High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

The EMiT 2016 Emerging Technologies Conference has issued its Call for Papers. Hosted by the Mont-Blanc project and the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, the event takes place June 2-3, 2016 in Barcelona.The post Call for Papers: EMiT 2016 Emerging Technologies Conference appeared first on insideHPC.

"Developers of modern HPC applications face a challenge when scaling out their hybrid (MPI/OpenMP) applications. As cluster sizes continue to grow, the amount of analysis data collected can easily become overwhelming when going from 10s to 1000s of ranks and it’s tough to identify which are the key metrics to track. There is a need for a lightweight tool that aggregates the performance data in a simple and intuitive way, provides advice on next optimizations steps, and hones in on performance issues. We’ll discuss a brand new tool that helps quickly gather and analyze statistics up to 100,000 ranks. We’ll give examples of the type of pertinent information collected at high core counts, including memory and counter usage, MPI and OpenMP imbalance analysis, and total communication vs. computation time. We’ll work through analyzing an application and effective ways to manage the data."The post Video: Profiling at Scale appeared first on insideHPC.

The InterCloud-HPC 2016 conference has issued its Call for Papers. As part of The International Conference on High Performance Computing & Simulation (HPCS 2016), the event takes place July 18-22 in Innsbruck, Austria.The post Call for Papers: InterCloud-HPC 2016 in Austria appeared first on insideHPC.

"SeqAn (www.seqan.de) is an open-source C++ template library (BSD license) that implements many efficient and generic data structures and algorithms for Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) analysis. It contains gapped k-mer indices, enhanced suffix arrays (ESA) or an (bidirectional) FM-index, as well algorithms for fast and accurate alignment or read mapping. Based on those data types and fast I/O routines, users can easily develop tools that are extremely efficient and easy to maintain. Besides multi-core, the research team at Freie Universität Berlin has started generic support for distinguished accelerators such as Intel Xeon Phi in a new IPCC. In this talk we will introduce SeqAn and its generic design, describe successful applications that use SeqAn, and describe how SeqAn will incorporate SIMD and multicore parallelism for its core data structures using the pairwise alignment module as an example."The post Video: The SeqAn C++ Library for Efficient NGS Sequence Analysis appeared first on insideHPC.

A new high performance computing and cloud facility has been unveiled by scientists in London, named after Dr Rosalind Franklin, the unsung heroine of elucidating the double-helix structure of DNA. "Before Rosalind, if we wanted to analyze the data from 500 DNA samples it would have taken us approximately six months, now with the launch of Rosalind it will take only a week."The post HPC Facility in London Named After Dr Rosalind Franklin appeared first on insideHPC.

Bill Lee presented this talk at the Mellanox booth at SC15. "The IBTA is responsible for compliance and interoperability testing of commercial products and has successfully added hundreds of products to its Integrators’ List. The IBTA unites the industry through IBTA-sponsored technical events and resources, and actively promotes InfiniBand from a vendor-neutral perspective through online communications, marketing and public relations engagements."The post Video: InfiniBand Trade Association Update appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Dr. David Southwell from Obsidian Strategics discusses conventional InfiniBand technology and goes on to describe how the company's Longbow, Crossbow and Bowman devices enable what is generally considered as an 'indoor use only' protocol to be deployed at scale with security over global distances. The resulting Global InfiniBand Fabrics can be used for a variety of purposes including technical computing, big data migration and streaming distribution.The post Obsidian Introduces Global InfiniBand Fabrics appeared first on insideHPC.

Are you planning to ISC 2016 in June? Special flight discounts are now available through Star Alliance member airlines.The post Save up to 20 Percent on Travel to ISC 2016 Through the Star Alliance appeared first on insideHPC.

"In this presentation, we will discuss several important goals and requirements of portable standards in the context of OpenMP. We will also encourage audience participation as we discuss and formulate the current state-of-the-art in this area and our hopes and goals for the future. We will start by describing the current and next generation architectures at NERSC and OLCF and explain how the differences require different general programming paradigms to facilitate high-performance implementations."The post Video: Enabling Application Portability across HPC Platforms appeared first on insideHPC.

An interesting use of HPC technologies is in the area of understanding the propagation of radio frequency energy in an outdoor environment. "Applications of this type need to be completed in seconds to minutes to be useful. Since the tracing of each ray is independent of another ray, this type of application can be distributed easily among the many cores of the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor."The post Tracing Radio Frequencies with Intel Xeon Phi appeared first on insideHPC.

Today NetApp announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire SolidFire for $870 million in cash. Founded in 2010, SolidFire is a market leader in all-flash storage systems built for the next-generation data center where simple scaling, set-and-forget management, assured performance and multi-tenancy, and cloud economic models are driving new market growth.The post NetApp to Acquire SolidFire for All-Flash SSDs appeared first on insideHPC.

Thomas Schulthess from CSCS presented this talk at the Nvidia booth at SC15. "On October 1, 2015 "Piz Kesch", a Cray CS-Storm system with NVIDIA K80 GPUs became operational at CSCS on behalf of MeteoSwiss. In this talk, we will discuss the hardware-software co-design project behind this most cost and energy efficient system for numerical weather prediction."The post Piz Kesch: The Making of a GPU-based Weather Forecasting System appeared first on insideHPC.

The 2016 International Conference on High Performance Computing & Simulation (HPCS 2016) has issued its Call for Doctoral Dissertation Colloquium Abstracts. The mission of HPCS is to address, explore and exchange information on the state-of-the-art in high performance and large scale computing systems, their use in modeling and simulation, their design, performance and use, and their impact. The Conference will be held on July 18 - 22, 2016 in Innsbruck, Austria.The post Call for Doctoral Dissertation Colloquium Abstracts: HPCS 2016 appeared first on insideHPC.

Prof. Kai Li from Princeton presented this talk at the Intel HPC Developer Conference at SC15. "Full correlation matrix analysis (FCMA) is an unbiased approach for exhaustively studying interactions among brain regions in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from human participants. In order to answer neuro-scientific questions efficiently, we are developing a closed-loop analysis system with FCMA on a cluster of nodes with Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. In this talk, we will discuss our current results and future plans."The post Building A Real-Time, Closed Loop fMRI Data Analysis System for Neuroscience Experiments appeared first on insideHPC.

The use of High Performance Computing continues to grow in the enterprise and beyond. In this podcast, James Reinders from Intel describes how Intel will continue to drive HPC democratization in 2016. "At Intel, our passion to help drive the democratization of HPC is exemplified by many things. Here is my list of ten things which caught my attention as being most significant as we enter 2016."The post Podcast: Top 10 Ways Intel Will Drive HPC Democratization in 2016 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Tommy Minyard from TACC describes how Dell helped develop the 9.6 Petaflop Stampede supercomputer for scientific computing. "The Texas Advanced Computing Center supports the University of Texas System and National Science Foundation researchers with the newest version of their Stampede High Performance Computing cluster. Stampede uses Dell PowerEdge servers, Intel Xeon processors and the new Dell Networking H-Series switches and adapters based on Intel Omni-Path Architecture. These newly implemented technologies greatly reduce latency, optimize traffic flow, and give Stampede a peak performance of 10 petaflops."The post Video: TACC Powers Stampede Supercomputer with Dell Servers and Intel Omni Path appeared first on insideHPC.

"To be successful in high-performance computing (HPC) today, it is no longer enough to sell good hardware: vendors need to develop an ‘ecosystem’ in which other hardware companies use their products and components; in which system administrators are familiar with their processors and architectures; and in which developers are trained and eager to write code both for the efficient use of the system and for end-user applications. No one company, not even Intel or IBM, can achieve all of this by itself anymore."The post Is HPC Heading Towards Openness, Chaos, or a Split? appeared first on insideHPC.

An interdisciplinary research team from JYU in Finland has set a new world record in the field of fluid flow simulations through porous materials. The team, coordinated by Dr. Keijo Mattila from the University of Jyväskylä, used the world’s largest 3D images of a porous material--synthetic X-ray tomography images of the microstructure of Fontainebleau sandstone, and successfully simulated fluid flow through a sample of the size of 1.5 cubic centimeters with a submicron resolution.The post JYU Sets World Record for Pore-scale Flow Simulations appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the French ESI Group announced the opening of its new European HPC Center. The datacenter is now based on the Teratec Campus, an ideal location to launch collaborative High-Performance Computing projects as it is in the vicinity of Europe’s biggest HPC center: the CEA’s Très Grand Centre de Calcul. The new datacenter will effectively act as ESI’s POD (Point of Delivery), serving all ESI offices across Europe as a platform for ESI’s new software development and engineering services alike. ESI teamed up with Legrand, the global specialist in electrical and digital building infrastructures to meet the technical challenges surrounding this project.The post ESI Opens New European HPC Center appeared first on insideHPC.

Lustre was originally developed as the fastest scratch file system for HPC workloads that supercomputer centers could get, but has over the years matured to be an enterprise-class parallel file system supporting mission-critical workloads. Unfortunately, in spite of Lustre having become extremely attractive to enterprises and adopted by IT departments, some naysayers continue toclaim that Lustre is still just a scratch file system. We in the Lustre community see quite a different picture.The post Lustre and Persistent Storage appeared first on insideHPC.

"This presentation will describe how OpenMP is used at NERSC. NERSC is the primary supercomputing facility for Office of Science in the US Depart of Energy (DOE). Our next production system will be an Intel Xeon Phi Knights Landing (KNL) system, with 60+ cores per node and 4 hardware threads per core. The recommended programming model is hybrid MPI/OpenMP, which also promotes portability across different system architectures."The post Video: Using OpenMP at NERSC appeared first on insideHPC.

Alexandre Caldeira from IBM writes that CentOS is now available for the POWER8 platform. This is a big step for the OpenPOWER community, as the business world uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its twin CentOS for their servers.The post CentOS Comes to POWER8 Platforms appeared first on insideHPC.

The High Performance Conjugate Gradients (HPCG) benchmark continues to gain traction in the high-performance computing community. “HPCG is designed to complement the traditional High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark used as the official metric for ranking the top 500 systems,” said Sandia National Laboratories researcher Mike Heroux, who developed the HPCG program in collaboration with Jack Dongarra and Piotr Luszczek from the University of Tennessee.The post HPCG Benchmark Gains Traction for Ranking Supercomputers appeared first on insideHPC.

Harvey Newman from CalTech presented this talk at the Mellanox booth at SC15. "We describe activities of the Caltech High Energy Physics team and collaborators, related to the use Software Defined Networking to help achieve fast and efficient data distribution and access. Results from Supercomputing 2014 are presented together with our work on the Advanced Network Services for the Experiments project, and a new project developing a Next Generation Integrated SDN Architecture, as well as our plans for Supercomputing 2015."The post Next Generation SDN Driven Systems for Exascale Data Intensive Science appeared first on insideHPC.

"Over the last several years, an enormous amount of development effort has gone into Lustre to address users’ enterprise-related requests. Their work is not only keeping Lustre extremely fast (the Spider II storage system at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) that supports OLCF’s Titan supercomputer delivers 1 TB/s ; and Data Oasis, supporting the Comet supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC) supports thousands of users with 300GB/s throughput) but also making it an enterprise-class parallel file system that has since been deployed for many mission-critical applications, such as seismic processing and analysis, regional climate and weather modeling, and banking."The post Lustre: This is Not Your Grandmother’s (or Grandfather’s) Parallel File System appeared first on insideHPC.

“Analytics applied over complex, many-to-many data relationships hit the ‘Graph Cache Thrash’ bottleneck and grind to a halt, failing to deliver good performance or to operate at scale,” said Brad Bebee, SYSTAP CEO. “GPU hardware provides a compelling performance increase for data-intensive, predictive analytic applications. With Blazegraph and our new GPU products, users can harness the computing power comparable to what was only available from supercomputers, such as a Cray, at a fraction of the cost.”The post Video: Blazegraph Accelerates Graph Computing with GPUs appeared first on insideHPC.

On December 18, Oracle closed an agreement to acquire StackEngine, an Austin-based startup focused on Docker automation. All StackEngine employees will be joining Oracle as part of Oracle Public Cloud.The post Oracle Acquires StackEngine Startup to Automate Docker appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, David Bolton from Slashdot Media looks at the costs of running high-powered servers in the Cloud from three providers: AWS, Google and Microsoft. The Cloud computing services are compared by price, capability and available features.The post How Much Does it Cost to Run an HPC Server in the Cloud? appeared first on insideHPC.

Intel is seeking an HPC Solutions Architect in our Job of the Week.The post Job of the Week: HPC Solutions Architect at Intel appeared first on insideHPC.

Scientists from the Heat and Mass Transfer Technological Center (CTTC) at the Technical University of Catalonia in Spain have harnessed the extreme performance of the Mira supercomputer with their in-house multi-physics CFD code as a result of collaboration on scalable debugging for the high-end system between Allinea Software and Argonne National Laboratory.The post Enabling New Frontiers in CFD Research at Argonne with Allinea DDT appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, David Keyes (KAUST) and Torsten Hoefler (ETH Zurich) discuss the new papers track at the PASC16 conference. After issuing their Call for Papers, the event will be held June 8-10, 2016 in Lausanne, Switzerland.The post Video: Seeking Submissions for New Papers Track at PASC16 appeared first on insideHPC.

The 2016 ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge (ASC16) in China has issued its Call for Participation. As one of the largest Student Cluster Competitions in the world, the ASC16 initiative provides a unique opportunity for organizations and individuals to test their mettle in High Performance Computing. Student Teams and Potential Hosting Institutions are invited to apply.The post Call for Participation: ASC16 Student Supercomputer Challenge appeared first on insideHPC.

John Stone from the University of Illinois presented this talk at the Intel HPC Developer Conference at SC15. "VMD is designed for modeling, visualization, and analysis of biological systems such as proteins, nucleic acids, lipid bilayer assemblies, etc. It may be used to view more general molecules, as VMD can read standard Protein Data Bank (PDB) files and display the contained structure."The post Visualizing Biomolecular Complexes on x86 and KNL Platforms: Integrating VMD and OSPRay appeared first on insideHPC.

The fifth Irish Supercomputer List was released today with a full ranking of the nation's HPC systems. Launched in November 2013 to raise the profile of High Performance Computing in Ireland and abroad, the list is updated twice annually with a continuous open call for participation from users and maintainers of Irish HPC installations.The post Irish Supercomputer List Reflects HPC Growth appeared first on insideHPC.

"At SC15, IBM, in turn, announced new offerings centered "on the tight integration of IBM’s Power processors with accelerators." But it was an announcement about IBM’s interest in FPGAs that attracted attention. It has concluded a multi-year strategic collaboration with Xilinx to develop FPGA-enabled workload acceleration on Power-based systems. Through a private commercial agreement as well as by collaboration through the Open Power Foundation, the two companies are teaming up to develop open acceleration infrastructures, software, and middleware.The post Is the Future CPU+GPU or CPU+FPGA? appeared first on insideHPC.

Today ClusterVision and UberCloud formally announced the integration of UberCloud Application Containers with Trinity, ClusterVision’s private cloud solution. Trinity provides a complete HPC cluster manager on top of a cloud platform capable of managing HPC, general IT, and Big Data, bringing the flexibility of Platform-as-a-Service to HPC.The post ClusterVision Trinity Private Cloud Moves to UberCloud HPC Application Containers appeared first on insideHPC.

"The goal of each hackathon is for current or prospective user groups of large hybrid CPU-GPU systems to send teams of at least 3 developers along with either (1) a (potentially) scalable application that needs to be ported to GPU accelerators, or (2) an application running on accelerators which needs optimization. There will be intensive mentoring during this 5-day hands-on workshop, with the goal that the teams leave with applications running on GPUs, or at least with a clear roadmap of how to get there. Our mentors come from national laboratories, universities and vendors, and besides having extensive experience in programming with OpenACC/CUDA, many of them develop the GPU-capable compilers and help define the OpenACC standard."The post 2016 Hackathons Seeking Team Applications appeared first on insideHPC.

ISC 2016 has announced their keynote speakers. The event takes place June 19-23 in Frankfurt, Germany.The post ISC 2016 Announces Keynote Speakers appeared first on insideHPC.

"Applications in diverse industries such as the hospitality and retail industry, social networks and surveillance can benefit from real time image recognition. Parallelism at the system level can be divided into two main areas. First, at the database level and second at the image recognition level. The compute load per thread on the host system can just be calculated as the total number of images in the database divided by the number of threads. The image matching algorithms can then be parallelized on the coprocessor."The post Image Recognition with Coprocessors appeared first on insideHPC.

Nvidia's Jen-Hsun Huang and Ian Buck presented this talk at SC15. "Supercomputing has swept rapidly from the far edges of science to the heart of our everyday lives. And propelling it forward – bringing it into the mobile phone already in your pocket and the car in your driveway – is GPU acceleration, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang told a packed house at a rollicking event kicking off this week’s SC15 annual supercomputing show in Austin. The event draws 10,000 researchers, national lab directors and others from around the world."The post Accelerated Computing: The Path Forward appeared first on insideHPC.

Graduate students and postdoctoral scholars from institutions in Canada, Europe, Japan and the United States are invited to apply for the seventh International Summer School on HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences, to be held June 26 to July 1, 2016, in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The summer school is sponsored by the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) with funds from the U.S. National Science Foundation, Compute/Calcul Canada, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) and the RIKEN Advanced Insti­tute for Computational Science (RIKEN AICS).The post Apply for International Summer School on HPC Challenges in Slovenia appeared first on insideHPC.

Baidu Research has unveiled new research results from its Silicon Valley AI Lab (SVAIL). Results include the ability to accurately recognize both English and Mandarin with a single learning algorithm. The results are detailed in a paper: Deep Speech 2: End-to-End Speech Recognition in English and Mandarin.The post Deep Learning System Replaces Hand-Engineered Components With Neural Networks appeared first on insideHPC.

Bill Nitzberg from Altair presented this talk at the Intel HPC Developer Conference at SC15. "Everyone benefits from faster, more resilient infrastructure - the small, the medium, and the really big. This talk will cover how job management software like PBS connect applications with system resources and present optimal paths for application execution."The post Video: Job Launching – Keeping Pace with Expanding Complexities appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Allinea released version 6.0 of their HPC development tools suite Allinea Forge and Performance Reports. Building on their commitment to serving the scientific HPC community, Allinea demonstrated the new features at SC15 last month in Austin.The post New Allinea 6.0 HPC Developer Tools Suite appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the CHPC National Meeting in South Africa, participants in the Student Cluster Competition discuss what they learned in their race to build the fastest HPC cluster. "The students received a unique opportunity to learn, experience and demonstrate how high-performance computing influence our world and day-to-day learning. As an integral part of the CHPC National Meeting, the Student Cluster Competition is designed to introduce the next generation of students to the high performance computing world and community."The post Lessons Learned from the CHPC Student Cluster Competition appeared first on insideHPC.

In this NICS podcast, Scott Gibson discusses how the Earth was formed with Wladimir Lyra, an assistant professor at California State University at Northridge, Department of Physics and Astronomy. Lyra is using XSEDE supercomputing resources to explore this age-old question.The post Podcast: XSEDE Powers Search for How the Earth was Formed appeared first on insideHPC.

Today IBM's Cleversafe announced its software defined/hardware aware storage approach to enable organizations with massive-scale data demands to easily take advantage of software defined storage (SDS) with a solution that integrates with industry-standard hardware. The Cleversafe approach reduces cost and complexity by enabling enterprises to manage their storage hardware and software from a single management system. The company also announced newly certified hardware platforms, giving enterprise customers even greater deployment flexibility.The post Cleversafe takes Software Defined Storage to Industry Standard Hardware appeared first on insideHPC.

"This talk will discuss the plans to use OpenStack to manage and automate dynamically changing an environment to provide users a highly re-configurable software environment with access to a large number of operating systems and software packages on the “Bridges system.” It will feature elements of OpenStack related to bare-metal booting, network provisioning, container management, storage, and scheduling nodes to match the workloads of the users."The post Using OpenStack to Manage a Data Analytics HPC Cluster at PSC appeared first on insideHPC.