC.

Rob Peglar from Micron presented this talk at the 2016 MSST Conference. "The growing demands of mobile computing and data centers continue to drive the need for high-capacity, high-performance NAND flash technology. With planar NAND nearing its practical scaling limits, delivering to those requirements has become more difficult with each generation. Enter our 3D NAND technology, which uses an innovative process architecture to provide 3X the capacity of planar NAND technologies while providing better performance and reliability. System designers who build products like laptops, mobile devices and servers can take advantage of 3D NAND’s unprecedented performance to meet the rising data movement needs for businesses and consumers."The post Innovations in Non-volatile Memory – 3D NAND and its Implications appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Seagate Technology announced that Sugon will incorporate Seagate’s latest 4TB Enterprise Performance 3.5 HDD into its new TC4600T line of server products. "Seagate is committed to developing innovative products that enable our customers to deliver higher performance while minimizing total cost of ownership,” said John Morris, vice president of enterprise products at Seagate. “Seagate’s new Enterprise Performance 3.5 HDD, which Sugon is employing, focuses on the most optimal combination of data storage and data access capabilities while outperforming all existing 3.5-inch hard disk drives currently available on the market.”The post Seagate Enterprise Performance 3.5 HDD Powers New Sugon TC4600T Server appeared first on insideHPC.

ARL in Aberdeen is seeking a Network Engineer for HPC in our Job of the Week.The post Job of the Week: Network Engineer for HPC at ARL appeared first on insideHPC.

In an effort to accelerate research with international partners, the Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information (KISTI) is upgrading its 100G optical-transport network with bandwidth-on-demand solutions from Ciena. The network upgrade will provide critical support for KISTI users research and collaboration efforts against next-generation applications such as big data visualization, biocomputational analysis tools and information analysis models.The post KISTI Deploys 100G Transoceanic Research Network appeared first on insideHPC.

Bo Ewald from D-Wave Systems presented this talk at the HPC User Forum in Tucson. “D-Wave continues to advance the state-of-the-art of quantum computing at a rapid pace, with a number of impressive application results, and the release of their 1000 qubit D-Wave 2X system is another major milestone in the industry,” said Earl Joseph, IDC program vice president for HPC. “Complementing today’s high performance computing systems, quantum computers will likely become an important tool to solve important problems that can’t be solved today.”The post Video: Quantum Computing and D-Wave appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Flow Science announced that it will hold its 2016 FLOW-3D Americas Users Conference in Chicago, IL on September 22 at the Warwick Allerton. Anyone interested in the FLOW-3D product suite are invited to attend the conference.The post FLOW-3D User Conference Coming to Chicago appeared first on insideHPC.

Global efforts to bring about crucial improvements in supercomputing efficiency and energy usage were placed center stage this week as the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) welcomed users and vendors from around the world to London for the Cray User Group 2016 conference.The post Cray User Group Focuses on Scalability for Weather Forecasting appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the news highlights for the week leading up to Friday the 13th of May, 2016. Highlights include a 25 Petaflop Fujitsu supercomputer coming to Japan, an OpenPOWER Summit coming to Europe, and fighting the Zombie Apocalypse with HPC.The post Radio Free HPC News Roundup for Friday the 13th appeared first on insideHPC.

Applications to attend SC16 as a Student Volunteer are due Wednesday, June 1. "As part of the Students@SC program, Student Volunteers play a key role in supporting the overall conference and conference attendees. Undergraduate and graduate student volunteers help with the administration of the conference and have the opportunity to participate in student-oriented activities, including professional development workshops, technical talks by famous researchers and industry leaders, a job fair, exhibits by 350 organizations, as well as develop lasting peer connections."The post June 1 Deadline for SC16 Student Volunteer Applications Fast Approaching appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Lance Farrell writes that, in this era of global air travel, NSF-funded researchers are using supercomputers to equip policy makers with the evidence needed to make fast, accurate choices in the event of an epidemic.The post Combating the Spread of Disease with HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Western Digital announced it has completed the acquisition of SanDisk Corporation. The addition of SanDisk makes Western Digital Corporation a comprehensive storage solutions provider with global reach, and an extensive product and technology platform that includes deep expertise in both rotating magnetic storage and non-volatile memory (NVM).The post Western Digital Completes Acquisition of SanDisk appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature from Scientific Computing World, Shailesh M Shenoy from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York discusses the challenges faced by large medical research organizations in the face of ever-growing volumes of data. "In short, our challenge was that we needed the ability to collaborate within the institution and with colleagues at other institutes – we needed to maintain that fluid conversation that involves data, not just the hypotheses and methods."The post Consolidating Storage for Scientific Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Altair announced the company has acquired CEDRAT S.A. and its New York-based wholly-owned subsidiary, Magsoft Corporation, expanding the electromagnetic and thermal simulation capabilities of its HyperWorks CAE portfolio. "Complementing the Altair HyperWorks simulation software suite with our solutions dedicated to electromagnetism, we are joining forces with a leader and now have access to new technologies and resources to help us offer more to users in this ever-accelerating world. By joining the Altair team, we will bring the electromagnetic expertise that has made our reputation over time, and allow us to meet new challenges and explore new, and so far inaccessible, horizons” said Vincent Leconte, Technical Director, CEDRAT.The post Altair Acquires Electromagnetics Software Portfolio from CEDRAT appeared first on insideHPC.

"The next step is to look at using OpenMP directives to create multiple threads to distribute the work over many threads and cores. A key OpenMP directive, #pragma omp for collapse, will collapse the inner two loops into one. The developer can then set the number of threads and cores to use and return the application to determine the performance. In one test case, three threads per physical core shows the best performance, by quite a lot compared to just using one or two threads per core."The post Diffusion Optimization on Intel Xeon Phi appeared first on insideHPC.

The OpenPOWER Foundation is pleased to announce the first OpenPOWER Europe Summit taking place on June 16-17 in Frankfurt.The post OpenPOWER Summit Coming to Frankfurt June 16-17 appeared first on insideHPC.

A new paper outlining NERSC's Burst Buffer Early User Program and the center’s pioneering efforts in recent months to test drive the technology using real science applications on Cori Phase 1 has won the Best Paper award at this year’s Cray User Group (CUG) meeting.The post NERSC Paper on Burst Buffers Recognized at Cray User Group appeared first on insideHPC.

Today D-Wave Systems announced the launch of Quantum for Quants, an online community designed specifically for quantitative analysts and other experts focused on complex problems in finance. Launched at the Global Derivatives Trading & Risk Management conference in Budapest, the online community will allow quantitative finance and quantum computing professionals to share ideas and insights regarding quantum technology and to explore its application to the finance industry. Through this community financial industry experts will also be granted access to quantum computing software tools, simulators, and other resources and expertise to explore the best ways to tackle the most difficult computational problems in finance using entirely new techniques.The post D-Wave Systems Launches Quantum for Quants Online Community appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Oklahoma State Director of HPC Dana Brunson describes how the Cowboy supercomputer powers research. "High performance computing is often used for simulations that may be too big, too small, too fast, too slow, too dangerous or too costly, another thing it's used for involves data. So you may remember the human genome project it took nearly a decade and cost a billion dollars, these sorts of things can now be done over the weekend for under a thousand dollars. Our current super computer is named Cowboy and it was funded by a 2011 National Science Foundation Grant and it has been serving us very well."The post Cowboy Supercomputer Powers Research at Oklahoma State appeared first on insideHPC.

Today SGI announced the deployment of its largest SGI UV 300 supercomputer to date at The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC) in the UK. As one of the largest Intel SSD for PCIe*deployments worldwide, TGAC’s new supercomputing platform gives the research Institute access to the next-generation of SGI UV technology for genomics. This will enable TGAC researchers to store, categorize and analyze more genomic data in less time for decoding living systems and answering crucial biological questions. "The combination of processor performance, memory capacity and one of the largest deployments of Intel SSD storage worldwide makes this a truly powerful computing platform for the life sciences.”The post TGAC Installs Worlds Largest SGI UV 300 Supercomputer for Life Sciences appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Fujitsu announced an order for a 25 Petaflop supercomputer system from the University of Tokyo and the University of Tsukuba. Powered by Intel Knights Landing processors, the "T2K Open Supercomputer" will be deployed to the Joint Center for Advanced High-Performance Computing (JCAHPC), which the two universities jointly operate. "The new supercomputer will be an x86 cluster system consisting of 8,208 of the latest FUJITSU Server PRIMERGY x86 servers running next-generation Intel Xeon Phi processors. Due to be completely operational in December 2016, the system is expected to be Japan's highest-performance supercomputer."The post Fujitsu to Build 25 Petaflop Supercomputer at JCAHPC in Japan appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the 2016 OpenPOWER Summit, Stephen Bates of Microsemi presents: Enabling high-performance storage on OpenPOWER Systems. "Non-Volatile Memory (NVM), and the low latency access to storage it provides, is changing the compute stack. NVM Express is the de-facto protocol for communicating with local NVM attached over the PCIe interface. In this talk we will demonstrate performance data for extermely low-latency NVMe devices operating inside OpenPOWER systems. We will discuss the implications of this for applications like in-memory databases, analytics and cognitive computing. In addition we will present data on the emerging NVMe over Fabrics (NVMf) protocol running on OpenPOWER systems."The post Video: Enabling High-Performance Storage on OpenPOWER Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

The TERATEC Forum has posted their agenda for their 11th annual meeting. The event takes place June 28-29 in Palaiseau, France. "TERATEC brings together top international experts in high performance numerical design, simulation and Big Data, making it the major event in France and in Europe in this domain."The post Teratec Forum to Put Spotlight on Big Data & HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the ISC Group, promoter of the TOP500 list, is pleased to announce the appointment of high performance computing industry journalist Michael Feldman to the position of managing editor of TOP500 News. In his new role, Feldman will expand the TOP500 project’s information portal into a comprehensive news site reporting on the HPC industry. "We are thrilled to bring Michael on board as he is a respected voice in the industry. With the addition of a comprehensive news site managed by him, the TOP500 project will offer a valuable new resource for HPC vendors and users,” said ISC Group managing director and TOP500 co-author, Martin Meuer.The post Michael Feldman Joins TOP500.org as Managing Editor appeared first on insideHPC.

David Bonnie from LANL presented this talk at the 2016 MSST Conference. "As we continue to scale system memory footprint, it becomes more and more challenging to scale the long-term storage systems with it. Scaling tape access for bandwidth becomes increasingly challenging and expensive when single files are in the many terabytes to petabyte range. Object-based scale out systems can handle the bandwidth requirements we have, but are also not ideal to store very large files as objects. MarFS sidesteps this while still leveraging the large pool of object storage systems already in existence by striping large files across many objects."The post MarsFS – A Near-POSIX Namespace Leveraging Scalable Object Storage appeared first on insideHPC.

Today's High Performance Computing (HPC) systems offer the ability to model everything from proteins to galaxies. The insights and discoveries offered by these systems are nothing short of astounding. Indeed, the ability to process, move, and store data at unprecedented levels, often reducing jobs from weeks to hours, continues to move science and technology forward at an accelerating pace. This article series offers those considering HPC, both users and managers, guidance when considering the best way to deploy an HPC solution.The post InsideHPC Guide to Technical Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

Intel has been working on a new HPC design philosophy for HPC systems called Intel® Scalable System Framework (Intel® SSF), an approach designed to enable sustained, balanced performance in HPC as the community pushes towards the Exascale computing era. Central to Intel SSF performance is the Lustre* scalable, parallel file system (PFS). Intel® Enterprise Edition for Lustre software (Intel® EE for Lustre software) is the Intel distribution of the well-known PFS, which is used by the majority of the fastest supercomputers around the world.The post Intel® Enterprise Edition for Lustre* Software—High-performance File System appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT) and the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) announced that Stephen Brookes and Peter W. O’Hearn are the recipients of the 2016 Gödel Prize for their invention of Concurrent Separation Logic.The post ACM Awards 2016 Gödel Prize to Inventors of Concurrent Separation Logic appeared first on insideHPC.

In what is being cited as a step towards personalized medicine, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and IrsiCaixa have developed a bioinformatics method to predict the effects of mutation on the resistance of the virus to HIV drugs. An article published in the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling explains how this method has effectively predicted the resistance of the virus with genetic mutations in the HIV-1 protease, a protein which is essential for the replication of the virus, to the drugs amprenavir and darunavir. The method could easily be applied to other drugs and proteins.The post Personalized Medicine steps forward with Bioinformatics Method from BSC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the 2016 MSST Conference, Yoonho Park from IBM presents: Storage Performance Modeling for Future Systems. "The burst buffer is an intermediate, high-speed layer of storage that is positioned between the application and the parallel file system (PFS), absorbing the bulk data produced by the application at a rate a hundred times higher than the PFS, while seamlessly draining the data to the PFS in the background."The post Storage Performance Modeling for Future Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team recaps the ASC16 Student Cluster Competition in China and the 2016 MSST Conference in Santa Clara. Dan spent a week in Wuxi interviewing ASC16 student teams, he came back impressed with the Linpack benchmark tricks from the team at Zhejiang University, who set a new student LINPACK record with 12.03 TFlop/s. Meanwhile, Rich was in Santa Clara for the MSST conference, where he captured two days of talks on Mass Storage Technologies.The post Radio Free HPC Trip Reports from ASC16 & MSST appeared first on insideHPC.

Successful HPC computing depends on choosing the architecture that addresses both application and institutional needs. In particular, finding a simple path to leading edge HPC and Data Analytics is not difficult, if you consider the capabilities and limitations of various approaches to HPC performance, scaling, ease of use, and time to solution. Careful analysis and consideration of the following questions will help lead to a successful and cost-effective HPC solution. Here are three questions to ask to ensure HPC success.The post Three Questions to Ensure Your HPC Success appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the 2016 MSST Conference, Harriet Coverston from Versity presents: Versity - Archiving to Objects. "Introducing Versity Storage Manager - an enterprise-class storage virtualization and archiving system that runs on Linux. Offering comprehensive data management for tiered storage environments and the ability to preserve and protect your data forever. Maximum protection at a minimum cost. Versity supports nearly unlimited volumes of storage and offers the most robust archive policy engine on the market."The post Video: Versity HSM – Archiving to Objects appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Flow Science announced the speakers for its annual FLOW-3D European Users Conference that will take place on June 15-16, 2016 in Kraków, Poland.The post Agenda Posted for FLOW-3D European User Conference appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the GPU Hackathon at the University of Delaware, attendees tune their code to accelerate their application performance. The 5-day intensive GPU programming Hackathon was held in collaboration with Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL). "Thanks to a partnership with NASA Langley Research Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health (NIH), Brookhaven National Laboratory and the UD College of Engineering, UD students had access to the world's second largest supercomputer — the Titan — to help solve real-world problems."The post Video: Accelerating Code at the GPU Hackathon in Delaware appeared first on insideHPC.

SGI_logo_platinum_lgSGI is seeking an HPC Pre-Sales Engineer in our Job of the Week. "The HPC Pre-Sales Engineer role provides in depth technical and architectural expertise in Federal Sales opportunities in the DC area, primarily working with DOD and Civilian Agencies. As the primary technical interface with the customer, you must be able to recognize customer needs, interpret them and produce comprehensive solutions."The post Job of the Week: HPC Pre-Sales Engineer at SGI appeared first on insideHPC.