High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

In this video from SC15, Larry Jones from Seagate provides an overview of the company's revamped HPC storage product line, including a new 10,000 RPM ClusterStor hard disk drive tailor-made for the HPC market. “ClusterStor integrates the latest in Big Data technologies to deliver class-leading ingest speeds, massively scalable capacities to more than 100PB and the ability to handle a variety of mixed workloads.”The post Slidecast: Seagate Beefs Up ClusterStor at SC15 appeared first on insideHPC.

The HPC Advisory Council Switzerland Conference 2016 has announced their Call for Participation. Hosted by the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, the event will take place in Lugano, Switzerland March 21-23, 2016.The post Call for Participation: HPC Advisory Council Switzerland Conference 2016 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC15, Dr. Eng Lim Goh from SGI describes how the company is embracing new HPC technology trends such as new memory hierarchies. With the convergence of HPC and Big Data as a growing trend, SGI is envisions a "Zero Copy Architecture" that would bring together a traditional supercomputer with a Big Data analytics machine in a way that would not require users to move their data between systems.The post Video: SGI Looks to Zero Copy Architecture for HPC and Big Data appeared first on insideHPC.

This week at SC15, Eurotech announced that their HiVe HPC system is now available with x86 and ARM-64 based processors. The HiVe supercomputer leverages a new original high performance computing system architecture combining extreme density and best-in-class energy efficiency.The post Eurotech HiVe HPC System Adds ARM CPUs appeared first on insideHPC.

This week, the University of Warsaw in Poland announced plans to install a Cray XC40 supercomputer at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modeling. The six-cabinet Cray XC40 system will be located in ICM’s OCEAN research data center, and will enable interdisciplinary teams of scientists to address the most computationally complex challenges in areas such as life sciences, physics, cosmology, chemistry, environmental science, engineering, and the humanities. ICM is Poland’s leading research center for computational and data driven sciences, and is one of the premier centers for large-scale high performance computing simulations and big data analytics in Central and Eastern Europe.The post University of Warsaw Selects Cray XC40 Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

This week at SC15, Altair announced today it will provide an open source licensing option for its PBS Professional HPC workload manager. Scheduled to be released to the open source community in mid-2016, PBS Pro will become available under two different licensing options for commercial installations and as an Open Source Initiative compliant version. The decision includes working closely with Intel and the Linux Foundation’s OpenHPC Collaborative Project to integrate the open source version of PBS Pro.The post Altair Collaborates with Intel to Integrate PBS Pro with OpenHPC Software Stack appeared first on insideHPC.

This week at SC15, One Stop Systems featured the first PCIe 3.0 expansion appliance to support up to sixteen Nallatech 510T accelerator cards. The preconfigured appliance is targeted for data centers operating HPC applications, providing the user with a complete appliance that solves many integration issues, provides enhanced performance, and allows for scalable flexibility. The user simply attaches the HDCA to up to four servers and has thousands of additional compute cores readily available. Each connection operates at PCIe x16 3.0 with speeds of up to 128Gb/s.The post One Stop Systems HDCA Supports 16 Nallatech 510T Accelerator Cards appeared first on insideHPC.

Los Alamos National Lab is seeking an HPC Modeling and Optimization Postdoc in our Job of the Week.The post Job of the Week: HPC Modeling and Optimization Postdoc at LANL appeared first on insideHPC.

This week at SC15, Penguin Computing announced availability of its OCP-compliant Tundra platform on the company’s Penguin Computing on Demand (POD) public HPC cloud service. "POD customers will realize an immediate benefit of more capacity, as Tundra allows us to scale POD faster and more cost effectively,” said Tom Coull, President and CEO, Penguin Computing. “The rapid, modular scaling enabled by Tundra will result in increased capacity and greater performance.”The post Tundra Servers come to Penguin on Demand appeared first on insideHPC.

The OpenACC Standards Group released the 2.5 version of the OpenACC API specification.The post OpenACC 2.5 Includes Support for ARM and x86 Processors appeared first on insideHPC.

Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin, IBM Research, New York University and the California Institute of Technology have been awarded the 2015 Gordon Bell Prize for realistically simulating the forces inside the Earth that drive plate tectonics. The team’s work could herald a major step toward better understanding of earthquakes and volcanic activity.The post Earth Core Simulation Awarded Gordon Bell Prize appeared first on insideHPC.

"Recognition of status and career advancement in academia relies on publications. If your skills as a software developer lead you to focus on code to the detriment of your publication history, then your career will come to a grinding halt – despite the fact that your work may have significantly advanced research. This situation is simply not acceptable."The post Creating Careers for Research Software Engineers appeared first on 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.