High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

Parallel file systems have become the norm for HPC environments. While typically used in high end simulations, these parallel file systems can greatly affect the performance and thus the customer experience when using analytics from leading organizations such as SAS. This whitepaper is an excellent summary of how parallel file systems can enhance the workflow and insight that SAS Analytics gives.The post Faster SAS Analytics Using DDN Storage Solutions appeared first on insideHPC.

Today FlyElephant announced new tools, a series of webinars, and the formation of a community around the platform. FlyElephant is a platform that provides scientists with computing infrastructure for calculation and automates routine tasks and allows focus on the core issues of research.The post FlyElephant Announces New Tools for Scientific Computing Data Management appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) announced it has joined the iRODS Partner Program.The post TACC Joins iRODS Partners Program appeared first on insideHPC.

Sean Hefty from Intel presented this talk at the Intel HPC Developer Conference at SC15. "OpenFabrics Interfaces (OFI) is a framework focused on exporting fabric communication services to applications. OFI is best described as a collection of libraries and applications used to export fabric services. The key components of OFI are: application interfaces, provider libraries, kernel services, daemons, and test applications. Libfabric is a core component of OFI. It is the library that defines and exports the user-space API of OFI, and is typically the only software that applications deal with directly. It works in conjunction with provider libraries, which are often integrated directly into libfabric."The post Video: A Brief Introduction to OpenFabrics appeared first on insideHPC.

Today DDN announced that the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has selected DDN’s new SFA14K high-performance hyper-converged storage platform to drive the performance and deliver the capacity needed for scientific breakthroughs in climate, weather and atmospheric-related science to power its Cheyenne supercomputer. “Having a centralized, large-scale storage resource delivers a real benefit to our scientists,” said Anke Kamrath, director of the operations and services division at NCAR’s computing lab. “With the new system, we have a balance between capacity and performance so that researchers will be able to start looking at the model output immediately without having to move data around. Now, they’ll be able to get right down to the work of analyzing the results and figuring out what the models reveal.”The post DDN Storage Enables NCAR to Advance Weather and Climate Science appeared first on insideHPC.

The HiPEAC16 High Performance and Embedded Architecture and Compilation conference returns to Prague next week. With three keynote talks, 33 workshops, nine tutorials, and 37 papers, the three-day conference takes place January 18-20.The post HiPEAC16 Conference Returns to Prague January 18-20 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the National Center for Atmospheric Research announced that it has selected SGI to build one of the world’s most advanced compute systems used to develop models for predicting the impact of climate change and severe weather events on both a global and local scale. As part of a new procurement coming online in 2017, an SGI ICE XA system named “Cheyenne” will perform some of the world’s most data intensive calculations for weather and climate modeling to improve the resolution and precision by orders of magnitude. As a result, NCAR’s scientists will provide more actionable projections about the impact of climate change for specific regions and assist agencies throughout the world develop more accurate weather predictions on a local and global scale.The post NCAR Selects SGI Supercomputer for Advanced Modeling and Research appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Comsol announced the availability of COMSOL Multiphysics software on the Rescale Cloud simulation platform. "For customers seeking HPC resources for bigger analyses, this important initiative with Rescale allows our users to take full advantage of both the COMSOL Multiphysics software and Rescale's secure and flexible simulation environments," said Phil Kinnane, COMSOL's VP of Business Development.The post COMSOL Multiphysics Comes to Rescale Cloud Simulation Platform appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the Intel HPC Developer Conference at SC15, James Reinders hosts an Intel Black Belt discussion on Code Modernization. "Modern high performance computers are built with a combination of resources including: multi-core processors, many core processors, large caches, high speed memory, high bandwidth inter-processor communications fabric, and high speed I/O capabilities. High performance software needs to be designed to take full advantage of these wealth of resources. Whether re-architecting and/or tuning existing applications for maximum performance or architecting new applications for existing or future machines, it is critical to be aware of the interplay between programming models and the efficient use of these resources. Consider this a starting point for information regarding Code Modernization. When it comes to performance, your code matters!"The post Video: Intel Black Belt Discussion on HPC Code Modernization appeared first on insideHPC.

“The virtually infinite scale of cloud compute resources is now within easy reach from either existing network-attached or object-based storage. No longer is the location of your storage a roadblock to reaping the ease, timeliness, and cost offered by cloud compute services. Avere’s Enterprise Cloud Bursting solution utilizes the Virtual FXT Edge filer (vFXT) which puts high-performance, scalable NAS where you need it to enable massive compute on-demand for enterprise apps with simple installation and zero hardware maintenance. Avere makes your NAS data accessible to cloud compute without experiencing latency or requiring that your data be moved to the cloud.”The post Video: Overcoming Storage Roadblocks in HPC Clouds appeared first on insideHPC.

Dell in Austin is seeking an HPC Benchmarking Principal Engineer in our Job of the Week.The post Job of the Week: HPC Benchmarking Principal Engineer at Dell in Austin appeared first on insideHPC.

The National Science Foundation’s premier data management platform for the life sciences has rebranded, shedding the project’s original label of iPlant Collaborative and donning the new name CyVerse. The rebrand emphasizes the project’s capacity to provide data management and computation services beyond plant sciences, for collaborations across scientific disciplines.The post NSF’s iPlant Rebrands to CyVerse, Provides Data Management and Computation Across Scientific Disciplines appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the Dell booth at SC15, Addison Snell from Intersect360 Research discusses why HPC is now important to a broader group of use cases, and dug deep into overviews of HPC for research, life sciences and manufacturing. Participants learned more about why HPC, Big Data, and Cloud are converging.The post Video: Intersect360 Research Describes HPC Market Trends at SC15 appeared first on insideHPC.

The fifth annual Optical Interconnects Conference has issued its Call for Papers. Hosted by the IEEE Photonics Society, the event takes place May 9-11 in San Diego. "Optical interconnect strategies can only be fully realized when optimized at the system level,” said Lukas Chrostowski, University of British Columbia and Samuel Palermo, Texas A&M University, OI Conference 2016 General Co-Chairs. “This year’s Optical Interconnects Conference promises to be an important step in the exploration of the interconnect potential for future petascale and exascale platforms in supercomputers and datacenters.”The post Call for Papers: 2016 Optical Interconnects Conference appeared first on insideHPC.

Many will be familiar with HPC and industrial or scientific applications, but now HPC is making its impact on something that touches the soul of millions and millions of people every day — music. In an interview with the inventor of HPC for Music, Antonis Karalis shared a brief explanation of how the future of music has been compromised and what steps are being taken to revolutionize music composition, the creative workflow, and deliver new entertainment experiences. Along the way, Karalis is applying cutting edge computing technologies including Intel Optane 3D memory and the Scalable System Framework.The post The Impact of HPC on Music appeared first on insideHPC.

PRACE is seeking students interested in spending the summer working abroad. Consisting of a training week and two months at a European High Performance Computing Center, the program affords participants the opportunity to learn and share more about PRACE and HPC, and includes accommodation, a stipend and travel to their HPC center placement.The post Students: Apply Now for Summer of HPC in Europe appeared first on insideHPC.

Barbara Chapman, a leading researcher in programming languages, programming models, and compilers, has been named head of the Computer Science and Mathematics Group (CSM) under the new Computational Science Initiative at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory. Chapman is also a professor of Applied Mathematics & Statistics and Computer Science at Stony Brook University, where she serves as a joint appointee affiliated with the university's Institute for Advanced Computational Science (IACS).The post Barbara Chapman Named Head of Brookhaven Lab’s Computer Science and Mathematics Group appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Baidu Chief Scientist Andrew Ng discusses what machine learning is, how it relies on high performance computing, and touches on the many ways that machine learning will advance commercial and scientific applications.The post Video: Machine Learning Possibilities with HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

OCF in the U.K. recently deployed a new Fujitsu HPC cluster at the University of East Anglia. As the University’s second new HPC system in 4-years, the cluster can be easily scaled and expanded in the coming months through a framework agreement to match rapidly increasing demand for compute power.The post OCF Deploys Fujitsu HPC Cluster at University of East Anglia appeared first on insideHPC.

Astronomers are using iRODs data technology to study the evolution of galaxies and the nature of dark matter. "By partnering with data specialists at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) who develop the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS) researchers and students now have online databases for two large astronomical data sets: the REsolved Spectroscopy of a Local VolumE (RESOLVE) survey and the Environmental COntext (ECO) catalog."The post Astronomers Using iRODS to Wrangle Massive Survey Data appeared first on insideHPC.

"There are a number of exciting technologies we should see in 2016, and a leader will be Intel’s next-generation Xeon Phi coprocessor – a hybrid between an accelerator and general purpose processor. This new class of processors will have a large impact on the industry with its innovative design that combines a many-core architecture with general-purpose productivity. Cray, for example, will be delivering Intel Xeon Phi processors with some of our largest systems, including those going to Los Alamos National Labs (the “Trinity” supercomputer) and NERSC (the “Cori” supercomputer)."The post Five Supercomputing Predictions from Cray’s Barry Bolding appeared first on insideHPC.

"In the case of the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor, although 60 cores are commonly used for computation, there is another core that is available, but not traditionally used as part of a simulation. Experiments using the 61st core for actual computation while running a reverse Monte Carlo ray tracing application for the modeling of radiative heat transfer, demonstrated that the use of another core improved performance, and that oversubscribing the coprocessor operating system thread did not degrade the performance."The post Reserved Cores in the Intel Xeon Phi appeared first on insideHPC.

Fans of High Performance Data Analytics got a boost today with news that the High-Performance Big Data (HiBD) team at Ohio State University has released RDMA-Apache-Spark 0.9.1.The post New Version of RDMA-Spark Runs Native InfiniBand and RoCE appeared first on insideHPC.

Today DDN announced the winners of the 2015 Pioneer User Awards. The awards recognize and celebrate visionary individuals, organizations and/or multiple people who are embracing leading-edge high performance computing technologies to shatter long-standing technical limits and to accelerate business results and scientific insights.The post DDN Announces Winners of the 2015 Pioneer Awards appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC15, Peter Hopton from Iceotope describes the company's innovative liquid cooling technology for the European ExaNeSt project. “ExaNeSt will develop, evaluate, and prototype the physical platform and architectural solution for a unified Communication and Storage Interconnect and the physical rack and environmental structures required to deliver European Exascale Systems."The post Iceotope Showcases ExaNeSt Cooling Technology for Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.

"HPC in India is getting noticed on a different scale today. Starting with lot of initiatives across, the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) gives clear HPC roadmap with assert confidence of dominating HPC in India. The student cluster competition to me is a perfect way to introduce, develop and enhance the HPC technologies around. ISSC opens up an interesting and innovative platform for HPC student fraternity in India to experience the computer science and computational science."The post Interview: How de-HPC.org is bringing the Student Cluster Competition to India appeared first on insideHPC.

Data accumulation is just one of the challenges facing today weather and climatology researchers and scientists. To understand and predict Earth’s weather and climate, they rely on increasingly complex computer models and simulations based on a constantly growing body of data from around the globe. "It turns out that in today’s HPC technology, the moving of data in and out of the processing units is more demanding in time than the computations performed. To be effective, systems working with weather forecasting and climate modeling require high memory bandwidth and fast interconnect across the system, as well as a robust parallel file system."The post How HPC is Helping Solve Climate and Weather Forecasting Challenges appeared first on insideHPC.

Researchers using the Gordon Supercomputer at SDSC have identified a class of possible antibiotics with the potential to disable previously drug-resistant bacteria. In essence, these new agents were found to attack the bacteria along two fronts: its external lipid cellular wall and its internal factory responsible for generating cellular energy in the form of adenosine triphosphate or ATP.The post Gordon Supercomputer Aids Search for New Antibiotics appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Nimbix announced plans to use Infomart Dallas to support the infrastructure needs of its upgraded HPC cloud platform, JARVICE 2.0. Infomart Dallas provides Nimbix with a high-density data center complete with industry-leading connectivity options, access to the core Dallas/Fort Worth (DFW) network hub, and the low-cost power it needs to deliver its innovative HPC solutions.The post Nimbix HPC Cloud Moves to 100 MW Dallas Datacenter appeared first on insideHPC.

Today ProphetStor Data Services rolled out a reference cloud computing platform with Mellanox based on the open-source projects OpenStack and Ceph. The solution leverages each company's respective strength in software-defined-storage, state-of-the-art server hardware, and high-speed networking. Based on ProphetStor Federator SDS, this joint project addresses the key issues of OpenStack's storage management solution as well as improving the functionality and performance of Ceph, the de facto storage backend for OpenStack.The post ProphetStor Leverages Mellanox Tech for Next-Gen Cloud Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

There are just two weeks left to submit papers to PASC16. The event takes place June 8-10, 2016 in Lausanne, Switzerland.The post PASC16 Seeks Your Paper Submissions by Jan. 15 appeared first on insideHPC.

Dr. Lewey Anton reports on who's moving on up in High Peformance Computing. Familiar names in this edition include: Sharan Kalwani, John Lee, Jay Muelhoefer, Brian Sparks, and Ed Turkel.The post HPC People on the Move – New Year’s Edition appeared first on insideHPC.

In this Chigago Tonight video, Katrin Heitmann from Argonne National Lab describes one of the most complex simulations of the evolution of the universe ever created. "What we want to do now with these simulations is exactly create this universe in our lab. So we build this model and we put it on a computer and evolve it forward, and now we have created a universe that we can look at and compare it to the real data."The post Video: How Argonne Simulated the Evolution of the Universe appeared first on insideHPC.

Researchers from Zhejiang University and Hangzhou Dianzi University in China have developed the Darwin Neural Processing Unit (NPU), a neuromorphic hardware co-processor based on Spiking Neural Networks, fabricated by standard CMOS technology. "Its potential applications include intelligent hardware systems, robotics, brain-computer interfaces, and others. Since it uses spikes for information processing and transmission, similar to biological neural networks, it may be suitable for analysis and processing of biological spiking neural signals, and building brain-computer interface systems by interfacing with animal or human brains."The post China Develops Darwin Neuromorphic Chip appeared first on insideHPC.

In this Chip Chat Podcast, Intel's Barry Davis describes how today’s requirements for high performance computing fabrics are outstripping the capabilities of traditional fabric technologies in performance, reliability, and economic feasibility. He highlights how Intel Omni-Path Architecture (OPA) is delivering performance for tomorrow’s HPC workloads and has the ability to scale to tens and eventually thousands of nodes at competitive price to today’s fabrics. Barry illustrates that Intel OPA is a foundational element of the Intel Scalable System Framework (Intel SSF) and will continue to drive higher performance, lower latency, and more bandwidth across the Intel CPU roadmap.The post Podcast: Changing HPC Economics with the Intel Omni-Path Architecture appeared first on insideHPC.

Penguin Computing has renewed as a Platinum Member of Open Compute Project (OCP). Leading with the OCP-based Tundra Extreme Scale (ES) Series, Penguin was recently awarded the CTS-1 contract with the NNSA to bolster computing for national security at Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories.The post Penguin Computing is now Platinum Member of Open Compute Project (OCP) appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Dr. Michael Karasick from IBM moderates a panel discussion on Machine Learning. "The success of cognitive computing will not be measured by Turing tests or a computer’s ability to mimic humans. It will be measured in more practical ways, like return on investment, new market opportunities, diseases cured and lives saved."The post Video: IBM Panel Discussion on Machine Learning appeared first on insideHPC.

Quantlab Financial in Houston is seeking a Senior HPC Engineer in our Job of the Week.The post Job of the Week: Senior HPC Engineer at Quantlab Financial appeared first on insideHPC.

Rob Futrick presented this talk at SC15. "Cycle Computing’s CycleCloud software suite is the leading cloud orchestration, provisioning, and data management platform for Big Compute, Big Data, and large technical computing applications running on any public, private, or internal environment. For years, customers in Life Sciences, Manufacturing, Financial Services, and other Engineering and Research areas have used CycleCloud software to manage some of the world’s largest production cloud deployments."The post Video: Why Wouldn’t You Use Public Cloud for HPC? appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the Cycle Computing the HPC in the Cloud Educational Series, Jeff Layton, HPC Principal Architect at Amazon Web Services, explains concepts and options around using storage in the AWS Cloud.The post HPC Cloud Data Management at AWS appeared first on insideHPC.

OpenHPC is a collaborative, community effort that initiated from a desire to aggregate a number of common ingredients required to deploy and manage High Performance Computing Linux clusters including provisioning tools, resource management, I/O clients, development tools, and a variety of scientific libraries.The post Podcast: Strengthening High Performance Computing with OpenHPC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC15, Dell's Onur Celebioglu discusses why HPC is now important to a broader group of use cases. He also provides an overview of HPC for research, life sciences and manufacturing. Participants learned more about why HPC, big data and cloud are converging, and how Dell solves challenges in our HPC engineering lab and through collaborative work with other leading technology partners and research institutions.The post Video: Trends and Tech in the HPC Market appeared first on insideHPC.

In this Chip Chat podcast, Bill Mannel, Vice President and General Manager for HPC and Big Data from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) describes the High Performance Computing Alliance between HPE and Intel. He highlights how the two companies are developing innovative solutions based on Intel Scalable System Framework (Intel SSF) and are working to enhance HPC solutions while engaging customers directly in centers of excellence (COEs) located in Grenoble, France and Houston, Texas. Bill also emphasizes how HPE compute solutions are experiencing incredible momentum in government, commercial and academic market verticals and that HPE is receiving excellent results from the integration of HPE Apollo products and Intel HPC technology.The post Podcast: HPE and Intel Alliance for High Performance Computing & Big Data appeared first on insideHPC.

Who are the world’s most important vendors of supercomputers, at least as measured by the number of systems they have in the Top500? HP is the leader with a 31 per cent share; Cray is number two with just under 14 per cent. So far, so unsurprising. But what has been little remarked upon is that in third place – with 49 systems, or 9.8 per cent of the Top500 list – is the Chinese vendor, Sugon. And both Sugon and Inspur, the other main Chinese vendor, have their sights set on expanding still further, with trade missions to Europe and setting up partnerships and subsidiaries in both Europe and the USA.The post China’s HPC Vendors Look to US and European Markets appeared first on insideHPC.

Ruud van der Pas from Oracle presented this talk at OpenMPcon. "Unfortunately it is a very widespread myth that OpenMP Does Not Scale – a myth we intend to dispel in this talk. Every parallel system has its strengths and weaknesses. This is true for clustered systems, but also for shared memory parallel computers. While nobody in their right mind would consider sending one zillion single byte messages to a single node in a cluster, people do the equivalent in OpenMP and then blame the programming model. Also, shared memory parallel systems have some specific features that one needs to be aware of. Few do though. In this talk we use real-life case studies based on actual applications to show why an application did not scale and what was done to change this. More often than not, a relatively simple modification, or even a system level setting, makes all the difference."The post Dispelling the Myth “OpenMP Does Not Scale” appeared first on insideHPC.

Steve Cooper from One Stop Systems presented this talk at SC15. “The OSS GPUltima is the densest and most cost-effective petaflop solution for scalable data center infrastructures," said Steve Cooper, OSS CEO. “Supporting up to 128 NVIDIA Tesla K80 GPU accelerators, the OSS GPUltima shows tremendous performance gains in many applications like oil and gas exploration, financial calculations, and medical devices. Providing ample cooling and power to accommodate this many high-end cards, it surpasses other devices in performance. In addition, the OSS GPUltima is a preconfigured rack of GPUs, servers and interconnections already integrated and the whole unit is tested and ready to add application software."The post Video: GPUltima – The Ultimate in GPU Networks appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Intel Corporation announced that it has completed the acquisition of Altera, a leading provider of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology. The acquisition complements Intel's leading-edge product portfolio and enables new classes of products in the high-growth data center and Internet of Things (IoT) market segments.The post Intel Completes Altera Acquisition appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team makes their tech predictions for 2016. Will secure firmware be the key differentiator for HPC vendors? Will this be the year of FPGAs? And could we see a 100 Petaflop machine on the TOP500 before the year ends?The post 2016 Predictions from Radio Free HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this Intel Chip Chat podcast, Alan Gara describes how Intel’s Scalable System Framework (SSF) is meeting the extreme challenges and opportunities that researchers and scientists face in high performance computing today. He explains that SSF incorporates many different Intel technologies including; Intel Xeon and Phi processors, Intel Omni-Path Fabrics, silicon photonics, innovative memory technologies, and efficiently integrates these elements into a broad spectrum of system solutions optimized for both compute and data-intensive workloads. Mr. Gara emphasizes that this framework has the ability to scale from very small HPC systems all the way up to exascale computing systems and meets the needs of users in a very scalable and flexible way.The post Podcast: Alan Gara on the Intel Scalable System Framework appeared first on insideHPC.