High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

Astronomers are using the Blue Waters supercomputer and the ALMA telescope in Chile to investigate the location of a dwarf dark galaxy. Subtle distortions hidden in ALMA’s stunning image of the gravitational lens SDP.81 are telltale signs that a dwarf dark galaxy is lurking in the halo of a much larger galaxy nearly 4 billion light-years away. This discovery paves the way for ALMA to find many more such objects and could help astronomers address important questions on the nature of dark matter.The post Supercomputing the Dwarf Dark Galaxy Hidden in ALMA Gravitational Lens Image appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team recaps the GPU Technology Conference, which wrapped up last week in San Jose.

A research team at the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) is beginning the task of modernizing a computer software package that leverages large-scale, 3-D modeling to research fatigue and fracture analyses, primarily in metals. "The research is a result of OSC being selected as an Intel Parallel Computing Center. The Intel PCC program provides funding to universities, institutions and research labs to modernize key community codes used across a wide range of disciplines to run on current state-of-the-art parallel architectures. The primary focus is to modernize applications to increase parallelism and scalability through optimizations that leverage cores, caches, threads and vector capabilities of microprocessors and coprocessors."The post Modernizing Materials Code at OSC’s Intel Parallel Computing Center appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the HPC User Forum in Tucson, Saul Gonzalez Martirena from NSF provides an update on the NSCI initiative. “As a coordinated research, development, and deployment strategy, NSCI will draw on the strengths of departments and agencies to move the Federal government into a position that sharpens, develops, and streamlines a wide range of new 21st century applications. It is designed to advance core technologies to solve difficult computational problems and foster increased use of the new capabilities in the public and private sectors.”The post NSCI Update from the HPC User Forum appeared first on insideHPC.

"Group Deutsche Boerse is a global financial service organization covering the entire value chain from trading, market data, clearing, settlement to custody. While reliability has been a fundamental requirement for exchanges since the introduction of electronic trading systems in the 1990s, since about 10 years also low and predictable latency of the entire system has become a major design objective. Both issues have been important architecture considerations, when Deutsche Boerse started to develop an entirely new derivatives trading system T7 for its options market in the US (ISE) in 2008. As the best fit at the time a combination of InfiniBand with IBM WebSphere MQ Low Latency Messaging (WLLM) as the messaging solution was determined. Since then the same system has been adopted for EUREX, one of the largest derivatives exchanges in the world, and is now also extended to cover cash markets. The session will present the design of the application and its interdependence with the combination of InfiniBand and WLLM. Also practical experiences with InfiniBand in the last couple of years will be reflected upon."The post Video: InfiniBand as Core Network in an Exchange Application appeared first on insideHPC.

Today One Stop Systems announced the results of High-Tech Online Magazine Tom's IT PRO's review of the 200TB Flash Storage Array SAN (FSA-SAN). OSS' FSA-SAN provides 200TB of shared Flash RAIDed memory with a choice of the fastest SAN connectivity options including Fiber Channel, Infiniband, and iSCSI.The post One Stop Systems 200TB Flash Storage Array SAN gets Rave Review appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Scality announced the production deployment of the Scality RING to power Los Alamo National Laboratory’s Trinity supercomputer, projected to be one of the world’s fastest. Trinity, part of the NNSA Advanced Simulation and Computing Program, is expected to be the first platform large and fast enough to begin to accommodate finely resolved 3D calculations for mission-critical simulations. As part of the deployment, Scality is also working together with Los Alamos on MarFS, an open source software project that brings the power of object storage to all large-scale research computing environments, including the U.S. Department of Energy.The post LANL Looks to Scality RING Storage for Trinity Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

"Cavium ThunderX has significant differentiation in the 64-bit ARM market as Cavium is the first ARMv8 vendor to deliver dual socket support with full ARMv8.1 implementation and significant advantage in CPU cores with 48 cores per socket. In addition, ThunderX supports large memory capacity (512GB per socket, 1TB in a 2S system) with excellent memory bandwidth and low memory latency. In addition, ThunderX includes multiple 10 GbE / 40GbE network interfaces delivering excellent IO throughput. These features enable ThunderX to deliver the core performance & scale out capability that the HPC market requires."The post Interview: Cavium to Move ARM Forward for HPC at ISC 2016 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the HPC User Forum in Tucson, Earl Joseph from IDC presents: 2016 IDC HPC Market Update. "The HPC User Forum was established in 1999 to promote the health of the global HPC industry and address issues of common concern to users. The organization has since grown to 150 members."The post HPC Market Update and IDC’s Top Growth Areas for 2016 and Beyond appeared first on insideHPC.

Today ISC 2016 announced the awards-winning research papers for the PRACE ISC Award and the Gauss Award.The post ISC 2016 Announces Award-Winning Research Papers appeared first on insideHPC.

"Atos is one out of three or four worldwide players having the expertise and know-how to build supercomputers today – and the only one in Europe. It is a source of pride for our company and provides a unique competitive advantage for our clients. With Atos’ Bull sequana astounding compute performance, businesses can now more efficiently maximize the value of data on a daily basis. By 2020, Bull sequana will reach exaflops level and will be able to process a billion billion operations per second.” says Atos Chairman and CEO Thierry Breton.The post Atos Rolls Out Bull sequana “The World’s Most Efficient Supercomputer” appeared first on insideHPC.

If you are in the Northwest and you happen to like surf and turf, have I got a deal for you! Dell is hosting a series of Big Data lunch events in Seattle and Portland at the end of April. On April 26, Dell brings the event to Blueacre Seafood in Seattle. In Portland, lunch is on April 27 at the mighty Fogo de Chao, a Brazilian steak house for the Where's the Beef? crowd. They're also coming to Flemings in Salt Lake City on April 28.The post Get Some Big Lunch at the Big Data & HPC Events coming to Portland & Seattle appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the 2016 GPU Technology Conference, Jason Pai from Supermicro describes the new 1028GQ-TRT SuperServer. With support for up to four Nvidia Tesla K80 GPUs, the 1U superserver offers extreme compute density in 1U of rack space. "From HPC to Deep Learning and Big Data Analytics, denser, more powerful GPU solutions have become a necessity in order to service the next generation of GPU-accelerated applications. At GTC, Supermicro demonstrated how these applications have progressed, and how its GPU solutions are influencing this evolution."The post Supermicro Showcases New GPU SuperServer at GTC 2016 appeared first on insideHPC.

According to the latest Intersect360 Research site census data, of the 50 most popular application packages mentioned by HPC users, 34 have offer GPU support, including 9 of the top 10. As is evident from the number of GPU-accelerated applications available in areas such as chemical research, physics, structural analysis, and visualization, the use of this accelerator technology has become well established in the HPC user community. "According to the latest Intersect360 Research site census data, of the 50 most popular application packages mentioned by HPC users, 34 have offer GPU support, including 9 of the top 10. As is evident from the number of GPU-accelerated applications available in areas such as chemical research, physics, structural analysis, and visualization, the use of this accelerator technology has become well established in the HPC user community."The post Discover why GPUs are driving the future of HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the SME HPC Adoption Program in Europe announced the winners from its recent Call for Proposals. SHAPE is a pan-European program supported by PRACE which aims to raise awareness and provide European SMEs with the expertise necessary to take advantage of the innovation possibilities created by HPC, thus increasing their competitiveness.The post SHAPE Selects Eight Innovative HPC Projects for Access to PRACE Supercomputers appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the 2016 GPU Technology Conference, Jaan Mannik from One Stop Systems describes the GPUltima system. Delivering up to 1 Petaflop in a rack, the GPUltima is a single 19" rack comprised of 8 OSS High Density Compute Accelerators (HDCA) each with 16 NIVIDA Dual GPUs (128 total), 16 dual-socket servers, an Infiniband Switch and an Ethernet Switch."The post Video: GPUltima System Delivers a Petaflop in a Rack appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Ken Strandberg offers this live report from Day 3 of the Lustre User Group meeting in Portland. "Rick Wagner from San Diego Supercomputing Center presented progress on his team’s replication tool that allows copying large blocks of storage from object storage to their disaster recovery durable storage system. Because rsync is not a tool for moving massive amounts of data, SDSC created recursive worker services running in parallel to have each worker handle a directory or group of files. The tool uses available Lustre clients, a RabbitMQ server, Celery scripts, and bash scripts."The post Live Report from LUG 2016 Day 3 appeared first on insideHPC.

A design for virtual Ethernet networks over IB is described. The virtual Ethernet networks are implemented as overlays on the IB network. They are managed in a flexible manner using software. Virtual networks can be created, removed, and assigned to servers dynamically using this software. A virtual network can exist entirely on the IB fabric, or it can have an uplink connecting it to physical Ethernet using a gateway. The virtual networks are represented on the servers by virtual network interfaces which can be used with para-virtualized I/O, SRIOV,and non-virtualized I/O. This technology has many uses: communication between applications which are not IB-aware, communication between IB-connected servers and Ethernet-connected servers, and multi-tenancy for cloud environments. It can be used in conjunction with OpenStack, such as for tenant networks."The post Video: Software-Defined Networking on InfiniBand Fabrics appeared first on insideHPC.

This week, Molex announced the acquisition of Interconnect Systems, Inc. (ISI) which specializes in the design and manufacture of high density silicon packaging with advanced interconnect technologies. "We are thrilled to join forces with Molex. By combining respective strengths and leveraging their global manufacturing footprint, we can more efficiently and effectively provide customers with advanced technology platforms and top-notch support services, while scaling up to higher volume production,” said Bill Miller, president, ISI.The post Molex Acquires Interconnect Systems, Inc. appeared first on insideHPC.

NVMe over Fabrics is an enhancement / expansion of the NVMe specification to support remote access to NVMe storage resources via RDMA. This presentation will review the major components of the NVMe over Fabrics specification, describe the host and target stack, discuss the plan for Linux open source drivers, and preview some performance characteristics. The discussion will also touch on possible deployment models.The post Video: NVMe Over Fabrics appeared first on insideHPC.

Over at the SC16 Blog, Dan Stanzione from TACC writes that the conference is starting a multi-year emphasis designed to advance the state of the practice in the HPC community by providing a track for the professionals driving innovation and development in designing, building, and operating the world’s largest supercomputers, along with all of the system and application software that make them run effectively.The post SC16 Adds State-of-the-Practice Track appeared first on insideHPC.

The Intel Cloud Edition for Lustre* Software is now available on Microsoft’s Azure platform. Intel Cloud Edition for Lustre Software on Azure is a scalable, parallel file system designed as the working file system for HPC or other IO intensive workloads. Built for use with the virtualized compute instances available from Microsoft Azure scalable cloud infrastructure, it is designed for dynamic, pay-as-you-go applications.The post Now on Azure: Intel Cloud Edition for Lustre* Software appeared first on insideHPC.

Researchers at Purdue University are using HPC to help fight the Zika virus. "Purdue’s award-winning Community Cluster Program played a significant role in enabling the research team to create the first detailed, 3-D structural map of the Zika virus, a key step toward developing treatments. The technique the team used to map the virus structure combined cryo-electron microscopy and high-performance computing. With the microscope, the Purdue researchers capture images of many Zika virusDetailed image of the Zika virus structure. particles, or individual instances of the virus."The post Supercomputing the Zika Virus at Purdue appeared first on insideHPC.

"Research computational workflows consist of several pieces of third party software and, because of their experimental nature, frequent changes and updates are commonly necessary thus raising serious deployment and reproducibility issues. Docker containers are emerging as a possible solution for many of these problems, as they allow the packaging of pipelines in an isolated and self-contained manner. This presentation will introduce our experience deploying genomic pipelines with Docker containers at the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG). I will discuss how we implemented it, the main issues we faced, the pros and cons of using Docker in an HPC environment including a benchmark of the impact of containers technology on the performance of the executed applications."The post Manage Reproducibility of Computational Workflows with Docker Containers and Nextflow appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Ken Strandberg offers this live report from Day 2 of the Lustre User Group meeting in Portland. "Scott Yockel from Harvard University shared how they are deploying Lustre across their massive three data centers up to 90 miles apart with 25 PB of storage, about half of which is Lustre. They’re using Docker containers and employing a backup strategy across the miles of every NFS system, parsing of the entire MDT, and includes 10k directories of small files."The post Live Report from LUG 2016 Day 2 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today TYAN showcased the GT75-BP012, a new POWER8-based 1U server platform at the OpenPOWER Summit 2016 in San Jose. The 1U TYAN GT75-BP012 platform is a POWER8-based server solution that reveals the spirit of the OpenPOWER Foundation – resources and innovation are not limited to the community but are open to the world. "By building the ppc64 architecture in the 1U single-socket system, the TYAN GT75-BP012 provides huge memory footprint as well as outstanding performance for HPC and server virtualization applications.” said Albert Mu, Vice President of MITAC Computing Technology Corporation's TYAN Business Unit.The post TYAN Rolls Out POWER8-Based 1U Server at OpenPOWER Summit appeared first on insideHPC.

"The first release of OpenFabrics Interfaces (OFI) software, libfabric, occurred in January of 2015. Since then, the number of fabrics and applications supported by OFI has increased, with considerable industry momentum building behind it. This talk discusses the current state of OFI, then speaks to the application requirements driving it forward. It will detail the fabrics supported by libfabric, identify applications which have ported to it, and outline future enhancements to the libfabric interfaces and architecture."The post Video: Past, Present, and Future of OpenFabrics Interfaces appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Silicon Mechanics announced that the University of New Orleans is the recipient of the company's fifth annual Research Cluster Grant (RCG). Each grant awardee will receive a High-Performance Computing cluster with the latest high-performance processing and GPU technologies, valued at over $100,000 for use in demonstrated research purposes going forward. This is the second year that Silicon Mechanics has made the award to two institutions.The post University of New Orleans Wins Silicon Mechanics Research Cluster Grant appeared first on insideHPC.

Italy's E4 Computer Engineering announced that it has sealed an agreement with Wistron Corporation to market and distribute the OP205, the Company’s first POWER8 processor- based system in Italy and Europe. "We are very committed to OpenPOWER and we are going to great lengths to ensure we create a system that can be a reference for the Foundation’s amazing eco-system,” said Cosimo Gianfreda, CTO E4 Computer Engineering. “Wistron has worked for many years with many major players and we jumped at the opportunity of working together for this project. We know Europe is ready for OpenPOWER and we are actively encouraging its implementation in a number of Scientific and industrial environments”The post Italy’s E4 Computer Engineering Builds HPC OpenPOWER Server appeared first on insideHPC.

"While new technology will be developed that reduces the power per operation needed, in today’s environments it is important to understand how an application affects power usage. For modern applications that have been optimized to take advantage of both the Intel Xeon CPU and the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor, the hardware mentioned does include various power states, which can minimize the power consumption when idle."The post Application Performance & Power Consumption on Intel Xeon Phi appeared first on insideHPC.

"The Lustre User Group (LUG) 2016 conference is well under way. The morning of the first day was spent on looking at Lustre today and tomorrow and security developments in the code. Peter Jones and Andreas Dilger described what is in the newest release of Lustre 2.8 and will be in Lustre 2.9, targeted for release this fall, and beyond. These features include growing support for ZFS, security, multi-rail LNET, progressive file layouts, project quotas, and more."The post Live Report from LUG 2016 Day 1 appeared first on insideHPC.

“With Supermicro’s 90 top-load 3.5” hot-swap bay JBOD as the storage core of our Lustre Pod Cluster, we maximize performance, density and capacity and simplify serviceability for massive scale HA storage deployments. Combining our preconfigured, validated 2U SuperStorage OSS, 1U Ultra SuperServer with Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre software, and global service and support, Supermicro has the Total Solution for Lustre ready for HPC, Genomics and Big Data.”The post Supermicro Launches Total Solution for Lustre on ZFS appeared first on insideHPC.

The University of Michigan is collaborating with IBM to develop and deliver “data-centric” supercomputing systems designed to increase the pace of scientific discovery in fields as diverse as aircraft and rocket engine design, cardiovascular disease treatment, materials physics, climate modeling and cosmology. "Scientific research is now at the crossroads of big data and high performance computing,” said Sumit Gupta, vice president, high performance computing and data analytics, IBM. “The explosion of data requires systems and infrastructures based on POWER8 plus accelerators that can both stream and manage the data and quickly synthesize and make sense of data to enable faster insights.”The post University of Michigan Looks to OpenPOWER for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the OpenPOWER Foundation announced more than 50 new open innovations to help companies better solve grand challenges around big data. Many new community innovations unveiled today adhere to the Open Compute Project reference architecture. “Our ongoing work with the OpenPOWER Foundation is a natural extension of our commitment to open collaboration and innovation in data center technology,” said Amber Graner, Director of Operations, Community Manager, Open Compute Project. “Open Compute Project is focused on efficiency, flexibility, and openness—and we recognize the importance of the POWER processor and the robust OpenPOWER ecosystem for the future of sever design.”The post OpenPOWER Teams with Open Compute Project for the Datacenter appeared first on insideHPC.

Housing registration is now open for SC16 in Salt Lake City, Utah. As the world's largest gathering of supercomputing professionals, the event takes place November 14-17.The post Register Now for SC16 Housing in Salt Lake City appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Egypt's Bibliotheca Alexandrina library announced plans to build an HPC platform using Huawei technologies. Based on high-density FusionServer servers, the 118 Teraflop Huawei cluster employs high-speed InfiniBand and 288 TB in storage capacity for concurrent file systems.The post Huawei HPC Coming to Bibliotheca Alexandrina Egypt appeared first on insideHPC.

Europe’s most powerful supercomputer Piz Daint is being upgraded, a move that is expected to at least double its computing power. ETH Zurich is investing around CHF 40 million to allow researchers to perform simulations, data analyses and visualizations even more efficiently in the future. Although slightly reduced in physical size, Piz Daint will become considerably more powerful as a result of the upgrade, particularly because we will be able to significantly increase bandwidth in the most important areas,” says CSCS Director Thomas Schulthess.The post CSCS to Double Performance of Cray Supercomputer with GPUs appeared first on insideHPC.

"Trends in computer memory/storage technology are in flux perhaps more so now than in the last two decades. Economic analysis of HPC storage hierarchies has led to new tiers of storage being added to the next fleet of supercomputers including Burst Buffers or In-System Solid State Storage and Campaign Storage. This talk will cover the background that brought us these new storage tiers and postulate what the economic crystal ball looks like for the coming decade. Further it will suggest methods of leveraging HPC workflow studies to inform the continued evolution of the HPC storage hierarchy."The post Gary Grider Presents: HPC Storage and IO Trends and Workflows appeared first on insideHPC.

"Our greatest scientific and technical challenges -- finding cures for cancer, understanding climate change, building intelligent machines -- require a near-infinite amount of computing performance," said Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO and co-founder, NVIDIA. "We designed the Pascal GPU architecture from the ground up with innovation at every level. It represents a massive leap forward in computing performance and efficiency, and will help some of the smartest minds drive tomorrow's advances."The post Nvidia Launches Tesla P100 Hyperscale Accelerator appeared first on insideHPC.

Today 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 Seagate Adopts Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the ISC Group, organizers of the annual ISC High Performance conference, is pleased to announce the launch of the ISC Student Cluster Competition (SCC) Alumni Network. Maintained and managed via LinkedIn, the professional networking group was formed to establish and nurture mutually beneficial relationships between SCC team members and the High Performance Computing community.The post Announcing the ISC Student Cluster Competition Alumni Network appeared first on insideHPC.

Allinea Software reports that the company is helping weather and climate researchers to adapt advanced weather models to better exploit today’s technology capability and get ready for future platforms. The company will address leading climatologists and meteorologists on best practices for scalable code development April 6-7 at the 4th ENES HPC Workshop. The session will reference the application of Allinea's tools across over 20 weather and climate customers worldwide.The post Allinea Speeds Tomorrow’s Meteorological Code appeared first on insideHPC.

Addison Snell from Intersect360 Research presented this talk at the Switzerland HPC Conference. "Based on updated research studies, Addison Snell of Intersect360 Research will present on forward-looking topics for HPC and Hyperscale markets. With an expanding look at hyper- scale, Intersect360 Research will describe the size and influence of the market, including evolving standards like Open Compute Project, OpenStack, and Beiji/Scorpio. Intersect360 Research has also investigated users’ plans for evaluating competing processing and interconnect options, including Xeon, Xeon Phi, GPU, FPGA, POWER, ARM, InfiniBand, and OmniPath."The post Video: HPC and Hyperscale Trends for 2016 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Cray announced a contract to upgrade the supercomputers at Germany’s National Meteorological Service – the Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD). Located in Offenbach, Germany, DWD is one of the world’s premier numerical weather prediction centers. "Supercomputers are absolutely vital to our mission of providing important meteorological services for the protection of life and property,” said. Dr. Jochen Dibbern, Member of the Executive Board at DWD. “Our Cray supercomputers are critical tools for our researchers and scientists, and it’s imperative that we equip our users with highly advanced supercomputing technologies.”The post DWD Weather Service in Germany Upgrades Cray Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

"Traditionally, storage have been using brute force rather than intelligent design to deliver the required throughputs but the current trend is to design balanced systems with full utilization of the back-end storage and other related components. These new systems need to use fine grained power control all the way down to individual disk drives as well as tools for continuous monitoring and management of these systems. In addition, the storage solutions of tomorrow needs to support multiple tiers including backend archiving systems supported by HSM as well multiple file systems if required. This presentation is intended to provide a short update of where Seagate HPC storage is today."The post Video: Seagate Exascale HPC Storage appeared first on insideHPC.

"Supermicro’s new SuperServer and SuperBlade platforms optimized for next generation GPU technology offer the most flexible architecture for the future of extreme parallel computing,” said Charles Liang, President and CEO of Supermicro. “Our proprietary cooling architecture supports up to four GPUs in 1U, maximizing compute density, performance and reliability under peak thermal operating conditions. Supermicro’s innovation and revolutionary solutions deliver the greatest range of options for next generation supercomputers, enabling new breakthroughs in the latest deep learning and artificial intelligence applications.”The post Supermicro Showcases New GPU SuperServer at GTC 2016 appeared first on insideHPC.

Texas A&M University’s High Performance Research Computing (HPRC) center is the latest Intel® Parallel Computing Center. "HPRC is proud to be recognized as an Intel Parallel Computing Center,” said Honggao Liu, director of High Performance Research Computing. “At HPRC we use high-performance computing to unite experts in numerous fields of study. This grant and multi-disciplinary project will allow us to better understand and solve issues within this critical software.”The post Texas A&M is the Latest Intel Parallel Computing Center appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Penguin Computing announced Open Compute Project (OCP)-based systems that reinforce both its continued collaboration with NVIDIA and new options in Penguin Computing’s Magna family of OpenPOWER-based servers. "Customers benefit when we partner with exceptional organizations like NVIDIA, the OpenPOWER Foundation and Open Compute Foundation in developing our systems,” said Jussi Kukkonen, Director Product Management, Penguin Computing. “An essential part of our mission is to provide customers with form factor flexibility, choice of architecture and peak performance, which are all hallmarks of Penguin Computing.”The post Penguin Computing Accelerates OpenPOWER-based Magna Servers appeared first on insideHPC.

As high performance and webscale applications become mainstream, HPE's continued focus on this market is yielding positive results for our customers," said Bill Mannel, vice president and general manager, HPC, Big Data and IoT Servers, HPE. "Already, more than a third of the HPC market is using HPE compute platforms to enhance scientific and business innovation and gain a competitive edge. Today's announcement reinforces our commitment to delivering new infrastructure solutions that satisfy our customers' insatiable need for massive compute power to fuel new applications and unlock the value of their data."The post Hewlett Packard Enterprise Expands HPC Portfolio appeared first on insideHPC.