High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

The High Performance Conjugate Gradients (HPCG) Benchmark list was announced this week at SC15. This is the fourth list produced for the emerging benchmark designed to complement the traditional High Performance LINPACK (HPL) benchmark used as the official metric for ranking the TOP500 systems. The first HPCG list was announced at ISC’14 a year and a half ago, containing only 15 entries and the SC’14 list had 25. The current list contains more than 60 entries as HPCG continues to gain traction in the HPC community.The post New HPCG Benchmark List Goes Beyond LINPACK to Compare Supercomputers appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC15, Karl Schulz from Intel and Michael Miller from SUSE describe the all-new OpenHPC Community. "The use of open source software is central to HPC, but lack of a unified community across key stakeholders – academic institutions, workload management companies, software vendors, computing leaders – has caused duplication of effort and has increased the barrier to entry,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director, The Linux Foundation. “OpenHPC will provide a neutral forum to develop one open source framework that satisfies a diverse set of cluster environment use-cases.”The post Video: OpenHPC Community Launches at SC15 appeared first on insideHPC.

Of the varied approaches to liquid cooling, most remain technical curiosities and fail to show real-world adoption in any significant degree. In contrast, both Asetek RackCDU D2Câ„¢ (Direct-to-Chip) and Internal Loop Liquid Cooling are seeing accelerating adoption both by OEMs and end users.The post Rise of Direct-to-Chip Liquid Cooling Highlighted at SC15 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Penguin Computing announced that Emerson Network Power is supplying the uniquely-engineered DC power system for Penguin Computing’s Tundra Extreme Scale (ES) series. Emerson Network Power is the world’s leading provider of critical infrastructure for information and communications technology systems. The Tundra ES series delivers the advantages of Open Computing in a single, cost-optimized, high-performance architecture. Organizations can integrate a wide variety of compute, accelerator, storage, network, software and cooling architectures in a vanity-free rack and sled solution.The post Penguin Implements Emerson Network Power’s DC Power System appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Dell unveiled sweeping advancements to its industry-leading high performance computing portfolio. These advances include innovative new systems designed to simplify mainstream adoption of HPC and data analytics in research, manufacturing and genomics. Dell also unveiled expansions to its HPC Innovation Lab and showcased next-generation technologies including the Intel Omni-Path Fabric. HPC is becoming increasingly critical to how organizations of all sizes innovate and compete. Many organizations lack the in-house expertise to configure, build and deploy an HPC system without losing focus on their core science, engineering and analytic missions. As an example, according to the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences, 98 percent of all products will be designed digitally by 2020, yet 95 percent of the center’s 300,000 manufacturing companies have little or no HPC expertise.The post Dell Shows Strategic Focus on HPC at SC15 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Inspur Group announced the launch of the Inspur I9000 Blade System at SC15. The world's leading modular product in converged architecture can converge multiple computing solutions in a single chassis, including high-density servers, 4-socket and 8-socket mission-critical servers, software-defined storage and heterogeneous computing, to meet the demands of various applications on hardware platforms.The post Inspur Unveils I9000 Blade System at SC15 appeared first on insideHPC.

The Society of HPC Professionals will focus its 2015 Annual Technical Meeting on the applications of HPC technology to protect against cyberthreats. The one-day ‘HPC in Cybersecurity’ meeting will be held Wednesday, December 2, 2015, at a Schlumberger location in Houston. This event is free and open to all, but advanced registration is required.The post Society of HPC Professionals to Focus on Cybersecurity at December Conference appeared first on insideHPC.

"With high frequency trading becoming so important, the overall system performance, starting with the acquisition of the data from various markets through to the buy or sell decision relies on low latency between various parts of the system. The feed handlers, which accept the data in various formats, can be multithreaded and take advantage of coprocessors such as the Intel Xeon Phi. The NIC on a system waits for the packets to arrive and can then the information to a specified core on the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor system for processing."The post Financial Services and Low Latency with Intel Xeon Phi appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team shares their thoughts from SC15 in Austin. Henry is impressed by the increasing presence of FPGAs on the show floor. Dan is really impressed with Allinea Performance Reports profiling tool and how easy it is to use. And Rich sees SC15 as the crossroads that we’ll remember where Intel squared off with the official launch of their Omni-Path Interconnect and Scalable System Framework against the co-design alliance of OpenPOWER with IBM, Mellanox, and Nvidia.The post Radio Free HPC Reports Live from SC15 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC15, Barry Davis from Intel describes the ecosystem for the newly launched Intel Omni-Path fabric and Scalable System Framework. "Intel OPA delivers the performance for tomorrow’s high performance computing (HPC) workloads and the ability to scale to tens of thousands of nodes—and eventually more—at a price competitive with today’s fabrics. The Intel OPA 100 Series product line is an end-to-end solution of PCIe adapters, silicon, switches, cables, and management software. As the successor to Intel True Scale Fabric, this optimized HPC fabric is built upon a combination of enhanced IP and Intel technology."The post Video: Intel Debuts Omni-Path at SC15 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today One Stop Systems showcased its High Density Compute Accelerator (HDCA) with AMD FirePro S9170 GPUs at SC15. The HDCA, with sixteen AMD FirePro S9170 GPUs, provides up to 84 Tflops of peak single precision and 512GB of GPU memory. The HDCA is a complete appliance, cabled from one to four host servers through PCIe x16 Gen3 connections and perfect for adding compute power to any HPC application.The post One Stop Systems Showcases HDCA with 16 AMD FirePro S9170 GPUs at SC15 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today at SC15, Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced that more than a third of the HPC market is leveraging HPE Compute platforms. Among the organizations using HPE solutions are The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Ghent University and the Academic Computer Centre Cyfronet. They use HPE solutions based on the HPE Apollo server line to solve some of the world’s most challenging problems in science and engineering. HPE also announced the first solution deployments resulting from the HPC alliance with Intel.The post HPE Shows Momentum in HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Pica8 announced that the California Institute of Technology, Northwestern University and SURFnet will be demonstrating Pica8-powered Inventec 100G Ethernet solutions at the SC15 conference in Austin, Texas.The post PICA8 Drives High-Speed SDN AT SC15 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Penguin Computing announced first customer shipments of its Tundra Extreme Scale (ES) server based on Cavium’s 48 core ARMv8 based ThunderX workload optimized processors. Tundra ES Valkre servers are now available for public order and a standard 19” rack mount version will ship in early 2016.The post Penguin Computing Looks to Cavium ThunderX for ARM HPC Servers appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC15, Matt Drahzal from IBM describes the company's comprehensive approach to data-centric computing. "IBM is speeding up innovation through Data Centric Design. Limitations in traditional computing are slowing progress in business and society. A new approach to computer design is needed that will accelerate the pace of innovation to benefit organizations and individuals alike."The post Video: IBM Showcases Data-centric Computing at SC15 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Torben Kling-Petersen from Seagate describes new storage innovations for high performance computing. At SC15, Seagate announced a major expansion of its HPC product portfolio including the ClusterStor HPC hard disk drive designed for Big Data applications.The post Video: Seagate Rolls out All New ClusterStor Lineup for HPC Storage appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Cray announced plans to deliver an HPC-optimized Docker solution for the Cray XC line of supercomputers. Available in 2016, the HPC virtualization capabilities will be offered for the Cray CS400, Cray XE and Cray XK platforms.The post Docker Containers Come to Cray XC Software appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Dextro, developer of advanced computer vision, machine learning, and data analytics technologies, announced that Orange Silicon Valley, an innovation subsidiary of global telecommunications operator Orange, will use Dextro's Stream application in its prototype to demonstrate the power and performance capabilities of its {Orange Silicone Valley's} Exascale supercomputing platform, in collaboration with Echostreams and CocoLink. The Exascale one-unit system can do what previously took dozens of servers while making the learning speed of Dextro's algorithms more than 5x faster.The post Deep Learning Systems Analyze Periscope Streams on a Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

Dirk Pleiter from the Jülich Supercomputing Centre presented this talk at the DDN User Group at SC15. “IME unleashes a new I/O provisioning paradigm. This breakthrough, software defined storage application introduces a whole new new tier of transparent, extendable, non-volatile memory (NVM), that provides game-changing latency reduction and greater bandwidth and IOPS performance for the next generation of performance hungry scientific, analytic and big data applications – all while offering significantly greater economic and operational efficiency than today’s traditional disk-based and all flash array storage approaches that are currently used to scale performance.”The post Video: Early Evaluation of IME as a Burst Buffer and Application Accelerator appeared first on insideHPC.

Today One Stop Systems (OSS), a leading provider of HPC appliances, introduces the OCP Flash Storage Array (OCP-FSA), supporting over 250TB of Flash storage in a 2U form factor. The OCP-FSA supports up to three host servers through PCI Express (PCIe) x16 Gen3 connections. In addition, a shelf manager provides an IPMI connection as well as hot-plug support and thermal management of the system. OSS will be showing the OCP-FSA in booth 2324.The post One Stop Systems to Showcase the OCP Flash Storage Array at SC15 appeared first on insideHPC.

Intel Corporation today announced several advancements to its Intel Scalable System Framework (Intel SSF) that promise to bring high performance computing capabilities and benefits to more industries and new workloads. As a foundational element of the Intel SSF, Intel introduced the Intel Omni-Path Architecture (Intel OPA), a new HPC-optimized fabric technology that makes the performance of HPC clusters more accessible to a broader variety of users.The post Intel Unveils Omni-Path for Scalable System Framework appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Cray announced the Company has been awarded a contract to provide the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) with a Cray CS400 cluster supercomputer. Headquartered in Bremerhaven, Germany, AWI is one of the country's premier research institutes within the Helmholtz Association, and is an internationally respected center of expertise for polar and marine research.The post Cray CS400 to Power Polar Research at Alfred Wegener Institute appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Nvidia announced growing momentum for GPU computing as reflected in the latest TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers. "For the first time, more than 100 accelerated systems are on the list of the world’s 500 most powerful supercomputers, accounting for 143 petaflops, over one-third of the list’s total FLOPS. NVIDIA Tesla GPU-based supercomputers comprise 70 of these systems – including 23 of the 24 new systems on the list – reflecting compound annual growth of nearly 50 percent over the past five years."The post TOP500 Shows Growing Momentum for Accelerators appeared first on insideHPC.

The latest TOP500 list was published today in conjunction with SC15 in Austin. For the sixth consecutive time, the Tianhe-2 supercomputer in China has retained its position as the world’s No. 1 system. "In the bigger picture, China nearly tripled the number of systems on the latest list, while the number of systems in the United States has fallen to the lowest point since the TOP500 list was created in 1993. China is also carving out a bigger share as a manufacturer of high performance computers with multiple Chinese manufacturers becoming more active in this field."The post USA Has a Shrinking Share of the TOP500 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Peter ffoulkes from OrionX offers his insights on the latest TOP500 listing of the world's fastest supercomputers. "Most importantly increasing the number of petascale-capable resources available to scientists, researchers, and other users up to 20% of the entire list will be a significant milestone. From a useful outcome and transformational perspective it is much more important to support advances in science, research and analysis than to ring the bell with the world’s first exascale system on the TOP500 in 2018, 2023 or 2025."The post Benchmarks, Schmenchmarks: Big Iron Data and the November 2015 TOP500 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Aeon Computing announced that the company will provide two Lustre file systems to enhance LANL’s technical and supercomputing capabilities in support of its national security mission. Each of the two Lustre file systems provide 14 Petabytes of data storage capacity and are capable of up to 160 Gigabytes per second of parallel access performance. According Aeon, this next generation system pushes the limits of Lustre storage performance.The post LANL Looks to Aeon Computing for Lustre appeared first on insideHPC.

Today IBM and Xilinx announced a multi-year strategic collaboration to enable higher performance and energy-efficient data center applications through Xilinx FPGA-enabled workload acceleration on IBM POWER-based systems. IBM and Xilinx, through a private signed agreement and collaboration through the OpenPOWER Foundation, are teaming to develop open acceleration infrastructures, software and middleware to address emerging applications such as machine learning, network functions virtualization (NFV), genomics, high performance computing (HPC) and big data analytics.The post IBM and Xilinx Team to Accelerate Datacenter Applications appeared first on insideHPC.

Today IBM and a set of fellow OpenPOWER Foundation members unveiled new technologies, collaborations and developer resources to enable clients to analyze data more deeply and with incredible speed. The new offerings center on the tight integration of IBM’s open and licensable POWER processors with accelerators, dedicated high performance processors that can be optimized for computationally intensive software code.The post New OpenPOWER Technologies to Break Big Data Speed Barriers appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC15, Intel's Barry Davis and and Scott Misage from Hewlett Packard Enterprise describe how their two company's are driving HPC innovation with the Intel Scalable System Framework and Intel Omni-Path interconnect technologies. "As a result of a new alliance with Intel, HPE is offering its HPC Solutions Framework based on HPE Apollo servers, which are specialized for HPC and now optimized to support industry- specific software applications from leading independent software vendors. These solutions will dramatically simplify the deployment of HPC for customers in industries such as oil and gas, life sciences and financial services."The post Video: Intel and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Team Up with Scalable System Framework at SC15 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the NNSA and its three national labs announced they have reached an agreement with Nvidia’s PGI software to create an open-source Fortran compiler designed for integration with the widely used LLVM compiler infrastructure.The post PGI and NNSA to Open Source Fortran Compiler appeared first on insideHPC.

Today NUMECA announced that its complete suite of CFD software powered by UberCloud application software containers are now available as a service in any cloud.Until recently it was my firm belief that cloud computing for engineering applications is one of the next big challenges we have to solve," said Professor Charles Hirsch, President and founder of NUMECA International, and world-renowned expert on Computational Fluid Dynamics. "But when we came across UberCloud's new application container technology and containerized all our CFD software packages we were surprised about the ease of use and access to any computing system on demand.”The post NUMECA CFD Moves to the Cloud with UberCloud Containers appeared first on insideHPC.

Brown University in Rhode Island is seeking an HPC Applications Specialist in our Job of the Week.The post Job of the Week: HPC Applications Specialist at Brown University appeared first on insideHPC.

ORNL researcher Sparsh Mittal has authored a new paper entitled “A Survey Of Techniques for Architecting and Managing Asymmetric Multicore Processors.” Now accepted for ACM Computing Surveys 2015, the document reviews nearly 125 papers.The post New ORNL Paper: Survey on Asymmetric Multicore Processors appeared first on insideHPC.

Today LBNL announced that a team of scientists from Berkeley Lab’s Computational Research Division has been awarded a grant by Intel to support their goal of enabling data analytics software stacks—notably Spark—to scale out on next-generation high performance computing systems.The post Berkeley Lab to Optimize Spark for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

"To model climate change is one of the great benefits we're going to get from supercomputing. The trouble is, to really help the public understand all the benefits that they can get from supercomputing, it has to be communicated with clarity so that they get it and they get excited by it… (thus) I think we have to transform the scientists who are explaining this to the public before the public will allow them and participate with them in transforming their own lives with this amazing ability to model things on supercomputers.”The post Podcast: SC15 Keynote Speaker Alan Alda on How HPC Transforms appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Seagate announced the formation of Seagate Government Solutions, a new U.S.-based business entity dedicated to helping address the growing data-management needs of government agencies.The post Seagate Launches Government Solutions Group appeared first on insideHPC.

Today DDN announced that the French CEA has selected DDN’s SFA14KE as the core storage for this year’s comprehensive refresh of the agency's data management infrastructure, “GS1K”.The post CEA in France Upgrades Storage to DDN SFA14KE appeared first on insideHPC.

Today TACC announced it will enable users to take advantage of the capabilities of Microsoft's Project Catapult reconfigurable fabric platform. Project Catapult is expected to improve the speed and efficiency of science and engineering calculations using conventional cluster nodes augmented with field-programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs.The post TACC to Provide Onramp for Project Catapult Reconfigurable Fabric Platform appeared first on insideHPC.

Various industries have adopted or are in the planning and evaluation phase for using the cloud for HPC applications. Within the realm of technical computing, certain workloads are suited to a cloud-based HPC environment. Workloads could be considered either loosely coupled or tightly coupled. In each of the industries discussed in this article, multiple jobs submitted with different input parameters would be loosely coupled and not require a low-latency, high-speed interconnect, while a job that requires the use of multiple systems working in concert would be tightly coupled and need InfiniBand (IB).The post Industries that Use Cloud Computing for HPC Applications appeared first on insideHPC.

Today ARM announced new math libraries that are precision-tuned for 64-bit ARMv8-A processors. Designed for ARM-based HPC servers, ARM Performance Libraries are foundational math routines designed to enable the maximum performance of computational software. ARM math libraries take advantage of each silicon partner's specific microarchitecture innovations and features within their SoCs based on the ARMv8-A architecture to ensure peak system performance. The HPC community will have an opportunity to see the first public demonstrations of ARM Performance Libraries at the upcoming SC15 conference.The post New Math Libraries Speed 64-bit ARM-based HPC Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Atos launched the Bull sequana X1000, its new family of supercomputers on the company's road to exascale. "The new Bull sequana system, powered by future Intel Xeon processors and the Intel Xeon Phi processor, code-named "Knights Landing", is designed to address the performance, reliability and energy-efficiency requirements of exascale-class supercomputers,” said Raj Hazra, vice president and general manager, Enterprise and HPC Platforms Group, Intel Corporation. “We’re excited to be collaborating with Bull to bring to market this new generation of supercomputers on the path to exascale.”The post Atos Launches Bull sequana X1000 Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Linux Foundation announced plans to form the OpenHPC Collaborative Project. This project will provide a new, open source framework to support the world's most sophisticated HPC environments. "The use of open source software is central to HPC, but lack of a unified community across key stakeholders – academic institutions, workload management companies, software vendors, computing leaders – has caused duplication of effort and has increased the barrier to entry,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director, The Linux Foundation. “OpenHPC will provide a neutral forum to develop one open source framework that satisfies a diverse set of cluster environment use-cases.”The post Linux Foundation Announces OpenHPC Collaborative Project appeared first on insideHPC.

"The Amber Molecular Dynamics software is a well known and understood application for the structural dynamics of large biological molecules. With modern computer systems, a speedup in the computations can lead to studying events that occur on longer timescales, as well as statistical convergences. By incorporating the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor into the workflow on a compute server, additional speedups can be obtained."The post Amber Molecular Dynamics Optimization on Intel Xeon Phi appeared first on insideHPC.

"Today Mellanox announced 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 Slidecast: Mellanox Announces Switch IB2 on the Road to Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.

In this week's Industry Perspectives, Laura Shepard, Sr. Director Vertical and Product Marketing at DDN looks at trends in commodity hardware, specifically a converged approach to storage and the many benefits it offers to supercomputing professionals.The post The Hyper-Converged Approach to Storage – a Natural Next Step appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Bright Computing announced that the latest version of its Bright Cluster Manager software 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 Dell Equips PowerEdge Servers with Bright Cluster Manager for HPC Environments appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Italy's NICE Software announced plans to demonstrate their latest remote visualization technologies at SC15 in Austin. Enhanced products include new release of NICE Desktop Cloud Visualization (DCV), improvements for ParaView users developed in collaboration with Kitware on NVIDIA GPUs, and the latest release of SGI VizServer powered by NICE software.The post NICE to Demo Technical Computing Apps in the Cloud at SC15 appeared first on insideHPC.

Welcome to the Mobile Edition of Print ‘n Fly Guide to Austin. "Formatted for your smartphone the Guide is custom tailored for your journey to SC15 — the world’s largest gathering of high performance computing professionals. Inside this guide you will also find technical articles on supercomputing, HPC interconnects, and the latest developments on the road to exascale."The post Mobile Edition: Print ‘n Fly Guide to SC15 in Austin appeared first on insideHPC.