High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

There is still time to take advantage of Early Bird registration rates for ISC 2016. You can save over 45 percent off the on-site registration rates if you sign up by May 11. "ISC 2016 takes place June 19-23 in Frankfurt, Germany. With an expected attendance of 3,000 participants from around the world, ISC will also host 146 exhibitors from industry and academia."The post Register for ISC 2016 by May 11 for Early Bird Discounts appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the 2016 Percona Data Performance Conference, Brendan Gregg, Senior Performance Architect from Netflix presents: Linux Systems Performance. “Systems performance provides a different perspective for analysis and tuning, and can help you find performance wins for your databases, applications, and the kernel. However, most of us are not performance or kernel engineers, […]The post Video: Brendan Gregg Looks at Tools & Methodologies for Linux System Performance appeared first on insideHPC.

In this TACC Podcast, Jorge Salazar looks at how researchers are using the Stampede supercomputer to shed light on the microscale world of colloidal gels — liquids dispersed in a solid medium as a gel. "Colloidal gels are actually soft solids, but we can manipulate their structure to produce ‘on-demand' transitions from liquid-like to solid-like behavior that can be reversed many times," Zia said. Zia is an Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University.The post Podcast: Supercomputing Gels with Stampede appeared first on insideHPC.

Kirill Malkin from SGI presented this talk at the 2016 MSST conference. "Malkin will talk about the impact of power management on reliability of hard disk devices based on a field experience with SGI’s MAID product (formerly COPAN). The presentation will explore statistical analysis of support data covering a decade of MAID deployment (2005-2015) as well as briefly cover the history and basic principles of the technology and provide an update on future direction of the product line."The post A Perspective on Power Management for Hard Disks appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the ISC Group announced that the Green500 will be integrated with the TOP500 project with a single submission process. "This merge is of great significance to the high performance computing community,” said Erich Strohmaier, co-founder of TOP500. “Both projects will now be maintained under a common set of rules for data submission, which will simplify the process for submitters and provide a consistent set of data for the historical record.”The post Submissions Open for Newly Merged TOP500 and Green500 appeared first on insideHPC.

IBM has introduced a new way for organizations of all sizes to buy and acquire a full HPC management suite including a community edition for those just starting out. The new IBM Platform LSF Suites are packages that include more than IBM Platform LSF, they provide additional functionalities designed to simplify HPC for users, administrators and the IT organization.The post IBM Makes HPC Easier appeared first on insideHPC.

Katie Antypas from NERSC presented this talk at the 2016 MSST conference. Katie is the Project Lead for the NERSC-8 system procurement, a project to deploy NERSC's next generation supercomputer in mid-2016. The system, named Cori, (after Nobel Laureate Gerty Cori) will be a Cray XC system featuring 9300 Intel Knights Landing processors. The Knights Landing processors will have over 60 cores with 4 hardware threads each and a 512 bit vector unit width. It will be crucial that users can exploit both thread and SIMD vectorization to achieve high performance on Cori."The post Superfacility – How New Workflows in the DOE Office of Science are Changing Storage Requirements appeared first on insideHPC.

While much noise is being made about the race to exascale, building productive supercomputers really comes down to people and ingenuity. In this special guest feature, Donna Loveland profiles supercomputer architect Robert Wisniewski from Intel. "In combining the threading and memory challenges, there’s an increased need for the hardware to perform synchronization operations, especially intranode ones, efficiently. With more threads utilizing less memory with wider parallelism, it becomes important that they synchronize among themselves efficiently and have access to efficient atomic memory operations. Applications also need to be vectorized to take advantage of the wider FPUs on the chip. While much of the vectorization can be done by compilers, application developers can follow design patterns that aid the compiler’s task."The post Peta-Exa-Zetta: Robert Wisniewski and the Growth of Compute Power appeared first on insideHPC.

"The Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor is an example of a many core system that can greatly increase the performance of an application when used correctly. Simply taking a serial application and expecting tremendous performance gains will not happen. Rewriting parts of the application will be necessary to take advantage of the architecture of the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor."The post Basics For Coprocessors appeared first on insideHPC.

Cloud computing has become another tool for the HPC practitioner. For some organizations, the ability of cloud computing to shift costs from capital to operating expenses is very attractive. Because all cloud solutions require use of the Internet, a basic analysis of data origins and destinations is needed. Here's an overview of when local or cloud HPC make the most sense.The post Local or Cloud HPC? appeared first on insideHPC.

A newly released report commissioned by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and conducted by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine examines priorities and associated trade-offs for advanced computing investments and strategy. "We are very pleased with the National Academy's report and are enthusiastic about its helpful observations and recommendations," said Irene Qualters, NSF Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Division Director. "The report has had a wide range of thoughtful community input and review from leaders in our field. Its timing and content give substance and urgency to NSF's role and plans in the National Strategic Computing Initiative."The post New Report Charts Future Directions for NSF Advanced Computing Infrastructure appeared first on insideHPC.

Today ACM announced that Ron Perrott, an international leader in the development and promotion of parallel computing, will receive ACM’s prestigious Distinguished Service Award. The goal of ACM’s Awards and Recognition Program is to highlight outstanding technical and professional achievements and contributions in computer science and IT. Perrott will be formally honored at the ACM Awards Banquet on June 11 in San Francisco.The post Ron Perrott to Receive ACM Distinguished Service Award appeared first on insideHPC.

The Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) in Germany has allocated a record 1,648 million core hours of computing time to 21 scientifically outstanding national research projects as part of its Call for Large-Scale Projects. "GCS is excited to support simulation projects of these excelling scopes as they clearly underline our claim of Germany being a world leader in High Performance Computing. Beyond dispute, they produce proof of us being at eye level with the largest international research projects such as the INCITE Program supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy," states Prof. Thomas Lippert of JSC, GCS Chairman of the Board."The post GCS in Germany Allocates Record Number of Core Hours for Research appeared first on insideHPC.

In its latest move to build a practical quantum computer, IBM Research for the first time ever is making quantum computing available in the cloud to anyone interested in hands-on access to the company’s advanced experimental quantum system. "The cloud-enabled quantum computing platform, called IBM Quantum Experience, will allow users to run algorithms and experiments on IBM’s quantum processor, work with the individual quantum bits (qubits), and explore tutorials and simulations around what might be possible with quantum computing."The post Kick the Tires on Quantum Computing with the IBM Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the 2016 MSST Conference, Ian Corner from CSIRO in Australia presents: A Journey to a Holistic Framework for Data-intensive Workflows. "At CSIRO, we are Australia's national science organization and one of the largest and most diverse scientific research organizations in the world. Our research focuses on the biggest challenges facing the nation. We also manage national research infrastructure and collections."The post Video: A Journey to a Holistic Framework for Data-intensive Workflows at CSIRO appeared first on insideHPC.

Over at ALCF, Katie Jones writes that researchers are using the Mira supercomputer to validate a new “wave-like” model of the van der Waals force—a weak attraction that has strong ties to function and stability in materials and biological systems.The post Supercomputing van der Waals Forces on Mira appeared first on insideHPC.

Jeff Bonwick from EMC DSSD presented this talk at the MSST conference. "Jeff Bonwick is co-founder and CTO of DSSD, where he co-invented both the system hardware architecture and the Flood software stack. His talk will focus on extracting maximum performance from flash at scale. Jeff has a long history of developing at-scale storage starting with leading the team that developed the ZFS filesystem, which powers Oracle’s ZFS storage line as well as numerous startups including Nexenta, Delphix, Joyent, and Datto."The post Video: DSSD Scalable High Performance FLASH Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

Altair is making a big investment toward uniting the whole HPC community to accelerate the state of the art (and the state of actual production operations) for HPC scheduling. Altair is joining the OpenHPC project with PBS Pro. They are focused on longevity – creating a viable, sustainable community to focus on job scheduling software that can truly bridge the gap in the HPC world.The post An Open Letter to the HPC Community appeared first on insideHPC.

The MJO occurs on its own timetable—every 30 to 60 days—but its worldwide impact spurs scientists to unlock its secrets. The ultimate answer? Timely preparation for the precipitation havoc it brings—and insight into how it will behave when pressured by a warming climate.The post Edison Supercomputer Helps Find Roots of MJO Modeling Mismatches appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, technicians install a new supercomputer at UK Met Office. The Met Office is the National Weather Service for the UK, providing internationally-renowned weather and climate science and services to support the public, government and businesses.The post Time-lapse Video: Cray Install at UK Met Office appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature from Scientific Computing World, Darren Watkins from Virtus Data Centres explains the importance of building a data centre from the ground up to support the requirements of HPC users - while maximizing productivity, efficiency and energy usage. "The reality for many IT users is they want to run analytics that –with the growth of data – have become too complex and time critical for normal enterprise servers to handle efficiently."The post HPC and the HDC Datacenter appeared first on insideHPC.

The Women in HPC organization will host a Workshop and a BoF at ISC 2016 in Frankfurt. "Once again we will bring together women from across the international HPC community, providing opportunities to network, showcasing the work of inspiring women and discussing how we can all work towards to improving the under-representation of women in supercomputing."The post Women in HPC to Host Events at ISC 2016 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from LUG 2016 in Portland, Steve Simms from Indiana University presents: Lustre 101 - A Quick Overview. Now in its 14th year, the Lustre User Group is the industry’s primary venue for discussion and seminars on the Lustre parallel file system and other open source file system technologies.The post Lustre 101: A Quick Overview appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Barcelona Supercomputing Center released version 1.4 of the COMPSs programming environment. COMPSs includes new features that improves runtime performance, a new tracing infrastructure, and support for dockers and Chameleon infrastructure.The post Announcing the COMPSs 1.4 Programming Environment from BSC appeared first on insideHPC.

Mark Seamans from SGI presented this talk at the HPC User Forum in Tucson. "As the trusted leader in high performance computing, SGI helps companies find answers to the world’s biggest challenges. Our commitment to innovation is unwavering and focused on delivering market leading solutions in Technical Computing, Big Data Analytics, and Petascale Storage. Our solutions provide unmatched performance, scalability and efficiency for a broad range of customers."The post Video: SGI Production Supercomputing appeared first on insideHPC.

Today PRACE announced that Dr Zoe Cournia is the recipient of the 1st PRACE Ada Lovelace Award for HPC. As a Computational Chemist, Investigator – Assistant Professor level at the Biomedical Research Foundation, Academy of Athens in Greece, Dr Cournia was selected for her outstanding contributions and impact on HPC in Europe on a global level. "Using the PRACE HPC resources and recent advances in computer-aided drug design allow us to develop drugs specifically designed for a given protein, shortening the time for development of new drugs,” says Dr Cournia. “I believe that our work is a good example of how computers help develop candidate drugs that have the potential to save millions of lives worldwide. I am honored to receive this prestigious award and hope that this serves as inspiration to other female researchers in the field.”The post Dr Zoe Cournia to Receive 1st PRACE Ada Lovelace Award for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Over at the Nvidia Blog, George Millington writes that, the fourth consecutive year, the Nvidia Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform helped set new milestones in the Asia Student Supercomputer Challenge, the world’s largest supercomputer competition.The post GPU-Powered Systems Take Top Spot & Set Performance Records at ASC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

"Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) technology has been steadily gaining momentum for high-performance interconnects such as InfiniBand. SR-IOV can deliver near native performance but lacks locality-aware communication support. This talk presents an efficient approach to build HPC clouds based on MVAPICH2 over OpenStack with SR-IOV. We discuss the high-performance design of virtual machine-aware MVAPICH2 library over OpenStack-based HPC Clouds with SR-IOV. A comprehensive performance evaluation with micro-benchmarks and HPC applications has been conducted on an experimental OpenStack-based HPC cloud and Amazon EC2. The evaluation results show that our design can deliver near bare-metal performance."The post Building Efficient HPC Clouds with MVAPICH2 and OpenStack over SR-IOV Enabled InfiniBand Clusters appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the OpenPOWER Summit, Dr. Mike Ashworth from the STFC Hartree Centre presents: Driving Innovation at the Hartree Centre with the OpenPOWER Architecture. "The STFC Hartree Centre has been established with a focus on economic impact through our collaborations with UK industry, offering access to HPC and data intensive systems, code development expertise and collaborative research opportunities. Through a major partnership with IBM we have been porting and evaluating our key application codes on the OpenPOWER architecture seeking to leverage performance and productivity gains for the benefit of our key customers. We will describe progress in porting and optimization of applications from a range of science areas."The post Driving Innovation at the Hartree Centre with the OpenPOWER Architecture appeared first on insideHPC.

Pfizer in Connecticut is seeking an HPC Linux Engineer in our Job of the Week. "We are seeking an accomplished Linux operations engineer with a comprehensive understanding of Linux including systems administration, application tuning and optimization with a strong working knowledge of multiple scientific domains in support of HPC users. The candidate should have demonstrated troubleshooting abilities and would lead our efforts in enabling and maintaining leading edge scientific applications."The post Job of the Week: HPC Linux Engineer at Pfizer appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from LUG 2016, Andreas Dilger from Intel presents: Lustre 2.9 and Beyond. “I do this presentation every year and I think it is important to focus on features that are going to be available in the short term."The post Video: Lustre 2.9 and Beyond appeared first on insideHPC.

Designing materials atom-by-atom has long been a science fiction dream. Georg Schusteritsch and Chris Pickard of the University of Cambridge are bringing science fiction one step closer to reality using the UK National Supercomputing Facility, ARCHER to reveal the interfaces forming within and between materials. "We have developed a general first-principles approach to predict the crystal structure of interfaces in materials, a technique that represents a major step towards computationally developing materials with specially designed interfaces."The post Designing Interfaces in Materials with Supercomputers appeared first on insideHPC.

Parallel programming software developed at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center is being used as part of a successful kickstarter campaign for a maker board with 10 times the power of the Rasberry PI 3. "Developed at BSC, the OmpSs parallel programming model is used on the new UDOO X86 board, which reached its Kickstarter funding target of €100,000 in under seven hours. UDOO X86 combines a powerful maker board and an Arduino 101-compatible platform, all embedded on the same board. It can be used for a range of applications, such as gaming, video streaming, graphic design editing, Internet of Things applications, or as a toolbox for makers."The post Quad-Core Maker Board Uses BSC Programming Model OmpSs appeared first on insideHPC.

Over at the Women in HPC Blog, Daniel Holmes from EPCC writes that the EuroMPI Conference is partnering with Women in HPC to increase diversity in high performance computing.The post EuroMPI Conference Partners with Women in HPC to Bolster Diversity appeared first on insideHPC.

"Fortissimo will make advanced simulation more easily accessible, particularly to SMEs, through the realization of a “one-stop shop” where hardware, expertise, applications, visualization and tools will be easily available and affordable on a pay-per-use basis. In doing this, it will create and demonstrate a sustainable commercial ecosystem where actors at all levels in the value chain can realize sufficient commercial benefit to enable that ecosystem to persist independently of EU funding and continue to provide affordable services to manufacturing industry, particularly SMEs."The post HPC and SMEs – The Fortissimo Initiative appeared first on insideHPC.

"HPE Persistent Memory products deliver the performance of memory with the persistence of traditional storage. The HPE 8GB NVDIMM Module is the first offering in the HPE Persistent Memory product category. Customers are looking for offerings that enable faster business decisions and the HPE Persistent Memory portfolio delivers outstanding performance to put data to work more quickly in your business. The HPE 8GB NVDIMM Module has the resiliency you have come to expect from storage technology by utilizing higher endurance DRAM and components that help verify data is moved to non-volatile technology in the event of a power loss."The post Video: HPE Persistent Memory appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) published a new report that urges U.S. policymakers to take decisive steps to ensure the United States continues to be a world leader in high-performance computing. "While America is still the world leader, other nations are gaining on us, so the U.S. cannot afford to rest on its laurels. It is important for policymakers to build on efforts the Obama administration has undertaken to ensure the U.S. does not get out paced.”The post Report: US At Risk of Falling Behind in Supercomputing appeared first on insideHPC.

We caught up Jeff Bonwick from DSSD to learn more about their exciting storage technology for HPC. "Our mission statement was four words: fastest storage on earth. That was our singular goal from day one, which gave the team incredible focus and clarity. Whenever we had to make a tradeoff between performance and something else, performance always won. Always. And it just so happens that when you aim for performance, density comes along for the ride because the more flash chips you have working in parallel, the faster it goes."The post Interview: Jeff Bonwick on the Secret Sauce behind DSSD appeared first on insideHPC.

In this slidecast, Gabor Samu from IBM describes the newly available IBM Platform LSF Suites for Workgroup and HPC. Designed to make it much easier to "kick the tires" on LSF, the new suites can help you configure install, maintain, and job manage HPC clusters with a single download. “The new IBM Platform LSF Suites are packages that include more than IBM Platform LSF, they provide additional functionalities designed to simplify HPC for users, administrators and the IT organization.”The post Slidecast: Getting Started with HPC using the New IBM Platform LSF Suites appeared first on insideHPC.

"Parallel software and parallel hardware, used together will give the best results for an application. If the application is serial in nature, and the processor is serial, then there will obviously not be a great gain in performance. When the application is parallelized, but the processor is serial, again, no great gain. A third combination is when the application is serial and the processing is parallel. Since the application cannot take advantage of the increased power of the hardware, there will not be a great performance boost. The best and really only solution is to modify the application to run in parallel, using high performing parallel hardware."The post Code Modernization for High Performance Hardware appeared first on insideHPC.

"Cycle Computing software leverages cloud resources to make computation in the cloud productive at any scale, by orchestrating workflows, managing data, balancing cloud options, and enabling users in a secure, controlled way. Our software works with public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure, as well as with internal and private cloud environments."The post Video: Managing Large Production Cloud Deployments appeared first on insideHPC.

In this TACC podcast, Joe Stubbs from the Texas Advanced Computing Centter describes potential benefits to scientists of open container platform Docker in supporting reproducibility, NSF-funded Agave API. "As more scientists share not only their results but their data and code, Docker is helping them reproduce the computational analysis behind the results. What's more, Docker is one of the main tools used in the Agave API platform, a platform-as-a-service solution for hybrid cloud computing developed at TACC and funded in part by the National Science Foundation."The post Podcast: Using Docker for Science at TACC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from CCTV News, ASC16 wraps up their Student Supercomputing Challenge. Huazhong University of Science won the overall competition, which concluded April 22 in Wuhan at the Central China University of Science. "With over 175 participating teams, the ASC16 is the world’s largest student cluster competition. In a race against time, student teams build HPC clusters and tune application codes to run with under 3000 watts of power."The post Video: ASC16 Student Supercomputing Challenge Wraps Up in China appeared first on insideHPC.

Many HPC applications began as single processor (single core) programs. If these applications take too long on a single core or need more memory than is available, they need to be modified so they can run on scalable systems. Fortunately, many of the important (and most used) HPC applications are already available for scalable systems. Not all applications require large numbers of cores for effective performance, while others are highly scalable. Here is how to better understand your HPC application needs.The post Understanding Your HPC Application Needs appeared first on insideHPC.

"After a careful consideration of all our options, we have made the decision to leave our current location in downtown St. Paul and relocate our employees to The Offices @ MOA complex," said Fred Kohout, chief marketing officer at Cray. "Saint Paul has been a great regional home for Cray over the last seven years. While it's always tough to leave a location you love, we are excited to move to a new site that will better facilitate our growth, and allow us to continue to build upon our strong presence in the region."The post Cray Moves Minnesota Offices from St. Paul to Mall of America appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Panasas announced that it has joined the iRODS Consortium as a contributing member. The iRODS Consortium leads development and support of the Integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS), free open source software for data discovery, workflow automation, secure collaboration, and data virtualization.The post Panasas Joins IRODS Consortium to Bolster Life Sciences appeared first on insideHPC.

Today TYAN announced support for the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v4 product family (Broadwell). Incorporating Intel’s new processor technologies allows TYAN to offer the latest performance and power savings features available. TYAN’s Xeon E5 platform-based server systems and motherboards continue to offer the high performance, power efficiency, and required reliability on the market.The post TYAN Servers and Motherboards Add Support for Broadwell Processors appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Cambridge University spin-out Optalysys announced that the company has been awarded a $350k grant for a 13-month project from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The project will see the company advance their research in developing and applying their optical co-processing technology to solving complex mathematical equations. These equations are relevant to large-scale scientific and engineering simulations such as weather prediction and aerodynamics.The post Optalysys Wins DARPA Grant for Optical Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Flow Science announced that it has formed a new subsidiary, Flow Science Latin America SAS (FSLA), to sell and support Flow Science’s suite of computational fluid dynamics software products throughout Central and South America.The post Flow Science Expands to Latin America appeared first on insideHPC.

“The National Supercomputing Center supports research projects at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas by providing a full-service supercomputing facility, plus available training and services, to academic and research institutions, government and private industry. NSCEE’s focus is on R&D related to energy, the environment, medical informatics and health care delivery. In this presentation, Lombardo will highlight results from an Alzheimer’s research project and the NSCEE’s new system at the Supernap and how it is being used to advance research for HPC users in both academia/R&D and commercial industry. Lombardo will also highlight two emerging projects; the New School of Medicine and new Technology park.”The post Leveraging HPC for Alzheimer’s Research and Beyond appeared first on insideHPC.