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

Today AMD announced that CGG, a pioneering global geophysical services and equipment company, has deployed AMD FirePro S9150 server GPUs to accelerate its geoscience oil and gas research efforts, harnessing more than 1 PetaFLOPS of GPU processing power. Employing AMD’s HPC GPU Computing software tools available on GPUOpen.com, CGG rapidly converted its in-house Nvidia CUDA code to OpenCL for seismic data processing running on an AMD FirePro S9150 GPU production cluster, enabling fast, cost-effective GPU-powered research.The post With GPUOpen, CGG Fuels Petroleum Exploration using AMD FirePro GPUs appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the 2016 Stanford HPC Conference, Gilad Shainer from the HPC Advisory Council 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 Video: Panel Discussion on Exascale Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

Ensuring reliability and reproducibility in computational research raises unique challenges in the supercomputing context. Specialized architectures, extensive and customized software, and complex workflows all raise barriers to transparency, while established concepts such as validation, verification, and uncertainty quantification point ways forward. The topic has attracted national attention: President Obama's July 2015 Executive Order, "Creating a National Strategic Computing Initiative," includes accessibility and workflow capture as objectives; an XSEDE14 workshop released a report, "Standing Together for Reproducibility in Large-Scale Computing"; on May 5, 2015, ACM Transactions in Mathematical Software began the Replicated Computational Results Initiative; and this conference is host to a new workshop, "Numerical Reproducibility at Exascale,” to name but a few examples. In this context, I will outline a research agenda to establish reproducibility and reliability as a cornerstone of scientific computing.The post Video: Reproducibility in High Performance Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

Researchers from across University College London are now benefitting from "Grace," a new 181 Teraflop HPC system named in honor of pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper. Designed and integrated by OCF in the UK, the Grace cluster integrates Lenovo and DDN technology to provide HPC services alongside UCL’s existing HPC machines, Legion and Emerald.The post OCF Deploys 181 Teraflop “Grace” HPC Cluster at University College London appeared first on insideHPC.

"Although commerce and consumers have been computing in the cloud for years, the high-performance computing sector has been more hesitant. But all that may now be changing. The cost of cloud computing for HPC is falling, while new programming models that will allow HPC workloads to run more efficiently in the cloud are becoming available. Public cloud providers are installing hardware configurations that are more suited to HPC, while private clouds are giving users experience of how to run their jobs in a cloud environment."The post HPC Finally Climbing to the Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Extoll, the German HPC innovation company, announced that is has it has successfully implemented its new GreenICE immersion cooling system at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre. As part of the DEEP Dynamical Exascale Entry Platform project, GreenICE was developed to meet the need for increased compute power, density, and energy efficiency.The post EXTOLL Deploys Immersion Cooled Compute Booster at Jülich appeared first on insideHPC.

"An interesting aspect to prefetching is the distance ahead of the data that is being used to prefetch more data. This is a critical parameter for success and can be defined as how many iterations ahead to issue a prefetch instruction, and can be referred to as the distance. A compiler will automatically determine the distance to prefetch, and can be determined by looking at the compiler optimization reports."The post PreFetch for Intel Xeon Phi – Part 2 appeared first on insideHPC.

"With Docker v1.9 a new networking system was introduced, which allows multi-host networking to work out-of-the-box in any Docker environment. This talk provides an introduction on what Docker networking provides, followed by a demo that spins up a full SLURM cluster across multiple machines. The demo is based on QNIBTerminal, a Consul backed set of Docker Images to spin up a broad set of software stacks."The post Video: Multi-Host Containerized Clusters – Using Docker Networking To Spin-Up SLURM appeared first on insideHPC.

Pioneering a new consulting services model for strategy, marketing, and PR, OrionX today announced the appointment of Dan Olds as partner. Our clients value OrionX’s ability to understand their technology, their competition, and their customers, as they pave the way for digital transformation,” said Shahin Khan, Founding Partner at OrionX. “We are raising the bar with Dan’s extensive knowledge of technology trends and insightful appreciation of customer adoption patterns.”The post OrionX Appoints Big Data & HPC Expert Dan Olds as Partner appeared first on insideHPC.

Mellanox announced today that it has joined the RISC-V foundation as a Founding Platinum Sponsor. The RISC-V foundation promotes the open RISC-V instruction set architecture and associated hardware and software ecosystem for a broad range of computing devices.The post Video: Introduction to RISC-V appeared first on insideHPC.

"Alineos clients are keen to simplify the installation of HPC, big data and OpenStack, and then blend these environments into a single view," said Clemens Engler, Director, Business Development in EMEA at Bright. "Bright is uniquely positioned to service these requirements, so we look forward to some interesting discussions with Alineos’ clients in the coming months.”The post Bright Computing Partners with France-based Alineos appeared first on insideHPC.

Registration opened today for the ISC 2016 conference, which takes place June 19-23 in Frankfurt. This year, the ISC 2016 conference program features an increased focus on Cloud, Machine Learning, and Robotics. In fact, insideHPC has learned that bulk of topics normally covered at the annual ISC Cloud conference have been absorbed into the ISC High Performance industry track. To learn more, we caught up with Wolfgang Gentzsch, a member of the ISC Steering Committee who has chaired the ISC Cloud event since its beginnings.The post Interview: ISC Cloud Absorbs into ISC High Performance appeared first on insideHPC.

“DDN’s selection for seven consecutive years as strategic partner and storage vendor of choice by the overwhelming majority of supercomputer centers on the Top500 list is a testament to the continuous innovation and performance leadership we bring to the HPC space,” said Alex Bouzari, CEO and founder, DDN. “From SSD to Persistent Storage and Archive, File Systems to Object Stores and Burst Buffers, DDN’s comprehensive end to end data lifecycle solutions continue to power the most data-intensive workflows in the world – generation after generation.”The post DDN Leads 2015 TOP500 List of Global Supercomputing Centers appeared first on insideHPC.

"In high performance computing, data sets are increasing in size and workflows are growing in complexity. Additionally, it is becoming too costly to have copies of that data and, perhaps more importantly, too time and energy intensive to move them. Thus, the novel Zero Copy Architecture (ZCA) was developed, where each process in a multi-stage workflow writes data locally for performance, yet other stages can access data globally. The result is accelerated workflows with the ability to perform burst buffer operations, in-situ analytics & visualization without the need for a data copy or movement."The post SGI Update: Zero Copy Architecture (ZCA) appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Monash University announced that it has become the first spoke of the NVIDIA Technology Centre Asia Pacific. With its hub is in Singapore, the NVIDIA Southeast Asia Technology Centre is based at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University and has a core focus on deep learning research and development.The post Monash University Joins NVIDIA Technology Centre Asia Pacific appeared first on insideHPC.

Students interested in demonstrating their high-performance computing skills on a global stage are invited to team up and sign up to compete in the tenth annual Student Cluster Competition at the SC16 Conference to be held Nov. 13-18, 2016, in Salt Lake City. SC16 is the premier international conference on high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis.The post Students: Get your Team Together for the SC16 Student Cluster Competition appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Red Bull Racing Formula One team announced an extended agreement with ANSYS. The team uses ANSYS' simulation software to optimize its vehicle design enhancements for a competitive edge on the track.The post Red Bull Racing Speeds Simulation with ANSYS appeared first on insideHPC.

"In this talk, Intersect360 Research returns with an annual deep dive into the trends, technologies and usage models that will be propelling the HPC community through 2016 and beyond. Emerging areas of focus and opportunities to expand will be explored along with insightful observations needed to support measurably positive decision making within your operations."The post A Look at HPC and Hyperscale Trends for 2016 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Brocade announced the industry’s first Gen 6 Fibre Channel switch for storage networking. The Brocade G620 is a high-density SAN switch that delivers breakthrough performance and scalability designed to support data growth and demanding workloads from mission-critical applications.The post Brocade Launches Industry-First Gen 6 Fibre Channel Switch appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Bill Wagner of Bright Computing describes what attracted him to join the company as CEO and what's ahead for system management software. "Bright addresses the exploding demand to manage increasingly complex IT infrastructures with a simple yet powerful ‘single pane of glass’ management platform that can extend across the datacenter and the cloud. I am excited to join Bright’s talented team and eager to build on the company’s upward growth trajectory.”The post Interview with Bill Wagner, CEO of Bright Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Centre for Modeling & Simulation (CFMS) in the UK announced it will be taking part in a follow-on to the Hyperflux project. "Hyperflux ++ builds on the successful Innovate UK project ‘Hyperflux’ - developing next generation CFD technology for the civil, automotive, renewable and aerospace sectors."The post CFMS Joins Hyperflux++ Project to Advance CFD appeared first on insideHPC.

"Fred brings to Cray a proven track record of building strategic partnerships and increasing sales through a customer-centric view of the market,” said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. “Fred’s background at industry-leading technology companies is perfectly tailored for this position. His experience and insight will help us as we work to continue our growth as a company, and bring to our customers the promised convergence of the exciting worlds of supercomputing and big data.”The post Cray Appoints Fred Kohout as Chief Marketing Officer appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the 2016 Stanford HPC Conference, Michael Jennings from LBNL presents: Node Health Check (NHC) Project Update. "In this follow-up to his 2014 presentation at the Stanford HPCAC Conference, Michael will provide an update on the latest happenings with the LBNL NHC project, new features in the latest release, and a brief overview of the roadmap for future development."The post Video: Node Health Check (NHC) Project Update appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Allinea announced plans to champion what it sees as a key survival message for the Energy industry when it exhibits at the Rice Oil and Gas HPC Conference in Houston next week. "We'll be underlining to geophysicists at the conference the real commercial gains to be had from focusing on code performance," said Robert Rick, Allinea's VP of Sales, Americas. "HPC is helping the industry to operate more efficiently. The next step is for this market is to use code optimization to speed up the valuable seismic imaging and reservoir modeling processes, which are now essential to this industry."The post Code Modernization for Smarter Geophysics appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Adaptive Computing announced it has integrated Remote Visualization with Moab’s workload submission portal, Viewpoint, in order to improve ease-of-use and increase user productivity. "Adaptive Computing is transforming our customers’ experience so that technology is no longer a barrier and users are more empowered in their efforts to cure cancer, build safer vehicles, and better our overall environment,” says Marty Smuin, CEO of Adaptive Computing. “This latest innovation helps automate the experience in such a way that organizations can both reduce costs through sharing and improve productivity through faster application interaction and increased collaboration.”The post Adaptive Computing steps up with High Productivity Remote Visualization appeared first on insideHPC.

"Electrodialysis is a technology used for water purification in applications such as desalination for drinking water, waste water reuse, and demineralization. An electrodialysis system uses ion-selective membranes and applied electric fields to remove ions from aqueous electrolytes. High performance computing allows us to model the electrokinetic interactions that drive this process, providing insight on important underlying physics such as electroconvective chaos which has a significant effect on ionic transport and the prediction of mean quantities."The post Video: Using HPC to Advance Water Desalination By Electrodialysis appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Ken Strandberg describes the highlights of panel discussion on high performance storage at SC15. "There was significant discussion about identifying the most important workflows, e.g. will checkpoint/restart continue to dominate I/O demands, difficult to analyze scientific datasets, or some new emerging science workflows. In identifying these workflows, we expect to learn where to focus storage research."The post Industry Experts Discuss Accelerating Science with Storage Systems Research appeared first on insideHPC.

"When it comes to commercialization of promising IP, HPC punches below its weight. That, we can and should change. Where does the HPC community get training on entrepreneurship? How do you become an entrepreneur? Does it have to be in your blood, or can you actually learn how to do it? It turns out you can learn most of it, and in the process (since nobody is excellent at everything), you also learn how to surround yourself with others who are good at other necessary things."The post STEM IP – Advancing HPC, Industry & Society appeared first on insideHPC.

"What is important to researchers is ‘time to science,’ not the length of time a job takes to compute. 'If you can wait in line at a national supercomputing center and it takes five days in the queue for your job to run, and then you get 50,000 cores and your job runs in a few hours, that’s great. But what if you could get those 50,000 cores right now, no waiting, and your job takes longer to run but it would still finish before your other job would start on the big iron machine."The post Will the Cloud Change Scientific Computing? appeared first on insideHPC.

"From image recognition in social media to self-driving cars and medical image processing, deep learning is everywhere in our daily lives. Learn about recent advancements in deep learning that have been made possible by improvements in algorithms, numerical methods, and the availability of large amounts of data for training, as well as accelerated computing solutions based on GPUs. With GPUs, great performance can be reached across a wide range of platforms, from model development on a workstation to training on HPC and data-center systems to embedded platforms, enabling new horizons for computing and AI applications."The post Video: HPC, Deep Learning and GPUs appeared first on insideHPC.

"This Lockheed Martin Enterprise Business Services (EBS) position performs as a Systems Administrator supporting Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Information Technology. The position is a High Performance Computing/Super Computing Systems Administrator who will be required to maintain smooth operation of multi-user computer systems, including coordination with Network Services, Storage Administrators, Security, Vendors, and Research Scientists."The post Job of the Week: Supercomputing Systems Administrator at Lockheed Martin appeared first on insideHPC.

Registration is now open for the 32nd International Conference on Massive Storage Systems and Technology (MSST 2016). As the premier conference for massive-scale storage systems, MSST offers designers and implementers, storage architects, researchers, and vendors an opportunity to share best practices and discuss building and securing the world's largest storage systems for high-performance computing, web-scale systems, and enterprises.The post Registration Open for MSST Conference on Massive Storage Systems and Technology appeared first on insideHPC.

"Unified Communication X (UCX) is a set of network APIs and their implementations for high performance computing. UCX comes from the combined efforts of national laboratories, industry, and academia to co-design and implement a high-performing and highly scalable communication APIs for next generation applications and systems. UCX solves the problem of moving data memory location “A" to memory location "B" considering across multiple type of memories (DRAM, accelerator memories, etc.) and multiple transports (e.g. InfiniBand, uGNI, Shared Memory, CUDA, etc. ), while minimizing latency, and maximizing bandwidth and message rate."The post UCX: An Open Source Framework for HPC Network APIs and Beyond appeared first on insideHPC.

Registration is now open for the NCSA 2016 Private Sector Partner Annual Meeting. Through NCSA’s Private Sector Program, the event brings together private, university, and government organizations with the shared goal of increasing competitiveness and economic impact through high-performance computing and data analytics.The post Registration Opens for NCSA 2016 Private Sector Partner Annual Meeting appeared first on insideHPC.

"Many organizations are gaining a competitive advantage by implementing a Dynamic Data Center strategy. In a dynamic data center compute resources may be dynamically created and/or provisioned based on workload demand in accordance with configured policies. Compute resources may be physical, on-premises nodes, or they may be virtual nodes in a public or a private cloud, or all of the above. In all cases, the resources are dynamically created and/or powered on and provisioned on-the-fly for a specific workload. This results in an agile data center that responds quickly and automatically to changes in workload demand, while reducing power costs."The post Video: Dynamic Datacenter from Bright Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the UberCloud announced plans to support independent software vendors (ISVs) in Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) with its new go-to-cloud service for the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. The service consists of containerizing the software provider’s software, developing a Software as a Service (SaaS) cloud business model, utilizing and tuning the ISV’s application software on Azure, testing and evaluating the cloud offer, and conducting marketing and sales initiatives together with the ISV.The post UberCloud Offers SaaS Service for ISVs on Microsoft Azure appeared first on insideHPC.

The NSF-funded Comet supercomputer at SDSC was one of several high-performance computers used by researchers to help confirm that the discovery of gravitational waves before a formal announcement was made.The post Comet Supercomputer at SDSC Helps Confirm Gravitational Wave Discovery appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the 2016 Stanford HPC Conference, Jason Stowe from Cycle Computing presents: Making Clouds Productive. "Nine years of Cloud HPC experiences has taught us a number of lessons about things like security, scale, workload planning, cost models, multi-users, multi-cloud, , and the difference between running one job versus multiple workflows in the cloud."The post Slidecast: Making HPC Clouds Productive appeared first on insideHPC.

"Supercomputing is vital to NCAR’s research and this new system will be an important tool for researchers across the United States,” said Anke Kamrath, director of operations and services at NCAR’s Computational and Information Systems Laboratory. “It will enable enhanced understanding of weather and other natural processes, helping to make society more resilient.”The post Altair’s PBS Pro to Manage Workload for New NCAR Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

"This talk will focus on programming models and their designs for upcoming exascale systems with millions of processors and accelerators. Current status and future trends of MPI and PGAS (UPC and OpenSHMEM) programming models will be presented. We will discuss challenges in designing runtime environments for these programming models by taking into account support for multi-core, high-performance networks, GPGPUs, Intel MIC, scalable collectives (multi-core-aware, topology-aware, and power-aware), non-blocking collectives using Offload framework, one-sided RMA operations, schemes and architectures for fault-tolerance/fault-resilience.”The post Video: Programming Models for Exascale Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

"Prefetching on a coprocessor such as the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor can be more important than on a main CPU such as the Intel Xeon CPUs. Since the cores on the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor are in-order, they cannot hide memory latency as compared to an out-of-order CPU. In addition, since a coprocessor does not have an L3 cache, L2 misses must then access the slower memory subsystem."The post Prefetching Data for Intel Xeon Phi appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Mellanox announced that it has joined the Nutanix Elevate Technology Alliance Program to provide a simple to use and fully converged solution for compute, storage and networking to enterprise customers. The Mellanox SX1012 is a unique half rack width, top of rack 10/40 Gb/s Ethernet switch solution that provides network invisibility and has been validated as “Nutanix Ready for Networking” following functional and compatibility testing.The post Mellanox Joins Nutanix Alliance for Enterprise Infrastructure appeared first on insideHPC.

"As it readies for Sierra, a new IBM-based platform, LLNL is not only defining the metrics as it paves the road to Coral, it is taking the first giant steps on the path toward Exascale. This talk will provide an overview of Coral and reveal the plans and progress to evolve applications for Sierra and future large-scale systems."The post Video: The Road to the Sierra/Coral Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

Scientists have developed a process to deposit nano-lasers directly onto silicon chips, paving the way for fast and efficient data processing using silicon photonics. Physicists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have developed a nano-laser one thousand times thinner than a human hair. This process deposits the nano-wire lasers directly onto the chip, making it possible to produce high-performance, cost-effective photonic components.The post TUM Munich Researchers Develop Nanolasers for Silicon Photonics appeared first on insideHPC.

"Reliability and accuracy are crucial when it comes to developing successful cars," said David Floury, Technical Director of ORECA. "ANSYS is a key player in the motorsport industry and their solutions provide our engineers with the necessary tools to evaluate and optimize a range of product design ideas across varied operating conditions, leading to enhanced product performance and integrity and ultimately winning championships. We are already working with ANSYS solutions for our future new car, the ORECA 07."The post ANSYS Simulation Technology Speeds ORECA Race Car Design appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Earl Joseph from IDC describes his SC15 panel where four HPC luminaries discussed, disputed, and divined the path to exascale computing. "As the panel wound to a close, participants agreed on one thing: the path to exascale contains significant obstacles, but they’re not insurmountable. Tremendous progress is being made in preparing codes for the next generations of systems, and sheer determination and innovation is running at an all-time high."The post Exascale Architectures: Evolution or Revolution? appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Nvidia announced Gill Pratt, one of the world’s leading figures in artificial intelligence will deliver a keynote at the GPU Technology Conference in Silicon Valley on April 7. Pratt joined Toyota last year from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — the emerging technology arm of the U.S. Defense Department. In January, the world’s largest automaker announced it would invest $1 billion into artificial intelligence over the next five years.The post AI Expert Gill Pratt from Toyota to Keynote GPU Technology Conference appeared first on insideHPC.

“One of the biggest challenges enterprises face today is the massive growth of data, fueled by cloud, mobile, IoT, analytics, social media, cognitive and other technologies organizations eagerly employ to transform their business and engage customers,” said John Morris, CEO, Cleversafe, an IBM company. “By bringing Cleversafe technology to the cloud with these services, we will empower clients with the choice and flexibility needed to better balance storage cost, location, and compliance control requirements across their data sets and essential applications.”The post IBM Cleversafe Brings Object-Based Storage Services to the Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

"As our largest ever acquisition, we are confident the integrated teams of EZchip and Mellanox can deliver future value to our shareholders,” said Eyal Waldman, President and CEO of Mellanox. “We look forward to working together as a combined company building a leading intelligent, end-to-end interconnect, and network processing company. This will enable Mellanox to add intelligence, and application offloads to the interconnect, which is a trend we are seeing in data centers, and expect to take dominant share in this transition.”The post Mellanox Completes Acquisition of EZchip appeared first on insideHPC.