High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

In many HPC environments, the storage system is an afterthought. While the main focus is on the CPU’s the selection and implementation of the storage hardware and software is critical to an efficient and productive overall HPC environment. Without the ability to move data quickly into and out of the CPU system, the HPC users would not be able to obtain the performance that is expected.The post Enterprise HPC Storage System appeared first on insideHPC.

The XSEDE16 conference has issued its Call for Participation. With a conference theme of Diversity, Big Data, Science at Scale: Enabling the Next-Generation of Science and Technology, the conference takes place July 17-21, 2016 in Miami.The post Call for Participation: XSEDE16 Conference in Miami appeared first on insideHPC.

In this TACC podcast, the Thomas Jordan from the University of Southern California describes how he uses the computational resources of XSEDE, the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment, to model earthquakes and help reduce their risk to life and property. Dr. Jordan was invited to speak at SC15 on the Societal Impact of Earthquake Simulations at Extreme Scale.The post Podcast: Societal Impact of Earthquake Simulations at Extreme Scale appeared first on insideHPC.

Buddy Bland from ORNL presented this talk at SC15. "Summit will deliver more than five times the computational performance of Titan’s 18,688 nodes, using only approximately 3,400 nodes. Each Summit node will contain multiple IBM POWER9 CPUs and NVIDIA Volta GPUs all connected together with NVIDIA’s high-speed NVLink and a huge amount of memory."The post Buddy Bland Presents an Update on the Summit Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

SC15 has released results from the Supercomputing conference in Austin. This year, the conference drew a record 12,868 attendees, including 4,829 who registered for the six-day Technical Program of invited speakers, technical papers, research posters, tutorials, workshops and more.The post SC15 Announces Attendance Record & Awards Roundup appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Mellanox announced the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has approved the Mellanox SwitchX series of 10/40 Gigabit Ethernet switches for use on U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) networks. This move comes as a direct result of the DISA awarding Mellanox Federal Systems the Unified Capabilities Approved Product List (UC APL) certification for the Mellanox SwitchX series of Ethernet switches.The post Mellanox 10/40 Gig Ethernet Switches Approved for DoD Networks appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the Intel HPC Developer Conference at SC15, David Pellerin, HPC Business Development Principal at Amazon Web presents: Use-Cases and Methods for Scalable Enterprise HPC in the Cloud.The post Use-Cases and Methods for Scalable Enterprise HPC in the Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

This week Flow Science released a new version of FLOW-3D Cast, its software specially-designed for metal casters. FLOW-3D Cast v4.1 offers powerful advances in modeling capabilities, accuracy and performance.The post Flow Science Adds Active Simulation Control to FLOW-3D Cast appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC15, Bryan Catanzaro, senior researcher in Baidu Research's Silicon Valley AI Lab describes AI projects at Baidu and how the team uses HPC to scale deep learning. Advancements in High Performance Computing are enabling researchers worldwide to make great progress in AI.The post Video: Bryan Catanzaro on HPC and Deep Learning at SC15 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. Packages provided by OpenHPC have been pre-built with HPC integration in mind with a goal to provide re-usable building blocks for the HPC community."The post Video: Working Together on Frameworks for HPC Systems with OpenHPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Penguin Computing in Portland is seeking a Python Software Engineer in our Job of the Week.The post Job of the Week: Python Software Engineer at Penguin Computing in Portland appeared first on insideHPC.

In this TACC podcast, Niall Gaffney from the Texas Advanced Computing Center discusses the Wrangler supercomputer for data-intensive computing. "We went to propose to build Wrangler with (the data world) in mind. We kept a lot of what was good with systems like Stampede, but then added new things to it like a very large flash storage system, a very large distributed spinning disc storage system, and high speed network access to allow people who have data problems that weren't being fulfilled by systems like Stampede and Lonestar to be able to do those in ways that they never could before."The post Podcast: Big Data on the Wrangler Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC15, Brian Sparks from Mellanox presents an overview of the HPC Advisory Council. "The HPC Advisory Council’s mission is to bridge the gap between high-performance computing (HPC) use and its potential, bring the beneficial capabilities of HPC to new users for better research, education, innovation and product manufacturing, bring users the expertise needed to operate HPC systems, provide application designers with the tools needed to enable parallel computing, and to strengthen the qualification and integration of HPC system products."The post Video: Introduction to the HPC Advisory Council appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Society of HPC Professionals announced the formation of the HPC in Cybersecurity Center of Performance located in Washington, D.C. "The HPC in Cybersecurity Center of Performance (CoP) is an educational chapter focused on bringing together members of the private sector, government and academia engaged in the intersecting technologies of HPC and cybersecurity,” said Maryam Rahmani, CoP Director.The post New Cybersecurity Center of Performance Launches from SHPCP appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the Intel HPC Developer Conference at SC15, Kent Millfield from TACC presents: OpenMP and the Intel Compiler. "The OpenMP standard has recently been extended to cover offload and SIMD. The Intel compiler has provided its own implementations of offload and SIMD for some time before the extensions to the OpenMP standard was approved, and that standard is still evolving. This talk describes what you can do with the Intel compiler that you cannot yet do in OpenMP including some where gaps are getting closed soon, and some which will remain for a while. The talk will also highlight where things are done differently between the language interfaces of the Intel compiler and the OpenMP standard. The talk is relevant both to those who seek to port existing code to the OpenMP standard, and to those who are starting afresh."The post Video: OpenMP and the Intel Compiler appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Kristin Hansen, Chief Marketing Officer at Bright Computing writes that HPC doesn't need to be held back by commonly held misconceptions.The post HPC Myths Need Not Hamper the Technology’s Growth appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC15, Brian Connors of Lenovo and Charlie Wuischpard of Intel Lenovo discuss how their company's are partnering to drive innovation in high performance computing. “We’re excited to collaborate with Lenovo in their new Beijing Center for HPC, cloud and data analytics,” said Charles Wuischpard, vice president and general manager of HPC Platform Group at Intel. “As with the current Innovation Center in Germany, the new center in Beijing gives clients early access to a broad range of ever-advancing technology and scale, including full support of the Intel Scalable System Framework — allowing users of all sizes to experience its benefit.”The post Video: Lenovo and Intel Partner on HPC Innovation at SC15 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Nvidia announced that Facebook will power its next-generation computing system with Tesla GPUs, enabling a broad range of new machine learning applications.The post GPUs Power Facebook’s New Deep Learning Machine appeared first on insideHPC.

"How can quants or financial engineers write financial analytics libraries that can be systematically efficiently deployed on an Intel Xeon Phi co-processor or an Intel Xeon multi-core processor without specialist knowledge of parallel programming? A tried and tested approach to obtaining efficient deployment on many-core architectures is to exploit the highest level of granularity of parallelism exhibited by an application. However, this approach may require exploiting domain knowledge to efficiently map the workload to all cores. Using representative examples in financial modeling, this talk will show how the use of Our Pattern Language (OPL) can be used to formalize this knowledge and ensure that the domains of concerns for modeling and mapping the computations to the architecture are delineated. We proceed to describe work in progress on an Intel Xeon Phi implementation of Quantlib, a popular open-source quantitative finance library."The post Video: Designing Parallel Financial Analytics Libraries Using a Pattern Oriented Approach appeared first on insideHPC.

One of the highlight of the annual SC conference is the Student Cluster Competition, where student teams race to build the fastest HPC cluster. For SC16, the conference is looking for your help improve the application benchmark suite.The post Help Improve the SC16 Student Cluster Competition appeared first on insideHPC.

"In this video from SC15, Amar Shan describes how the the Cray CS-Storm takes GPUs to new levels of scalability. Systems like the CS-Storm have propelled Cray to power 50 percent of the TOP500 supercomputers. While the Cray CS-Storm started out successfully in government sectors, the systems have gained traction in various commercial sectors including Oil & Gas."The post Cray CS-Storm Takes GPUs to New Levels of Scalability at SC15 appeared first on insideHPC.

"Modal is a cosmological statistical analysis package that can be optimized to take advantage of a high number of cores. The inner product computations with Modal can be run on the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor. As a base, the entire simulation took about 6 hours on the Intel Xeon processor. Since the inner calculations are independent from each other, this lends to using the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor."The post Cosmic Microwave Background Analysis with Intel Xeon Phi appeared first on insideHPC.

"Just as representative benchmarks like HPCG are set to replace Linpack, so a focus on software is taking over. From industry analysts to users at SC15 we heard that software is the number one challenge and the number one opportunity to have world-class impact."The post Four Reasons that Software Development is in the HPC Driving Seat for 2016 appeared first on insideHPC.

"In July, Intel announced plans for the HPC Scalable System Framework - a design foundation enabling wide range of highly workload-optimized solutions. This talk will delve into aspects of the framework and highlight the relationship and benefits to application development and execution."The post Video: Diving into Intel’s HPC Scalable System Framework Plans appeared first on insideHPC.

Today CoolIT Systems announced that the company has been named 2015 Exporter of the Year by the Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters (CME) and JuneWarren-Nickle’s Energy Group (JWE) in Calgary.The post CoolIT Systems Named Alberta’s Exporter of the Year appeared first on insideHPC.

"Modeling and simulation have been the primary usage of high performance computing (HPC). But the world is changing. We now see the need for rapid, accurate insights from large amounts of data. To accomplish this, HPC technology is repurposed. Likewise the location where the work gets done is not entirely the same either. Many workloads are migrating to massive cloud data centers because of the speed of execution. In this panel, leaders in computing will share how they, and others, integrate tradition and innovation (HPC technologies, Big Data analytics, and Cloud Computing) to achieve more discoveries and drive business outcomes."The post Dell Panel on the Convergence of HPC, Big Data, and Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

The democratization of HPC got a major boost last year with the announcement of an NSF award to the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. The $9.65 million grant for the development of Bridges, a new supercomputer designed to serve a wide variety of scientists, will open the door to users who have not had access to HPC until now. “Bridges is designed to close three important gaps: bringing HPC to new communities, merging HPC with Big Data, and integrating national cyberinfrastructure with campus resources. To do that, we developed a unique architecture featuring Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) large-memory servers including HPE Integrity Superdome X, HPE ProLiant DL580, and HPE Apollo 2000. Bridges is interconnected by Intel Omni-Path Architecture fabric, deployed in a custom topology for Bridges’ anticipated workloads.”The post PSC’s Bridges Supercomputer Brings HPC to a New Class of Users appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC15, Scot Schultz from Mellanox describes the company's new Switch-IB 2, the new generation of its InfiniBand switch optimized for High-Performance Computing, Web 2.0, database and cloud data centers, capable of 100Gb/s per port speeds. "Switch-IB 2 is the world’s first smart network switch that offloads MPI operations from the CPU to the network to deliver 10X performance improvements. Switch-IB 2 will enables a performance breakthrough in building the next generation scalable and data intensive data centers, enabling users to gain a competitive advantage.”The post Mellanox Showcases Switch-IB 2 on the Road to Exascale at SC15 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Bright Computing announced that the latest version of its Bright Cluster Manager software, version 7.1, is now integrated with Dell’s 13th generation PowerEdge server portfolio. The integration enables systems administrators to easily deploy and configure Dell infrastructure using Bright Cluster Manager.The post Bright Cluster Manager Integrates with Dell PowerEdge Servers for HPC Environments appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the Intel HPC Developer Conference at SC15, Jim Jeffers from Intel presents an SDVis Overview. After that, Bruce Cherniak from Intel presents: OpenSWR: Fast SW Rendering within MESA. "This session has two talk for the price of one: (1) Software Defined Visualization: Modernizing Vis. A ground swell is underway to modernize HPC codes to take full advantage of the growing parallelism in today’s and tomorrow’s CPU’s. Visualization workflows are no exception and this talk will discuss the recent Software Defined Visualization efforts by Intel and Vis community partners to improve flexibility, performance and workflows for visual data analysis and rendering to maximize scientific understanding. (2) OpenGL rasterized rendering is a so called "embarrasingly" parallel workload. As such, multicore and manycore CPUs can provide strong, flexible and large memory footprint solutions, especially for large data rendering. OpenSWR is a MESA3D based parallel OpenGL software renderer from Intel that enables strong interactive performance for HPC visualization applications on workstations through supercomputing clusters without the I/O and memory limitations of GPUs. We will discuss the current feature support, performance and implementation of this open source OpenGL solution."The post Video: SDVis Overview & OpenSWR – A Scalable High Performance Software Rasterizer for SCIVIS appeared first on insideHPC.

A partnership of seven leading bioinformatics research and academic institutions called eMedLab is using a new private cloud, HPC environment and big data system to support the efforts of hundreds of researchers studying cancers, cardio-vascular and rare diseases. Their research focuses on understanding the causes of these diseases and how a person’s genetics may influence their predisposition to the disease and potential treatment responses.The post Virtual HPC Clusters Power Cancer Research at eMedLab appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing in Germany announced awards from the 14th Call for Large-Scale Projects. GCS says it achieved new All-Time Highs in various categories with 1358 million awarded core hours of compute time.The post GCS Awards 1358 Million Computing Core Hours to Research Projects appeared first on insideHPC.

"At SC15, DDN announced the new DDN SFA14K and SFA14KE high performance hybrid storage platforms. As the new flagship product in DDN’s most established product line, the DDN SFA14K provides customers with a simple route to take maximum advantage of a suite of new technologies including the latest processor technologies, NVMe SSD, PCIe 3, EDR InfiniBand and Omni-Path.The post DDN Steps Up with All-New HPC Storage Systems at SC15 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at why it pays to upgrade your home networking gear.The post Radio Free HPC Looks at Why it Pays to Upgrade Your Home Network appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC15, Patrick Wolfe from the Alan Turing Institute and Karl Solchenbach from Intel describe a strategic partnership to deliver a research program focussed on HPC and data analytics. Created to promote the development and use of advanced mathematics, computer science, algorithms and big data for human benefit, the Alan Turing Institute is a joint venture between the universities of Warwick, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, UCL and EPSRC.The post Video: Intel Forms Strategic Partnership with The Alan Turing Institute appeared first on insideHPC.

As the reach of high performance computing continues to expand, so does the worldwide HPC community. In such a fast-growing ecosystem, how do you find the right HPC resources to match your needs? Enter DiscoverHPC.com, a new directory that takes on the daunting task of trying to put all-things-HPC in one place. To learn more, we caught up with the site curator, Ron Denny.The post Interview: New DiscoverHPC Directory Puts All-Things-HPC in One Place appeared first on insideHPC.

“CTS-1 shows how the Open Compute and Open Rack design elements can be applied to high-performance computing and deliver similar benefits as its original development for Internet companies,” said Philip Pokorny, Chief Technology Officer, Penguin Computing. “We continue to improve Tundra for both the public and private sectors with exciting new compute and storage models coming in the near future.”The post Penguin Computing Showcases OCP Platforms for HPC at SC15 appeared first on insideHPC.

Because of the complexity involved, the length of the simulation period, and the amounts of data generated, weather prediction and climate modeling on a global basis requires some of the most powerful computers in the world. The models incorporate topography, winds, temperatures, radiation, gas emission, cloud forming, land and sea ice, vegetation, and more. However, although weather prediction and climate modeling make use of a common numerical methods, the items they compute differ.The post HPC Helps Drive Climate Change Modeling appeared first on insideHPC.

The University of Toronto is the official winner of Nvidia’s Compute the Cure initiative for 2015. Compute the Cure is a strategic philanthropic initiative of the Nvidia Foundation that aims to advance the fight against cancer. Through grants and employee fundraising efforts, Nvidia has donated more than $2,000,000 to cancer causes since 2011. Researchers from the […]The post University of Toronto Wins Research Grant to Compute the Cure appeared first on insideHPC.

"What we're previewing here today is a capability to have an overarching software, resource scheduler and workflow manager that takes all of these disparate sources and unifies them into a single view, making hundreds or thousands of computers look like one, and allowing you to run multiple instances of Spark. We have a very strong Spark multitenancy capability, so you can run multiple instances of Spark simultaneously, and you can run different versions of Spark, so you don't obligate your organization to upgrade in lockstep."The post IBM Ramps Up Apache Spark at SC15 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the Intel HPC Developer Conference at SC15, Prof. Dieter Kranzlmüller from LRZ presents: Scientific Insights and Discoveries through Scalable High Performance Computing at LRZ. "Science and research today relies heavily on IT-services for discoveries and breakthroughs. The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) is a leading provider of scalable high performance computing and other services for researchers in Munich, Bavaria, Germany, Europe and beyond. This talk describes the LRZ and its services for the scientific community, providing an overview of applications and the respective technologies and services provided by LRZ. At the core of its services is SuperMUC, a highly scalable supercomputer using hot water cooling, which is one of the world’s most energy-efficient systems.The post Video: Scientific Insights and Discoveries through Scalable HPC at LRZ appeared first on insideHPC.

While there has been a lot of disagreement about the slowing of Moore's Law as of late, it is clear that the industry is looking at new ways to speed up HPC by focusing on the data side of the equation. With the advent of burst buffers, co-design architectures, and new memory hierarchies, the one connecting theme we're seeing is that Moving Data is a Sin. In terms of storage, which technologies will take hold in the coming year? DDN offers us these 2016 Industry Trends & Predictions.The post 2016 Industry Trends and Predictions from DDN appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the DDN User Group at SC15, Kevin Behn from the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology presents: End to End Infrastructure Design for Large Scale Genomics. "HudsonAlpha has generated major discoveries that impact disease diagnosis and treatment, created intellectual property, fostered biotechnology companies and expanded the number of biosciences-literate people, many of whom will take their place among the future life sciences workforce. Additionally, HudsonAlpha has created one of the world’s first end-to-end genomic medicine programs to diagnose rare disease. Genomic research, educational outreach, clinical genomics and economic development: each of these mission areas advances the quality of life."The post Video: End to End Infrastructure Design for Large Scale Genomics appeared first on insideHPC.

"Mellanox Technologies is looking for experienced computational researchers to work on developing and optimizing the next generation of scalable HPC applications. A background in developing HPC application programs in areas such as Computational Chemistry, Physics, Meteorology, Climate Simulation, Engineering, or other closely related fields, or in methodologies for automatic code transformations is required. Experience using co-processor technologies is highly desirable."The post Job of the Week: HPC Application Engineer at Mellanox in Austin appeared first on insideHPC.

"At SC15, Numascale announced the availability of NumaConnect-2, a scalable cache coherent memory technology that connects servers in a single high performance shared memory image. The NumaConnect-2 advances the successful Numascale technology with a new parallel microarchitecture that results in a significantly higher interconnect bandwidth, outperforming its predecessor by a factor of up to 5x."The post Numascale Expands Performance and Features with NumaConnect-2 appeared first on insideHPC.

"EnSight is a software program for visualizing, analyzing, and communicating data from computer simulations and/or experiments. The purpose of OpenSWR is to provide a high performance, highly scalable OpenGL compatible software rasterizer that allows use of unmodified visualization software. This allows working with datasets where GPU hardware isn't available or is limiting. OpenSWR is completely CPU-based, and runs on anything from laptops, to workstations, to compute nodes in HPC systems. OpenSWR internally builds on top of LLVM, and fully utilizes modern instruction sets like Intel®Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE), and Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX and AVX2) to achieve high rendering performance."The post Video: Rendering in Ensight with OpenSWR appeared first on insideHPC.

"Modern systems will continue to grow in scale, and applications must evolve to fully exploit the performance of these systems. While today’s HPC developers are aware of code modernization, many are not yet taking full advantage of the environment and hardware capabilities available to them. Intel is committed to helping the HPC community develop modern code that can fully leverage today’s hardware and carry forward to the future. This requires a multi-year effort complete with all the necessary training, tools and support. The customer training we provide and the initiatives and programs we have launched and will continue to create all support that effort.”The post Code Modernization: Two Perspectives, One Goal appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the UberCloud announced a collaboration with EGI based on a shared vision to embrace distributed computing, storage and data related technologies. As a federation of more than 350 resource centers across 50 countries, EGI has a mission to enable innovation and new solutions for many scientific domains to conduct world-class research and achieve faster results.The post UberCloud Partners with EGI to Bridge Research and Innovation appeared first on insideHPC.

Matt Starr from Spectra Logic describes the company's new ArcticBlue nearline disk storage system. "If you think about a tape subsystem, it's probably the best cost footprint, density footprint that you can get. ArticBlue brings in kind of the benefits of tape from a cost perspective, but the speed and performance of a disk subsystem. Ten cents a gig versus seven cents a gig, three cents difference. You may want to deploy a little bit of ArcticBlue in your archive when you're putting it behind BlackPearl as opposed to just an all tape archive."The post Video: Spectra Logic Changes Storage Economics with ArcticBlue at SC15 appeared first on insideHPC.

"With Azure, Microsoft makes it easy for Univa customers to run true performance applications on demand in a cloud environment," said Bill Bryce, Univa Vice President of Products. "With the power of Microsoft Azure, Univa Grid Engine makes work management automatic and efficient and accelerates the deployment of cloud services. In addition, Univa solutions can run in Azure and schedule work in a Linux cluster built with Azure virtual machines."The post Univa Supports Dynamic Clusters on Microsoft Azure appeared first on insideHPC.