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

Italy's E4 Computer Engineering announced that it has sealed an agreement with Wistron Corporation to market and distribute the OP205, the Company’s first POWER8 processor- based system in Italy and Europe. "We are very committed to OpenPOWER and we are going to great lengths to ensure we create a system that can be a reference for the Foundation’s amazing eco-system,” said Cosimo Gianfreda, CTO E4 Computer Engineering. “Wistron has worked for many years with many major players and we jumped at the opportunity of working together for this project. We know Europe is ready for OpenPOWER and we are actively encouraging its implementation in a number of Scientific and industrial environments”The post Italy’s E4 Computer Engineering Builds HPC OpenPOWER Server appeared first on insideHPC.

"While new technology will be developed that reduces the power per operation needed, in today’s environments it is important to understand how an application affects power usage. For modern applications that have been optimized to take advantage of both the Intel Xeon CPU and the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor, the hardware mentioned does include various power states, which can minimize the power consumption when idle."The post Application Performance & Power Consumption on Intel Xeon Phi appeared first on insideHPC.

"The Lustre User Group (LUG) 2016 conference is well under way. The morning of the first day was spent on looking at Lustre today and tomorrow and security developments in the code. Peter Jones and Andreas Dilger described what is in the newest release of Lustre 2.8 and will be in Lustre 2.9, targeted for release this fall, and beyond. These features include growing support for ZFS, security, multi-rail LNET, progressive file layouts, project quotas, and more."The post Live Report from LUG 2016 Day 1 appeared first on insideHPC.

“With Supermicro’s 90 top-load 3.5” hot-swap bay JBOD as the storage core of our Lustre Pod Cluster, we maximize performance, density and capacity and simplify serviceability for massive scale HA storage deployments. Combining our preconfigured, validated 2U SuperStorage OSS, 1U Ultra SuperServer with Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre software, and global service and support, Supermicro has the Total Solution for Lustre ready for HPC, Genomics and Big Data.”The post Supermicro Launches Total Solution for Lustre on ZFS appeared first on insideHPC.

The University of Michigan is collaborating with IBM to develop and deliver “data-centric” supercomputing systems designed to increase the pace of scientific discovery in fields as diverse as aircraft and rocket engine design, cardiovascular disease treatment, materials physics, climate modeling and cosmology. "Scientific research is now at the crossroads of big data and high performance computing,” said Sumit Gupta, vice president, high performance computing and data analytics, IBM. “The explosion of data requires systems and infrastructures based on POWER8 plus accelerators that can both stream and manage the data and quickly synthesize and make sense of data to enable faster insights.”The post University of Michigan Looks to OpenPOWER for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the OpenPOWER Foundation announced more than 50 new open innovations to help companies better solve grand challenges around big data. Many new community innovations unveiled today adhere to the Open Compute Project reference architecture. “Our ongoing work with the OpenPOWER Foundation is a natural extension of our commitment to open collaboration and innovation in data center technology,” said Amber Graner, Director of Operations, Community Manager, Open Compute Project. “Open Compute Project is focused on efficiency, flexibility, and openness—and we recognize the importance of the POWER processor and the robust OpenPOWER ecosystem for the future of sever design.”The post OpenPOWER Teams with Open Compute Project for the Datacenter appeared first on insideHPC.

Housing registration is now open for SC16 in Salt Lake City, Utah. As the world's largest gathering of supercomputing professionals, the event takes place November 14-17.The post Register Now for SC16 Housing in Salt Lake City appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Egypt's Bibliotheca Alexandrina library announced plans to build an HPC platform using Huawei technologies. Based on high-density FusionServer servers, the 118 Teraflop Huawei cluster employs high-speed InfiniBand and 288 TB in storage capacity for concurrent file systems.The post Huawei HPC Coming to Bibliotheca Alexandrina Egypt appeared first on insideHPC.

Europe’s most powerful supercomputer Piz Daint is being upgraded, a move that is expected to at least double its computing power. ETH Zurich is investing around CHF 40 million to allow researchers to perform simulations, data analyses and visualizations even more efficiently in the future. Although slightly reduced in physical size, Piz Daint will become considerably more powerful as a result of the upgrade, particularly because we will be able to significantly increase bandwidth in the most important areas,” says CSCS Director Thomas Schulthess.The post CSCS to Double Performance of Cray Supercomputer with GPUs appeared first on insideHPC.

"Trends in computer memory/storage technology are in flux perhaps more so now than in the last two decades. Economic analysis of HPC storage hierarchies has led to new tiers of storage being added to the next fleet of supercomputers including Burst Buffers or In-System Solid State Storage and Campaign Storage. This talk will cover the background that brought us these new storage tiers and postulate what the economic crystal ball looks like for the coming decade. Further it will suggest methods of leveraging HPC workflow studies to inform the continued evolution of the HPC storage hierarchy."The post Gary Grider Presents: HPC Storage and IO Trends and Workflows appeared first on insideHPC.

"Our greatest scientific and technical challenges -- finding cures for cancer, understanding climate change, building intelligent machines -- require a near-infinite amount of computing performance," said Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO and co-founder, NVIDIA. "We designed the Pascal GPU architecture from the ground up with innovation at every level. It represents a massive leap forward in computing performance and efficiency, and will help some of the smartest minds drive tomorrow's advances."The post Nvidia Launches Tesla P100 Hyperscale Accelerator appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Seagate announced it will incorporate Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre (IEEL), a big data software platform, into its market-leading ClusterStor storage architecture for high-performance computing. The move will strengthen Seagate’s HPC data storage product line and provide customers with an additional choice of Lustre parallel file systems to help drive advancements in the HPC and big data market.The post Seagate Adopts Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the ISC Group, organizers of the annual ISC High Performance conference, is pleased to announce the launch of the ISC Student Cluster Competition (SCC) Alumni Network. Maintained and managed via LinkedIn, the professional networking group was formed to establish and nurture mutually beneficial relationships between SCC team members and the High Performance Computing community.The post Announcing the ISC Student Cluster Competition Alumni Network appeared first on insideHPC.

Allinea Software reports that the company is helping weather and climate researchers to adapt advanced weather models to better exploit today’s technology capability and get ready for future platforms. The company will address leading climatologists and meteorologists on best practices for scalable code development April 6-7 at the 4th ENES HPC Workshop. The session will reference the application of Allinea's tools across over 20 weather and climate customers worldwide.The post Allinea Speeds Tomorrow’s Meteorological Code appeared first on insideHPC.

Addison Snell from Intersect360 Research presented this talk at the Switzerland HPC Conference. "Based on updated research studies, Addison Snell of Intersect360 Research will present on forward-looking topics for HPC and Hyperscale markets. With an expanding look at hyper- scale, Intersect360 Research will describe the size and influence of the market, including evolving standards like Open Compute Project, OpenStack, and Beiji/Scorpio. Intersect360 Research has also investigated users’ plans for evaluating competing processing and interconnect options, including Xeon, Xeon Phi, GPU, FPGA, POWER, ARM, InfiniBand, and OmniPath."The post Video: HPC and Hyperscale Trends for 2016 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Cray announced a contract to upgrade the supercomputers at Germany’s National Meteorological Service – the Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD). Located in Offenbach, Germany, DWD is one of the world’s premier numerical weather prediction centers. "Supercomputers are absolutely vital to our mission of providing important meteorological services for the protection of life and property,” said. Dr. Jochen Dibbern, Member of the Executive Board at DWD. “Our Cray supercomputers are critical tools for our researchers and scientists, and it’s imperative that we equip our users with highly advanced supercomputing technologies.”The post DWD Weather Service in Germany Upgrades Cray Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

"Traditionally, storage have been using brute force rather than intelligent design to deliver the required throughputs but the current trend is to design balanced systems with full utilization of the back-end storage and other related components. These new systems need to use fine grained power control all the way down to individual disk drives as well as tools for continuous monitoring and management of these systems. In addition, the storage solutions of tomorrow needs to support multiple tiers including backend archiving systems supported by HSM as well multiple file systems if required. This presentation is intended to provide a short update of where Seagate HPC storage is today."The post Video: Seagate Exascale HPC Storage appeared first on insideHPC.

"Supermicro’s new SuperServer and SuperBlade platforms optimized for next generation GPU technology offer the most flexible architecture for the future of extreme parallel computing,” said Charles Liang, President and CEO of Supermicro. “Our proprietary cooling architecture supports up to four GPUs in 1U, maximizing compute density, performance and reliability under peak thermal operating conditions. Supermicro’s innovation and revolutionary solutions deliver the greatest range of options for next generation supercomputers, enabling new breakthroughs in the latest deep learning and artificial intelligence applications.”The post Supermicro Showcases New GPU SuperServer at GTC 2016 appeared first on insideHPC.

Texas A&M University’s High Performance Research Computing (HPRC) center is the latest Intel® Parallel Computing Center. "HPRC is proud to be recognized as an Intel Parallel Computing Center,” said Honggao Liu, director of High Performance Research Computing. “At HPRC we use high-performance computing to unite experts in numerous fields of study. This grant and multi-disciplinary project will allow us to better understand and solve issues within this critical software.”The post Texas A&M is the Latest Intel Parallel Computing Center appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Penguin Computing announced Open Compute Project (OCP)-based systems that reinforce both its continued collaboration with NVIDIA and new options in Penguin Computing’s Magna family of OpenPOWER-based servers. "Customers benefit when we partner with exceptional organizations like NVIDIA, the OpenPOWER Foundation and Open Compute Foundation in developing our systems,” said Jussi Kukkonen, Director Product Management, Penguin Computing. “An essential part of our mission is to provide customers with form factor flexibility, choice of architecture and peak performance, which are all hallmarks of Penguin Computing.”The post Penguin Computing Accelerates OpenPOWER-based Magna Servers appeared first on insideHPC.

As high performance and webscale applications become mainstream, HPE's continued focus on this market is yielding positive results for our customers," said Bill Mannel, vice president and general manager, HPC, Big Data and IoT Servers, HPE. "Already, more than a third of the HPC market is using HPE compute platforms to enhance scientific and business innovation and gain a competitive edge. Today's announcement reinforces our commitment to delivering new infrastructure solutions that satisfy our customers' insatiable need for massive compute power to fuel new applications and unlock the value of their data."The post Hewlett Packard Enterprise Expands HPC Portfolio appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Mellanox announced a new line of InfiniBand router systems. The new EDR 100Gb/s InfiniBand Routers enable a new level of scalability critical for the next generation of mega data-center deployments as well as expanded capabilities for data center isolations between different users and applications. The network router delivers a consistent, high-performance and low latency router solution that is mission critical for high performance computing, cloud, Web 2.0, machine learning and enterprise applications.The post Mellanox Rolls Out EDR InfiniBand Routers appeared first on insideHPC.

Through the microarchitecture improvements, increased core counts, and faster memory speeds of the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v4 product family based on the “Broadwell” microarchitecture, you can increase your HPC application performance. You will see significantly improved per-core performance with these just announced Intel® Xeon® processors that can then be multiplied by parallel programs that utilize the number of cores available inside these processors. Improvements to the memory and virtual memory capabilities – including the ability to utilize faster DDR4-2400 memory – means that these processors can speed all aspects of your application from IO DMA operations, to processing serial sections of code, as well as delivering increased performance on both task- and data-parallel applications.The post Why New Intel® Xeon Processors Make Sense for HPC Applications appeared first on insideHPC.

Since its beginnings in 1999 as a project at Carnegie Mellon University, Lustre, the high performance parallel file system, has come a long, long way. Designed and always focusing on performance and scalability, it is now part of nearly every High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster on the Top500.org’s list of fastest

The 2016 ALCF Data Science Program (ADSP) at Argonne has issued its Call for Proposals. The new initiative is targeted at "big data" science problems that require the scale and performance of leadership resources. "Our goal is to help explore and improve a variety of computational methods that will help enable data-driven discoveries across all scientific disciplines," said ALCF Director of Science Katherine Riley.The post Call for Proposals: ALCF Data Science Program appeared first on insideHPC.

"Last year IBM together with partners out of the OpenPOWER foundation won two of the multi-year contacts of the US CORAL program. Within these contracts IBM develops an accelerated HPC infrastructure and software development ecosystem that will be a major step towards Exascale Computing. We believe that the CORAL roadmap will enable a massive pull for transformation of HPC codes for accelerated systems. The talk will discuss the IBM HPC strategy, explain the OpenPOWER foundation and the show IBM OpenPOWER roadmap for CORAL and beyond."The post Video: OpenPOWER Roadmap Toward CORAL appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Supermicro announced its extensive support for the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v4 product family across SuperServer, SuperBlade, SuperStorage, SuperWorkstation and DP/UP motherboard product lines. Over 200+ Building Block Solutions take maximum advantage of the increased compute performance offered by Intel’s new processor technologies.The post Supermicro Shipping Broadwell Servers and Storage Solutions in Volume appeared first on insideHPC.

Watch our replay of the HPC for Manfacturing Webinar with SGI and Altair. "Manufacturing is enjoying an economic and technological resurgence with the help of high performance computing. In this insideHPC webinar, you’ll learn how the power of CAE and simulation is transforming the industry with faster time to solution, better quality, and reduced costs."The post Replay Available Now: HPC for Manufacturing Webinar appeared first on insideHPC.

The FT76-B7922 is the first multi-purpose server platform that simultaneously supports scale-up (fat node) and scale-out (many-core CPU node). With 1:1 CPU to GPU ratio, TYAN’s FT76-B7922 provides a high price/performance and performance/watt for HPC community that both needs CPU and GPU intensive computing workloads” said Albert Mu, Vice President of MITAC Computing Technology Corporation's TYAN Business Unit.The post TYAN to Showcase 4U, 4x GPU Platform at GTC 2016 appeared first on insideHPC.

NNSA's next-generation Penguin Computing clusters based on Intel SSF are bolstering “capacity” computing capability at the Tri Labs. "With CTS1 installed in April, the NNSA scientists can continue their stewardship research and management on some of the most advanced commodity clusters the Tri Labs have acquired, ensuring the safety, security, and reliability of the nation’s nuclear stockpile."The post NNSA Unleashes Advanced Computing Capabilities to Serve Researchers at Three National Labs appeared first on insideHPC.

The DoE INCITE program is now accepting proposals for high-impact, computationally intensive research campaigns in a broad array of science, engineering and computer science domains.The post INCITE Seeking Proposals to Advance Science with Leadership Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

Researchers at the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) will harness AMD FirePro S9300 x2 Server GPUs to analyze extraordinary amounts of data to help create a new, very detailed 3D map of the largest volume of the Universe ever observed. "Not only is the new AMD FirePro S9300 x2 Server GPU the world's fastest single-precision GPU accelerator, it is also the world's first professional GPU accelerator to be equipped with High Bandwidth Memory and the first to fully support the Radeon Open Compute platform – an integral element of the GPUOpen compute initiative."The post Creating the Largest Map of the Universe with the New AMD FirePro S9300 x2 Server GPU appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Exxact Corporation, a leading provider of high performance computing solutions and professional workstation graphics, announced that the company will showcase its latest developments at the GPU Technology Conference April 4-7 in San Jose. Exxact's exciting portfolio includes HPC solutions such as a water-cooled Deep Learning Devbox, a 10 GPU Peer-to-Peer Solution, and the Mechdyne TGX High Performance Remote Desktop tool.The post Exxact to Showcase HPC Hardware at the GPU Technology Conference appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Intel announced new technologies, investments and industry collaborations that make it easier for any business to harness the power of the cloud. The news featured the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v4 product family (Broadwell), collaborations with leading cloud software and solution providers, and Intel’s first 3D NAND SSDs optimized for cloud and enterprise workloads.The post Intel Rolls Out New Xeon Processors & 3D NAND SSDs appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Open Scalable File Systems (OpenSFS) community announced the release of Lustre 2.8.0, the fastest and most scalable parallel file system. OpenSFS, founded in 2010 to advance Lustre development, is the premier non-profit organization promoting the use of Lustre and advancing its capabilities through coordinated releases of the Lustre file system.The post OpenSFS Releases Lustre 2.8.0 for LUG 2016 Conference appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, Rich Brueckner interviews Hugo Saleh, Director of Marketing for the Intel High Performance Computing Platform Group. They discuss the new Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 v4 product family, based upon the Broadwell microarchitecture, and the first processor within Intel® Scalable System Framework (Intel® SSF). Hugo describes how the new processors improve HPC performance and examine the impact of Intel® SSF on vastly different procurements ranging from the massive 200 Petaflops Aurora system to small and large enterprise clusters plus scientific systems.The post Podcast: Intel Moves HPC Forward with Broadwell Family of Xeon Processors appeared first on insideHPC.

"Huawei focuses on R&D of IT infrastructure, cooling solutions, software integration, and provides end-to-end HPC solution by building ecosystems with partners. Huawei help customers from different sectors and fields, solving challenges and problems with computing resources, energy expenditure and business needs. This presentation will introduce how Huawei brings fresh technologies to next-generation HPC solutions for more innovation, higher efficiency and scale, as well as presenting our best practices for HPC."The post Video: Huawei Powers Efficient and Scalable HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Allinea announced plans to showcase its software tools for developing and optimizing high performance code at the GPU Technology Conference April 4-7 in San Jose. The company will highlight the best practices required to unleash the potential performance within the latest generation of NVIDIA GPUs for a wide range of software applications.The post Allinea Taps the Power of GPUs for High Performance Code appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature from Scientific Computing World, Dr Bruno Silva from The Francis Crick Institute in London writes that new cloud technologies will make the cloud even more important to scientific computing. "The emergence of public cloud and the ability to cloud-burst is actually the real game-changer. Because of its ‘infinite’ amount of resources (effectively always under-utilized), it allows for a clear decoupling of time-to-science from efficiency. One can be somewhat less efficient in a controlled fashion (higher cost, slightly more waste) to minimize time-to-science when required (in burst, so to speak) by effectively growing the computing estate available beyond the fixed footprint of local infrastructure – this is often referred to as the hybrid cloud model. You get both the benefit of efficient infrastructure use, and the ability to go beyond that when strictly required."The post Reducing the Time to Science with Efficient Clouds appeared first on insideHPC.

"As a community, we are excited about enabling HPC for everyone. If OpenHPC can really make it so easy to install HPC systems that more people join the ecosystem – as users, system administrators, resource managers, or developers – we all win."The post Jeff Squyres on Building Community at OpenHPC appeared first on insideHPC.

The Human Brain Project (HBP) is developing a shared European research infrastructure with the aim of examining the organization of the brain using detailed analyses and simulations and thus combating neurological and psychiatric disorders. For this purpose, the HBP is creating new information technologies like neurosynaptic processors which are based on the principles governing how the human brain works.The post European Research Infrastructure Launched for Human Brain Project appeared first on insideHPC.

Kenneth Hoste from the University Ghent presented this tutorial at the Switzerland HPC Conference. "One unnecessarily time-consuming task for HPC user support teams is installing software for users. Due to the advanced nature of a supercomputing system (think: multiple multi-core modern microprocessors (possibly next to co-processors like GPUs), the availability of a high performance network interconnect, bleeding edge compilers & libraries, etc.), compiling the software from source on the actual operating system and system architecture that it is going to be used on is typically highly preferred over using readily available binary packages that were built in a generic way.The post Tutorial on the EasyBuild Framework appeared first on insideHPC.

With help from the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center, an international team of researchers has published the largest network to date of connections between neurons in the cortex, where high-level processing occurs, and have revealed several crucial elements of how networks in the brain are organized. The results are published this week in the journal Nature.The post PSC Powers 3D-Reconstruction of Excitatory Visual Neuron Wiring appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the 2016 HPC Advisory Council Switzerland Conference, Addison Snell from Intersect360 Research moderates a panel discussion on Exascale computing. “Exascale computing will uniquely provide knowledge leading to transformative advances for our economy, security and society in general. A failure to proceed with appropriate speed risks losing competitiveness in information technology, in our industrial base writ large, and in leading-edge science.”The post Panel Discussion on Exascale Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

Total, one of the largest integrated oil and gas companies in the world, announced they are boosting the compute power of their SGI Pangea supercomputer with an additional 4.4 petaflops provided by a new SGI ICE X system and based on the Intel Xeon processor. Purchased last year, the new SGI system is now in production and will allow Total to determine the optimal extraction methods more quickly. The SGI supercomputer allows Total to improve complex modeling of the subsurface and to simulate the behavior of reservoirs, reducing the time and costs associated with discovering and extracting energy reserves.The post SGI Provides Total with Improved Modeling to Support Decision Making appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) announced it has purchased a first-of-a-kind brain-inspired supercomputing platform for deep learning inference developed by IBM Research. Based on a breakthrough neurosynaptic computer chip called IBM TrueNorth, the scalable platform will process the equivalent of 16 million neurons and 4 billion synapses and consume the energy equivalent of a tablet computer – a mere 2.5 watts of power for the 16 TrueNorth chips. The brain-like, neural network design of the IBM Neuromorphic System is able to infer complex cognitive tasks such as pattern recognition and integrated sensory processing far more efficiently than conventional chips.The post IBM & LLNL Collaborate on TrueNorth Neuromorphic Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

The ability to study complex interactions inside a diesel engine gives Army scientists a new perspective that may help design more fuel efficient and effective engines. Using state-of-the-art supercomputers, Army scientist Dr. Luis Bravo led efforts to create simulations highlighting the first year of his project, allowing them to investigate the jet fuel spray breakup process with microsecond time fidelity and sub-millimeter resolution, while generating petabytes of data.The post Supercomputing Complex Diesel Injection Mist at Army Research Lab appeared first on insideHPC.

"As the most powerful public research supercomputer in the southern hemisphere, Magnus supports several hundred research projects led by researchers from Australian academic and research institutions. As a Cray XC40 system, Magnus provides a petascale supercomputing environment for a diverse range of application areas, such as energy and resources, food security, ground water modeling, climate modeling, astronomy and astrophysics, genomics, and advanced manufacturing."The post Interview: Pawsey Supercomputer Centre Propels Science Down Under appeared first on insideHPC.

Pak Lui from the HPC Advisory Council presented this talk at the Switzerland HPC Conference. "To achieve good scalability performance on the HPC scientific applications typically involves good understanding of the workload though performing profile analysis, and comparing behaviors of using different hardware which pinpoint bottlenecks in different areas of the HPC cluster."The post Video: Best Practices – Applications Performance Optimizations appeared first on insideHPC.