Inside HPC & AI News | High-Performance Computing & Artificial Intelligence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.