High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

Can 3D-stacking technology topple the long-standing "memory wall" that's been holding back HPC application performance? A new paper from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center written in collaboration with experts from Chalmers University and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory concludes that it will take more than just the simple replacement of conventional DIMMs with 3D-stacked devices.The post New Paper: Can 3D-Stacking Topple the Memory Wall? appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the new round of Grand Challenges targeted by the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI). The conversation was sparked by an Scientific Computing editorial by IBM’s Dave Turek.The post Radio Free HPC Looks at the Grand Challenges of NSCI appeared first on insideHPC.

ESnet has released open source code for building online Interactive Network Portals. "Now that the libraries are made available, the team hopes that other organizations will take the code, use it, add to it and work with ESnet to make the improvements available to the community."The post ESnet Releases Code for Building Online Interactive Network Portals appeared first on insideHPC.

Tom Wilkie from Scientific Computing World reports on how China’s HPC vendors are seeking export markets with the support of their Government. With exhibits and various talks at ISC 2015, Inspur and Sugon were busy showcasing their technologies for the European market.The post Chinese HPC Vendors Look to Expand Overseas appeared first on insideHPC.

"DMF has been protecting data in some of the industries largest virtualized environments all over the world, enabling them to maintain uninterrupted online access to data for more than 20 years. Some customers have installations with over 100PB online data capacity, and billions of files, which they are able to manage at a fraction of the cost of conventional online architectures."The post Video: DMF and Tiering Update appeared first on insideHPC.

SC15 has stepped up with a series of blog posts previewing the conference this year, an effort that seems much more engaging than the random press releases we've seen in the past.The post SC15 Blog Puts the Spotlight on Invited Talks appeared first on insideHPC.

"ThroughPuter PaaS is purpose-built for secure, dynamic cloud computing of parallel processing era. ThroughPuter offers unique, realtime application load and type adaptive parallel processing: Get the speed-up from parallel execution cost-efficiently where and when any given program/task benefits most from the parallel processing resources. Addressing the parallel processing challenge takes a full programming-to-execution platform approach."The post Executing Multiple Dynamically Parallelized Programs on Dynamically Shared Cloud Processors appeared first on insideHPC.

The good folks from the StartupHPC-15 Conference have posted the Agenda for their meeting at SC15. The day-long conference takes place Monday, Nov 16 in Austin at the Capital Factory in Downtown Austin, Texas. "Does your Startup have ties to High Performance Computing? Please come, meet like minded people, listen to industry notables, and help StartupHPC continue its efforts to build a support community."The post StartupHPC-15 Conference Posts Agenda for Austin Event appeared first on insideHPC.

"Andreas presents an overview on the features currently under development for the upcoming Lustre 2.8 and 2.9 releases. This includes Layout Enhancement, Progressive File Layouts, Data-on-MDT, and improved single-client metadata and IO performance. In addition, several Lustre-specific ZFS improvements are also under development that will be available in this timeframe.”The post Video: Lustre 2.9 and Beyond appeared first on insideHPC.

"The HP Apollo 8000 supercomputing platform approaches HPC from an entirely new perspective as the system is cooled directly with warm water. This is done through a “dry-disconnect” cooling concept that has been implemented with the simple but efficient use of heat pipes. Unlike cooling fans, which are designed for maximum load, the heat pipes can be optimized by administrators. The approach allows significantly greater performance density, cutting energy consumption in half and creating synergies with other building energy systems, relative to a strictly air-cooled system."The post Video: HP R&D and HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

"By adopting an MDX philosophy, engineers are able to test designs automatically from the early concept stages and against all of the physical factors that might influence a system’s performance. It assesses which set of design parameters will break a system, and which will improve it. This pushes back the simulation process to force engineers to question every assumption they have made within a design, and optimise it appropriately by assessing a simulation with multiple operating scenarios."The post Is MDX the Future of Engineering Simulation? appeared first on insideHPC.

“NOAA will acquire software engineering support and associated tools to re-architect NOAA’s applications to run efficiently on next generation fine-grain HPC architectures. From a recent procurement document: “Finegrain architecture (FGA) is defined as: a processing unit that supports more than 60 concurrent threads in hardware (e.g. GPU or a large core-count device).”The post Video: NOAA Software Engineering for Novel Architectures (SENA) Project appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) announced the opening of their Performance Optimization and Productivity (POP) Center of Excellence. With the POP, developers of applications that require the use of High Performance Computing can count now with the free advice of European experts to analyze the performance of its codes.The post BSC Opens Productivity Center of Excellence for HPC Apps appeared first on insideHPC.

Climaveneta of Italy announced that the company has won a contract to provide liquid-cooling equipment for a 100 Petaflop supercomputer coming to the Jiangnan Institute of Computer Technology in Wuxi, China, near Shanghai.The post Climaveneta to Provide Liquid Cooling for 100 Petaflop Supercomputer Coming to China appeared first on insideHPC.

“Exascale levels of computing pose many system- and application-level computational challenges. Mellanox as a provider of end-to-end communication services is progressing the foundation of the InfiniBand architecture to meet the exascale challenges. This presentation will focus on recent technology improvements which significantly improve InfiniBand’s scalability, performance, and ease of use.”The post Video: The Road to Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.

"A parallel implementation of SpMV can be implemented, using OpenMP directives. However, by allocating memory for each core, data races can be eliminated and data locality can be exploited, leading to higher performance. Besides running on the main CPU, vectorization can be implemented on the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor. By blocking the data in various chunks, various implementations on the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor can be run and evaluated."The post Sparse Matrix Multiplication appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) announced that it has made significant upgrades to its cloud-based storage system to include a new range of computing services designed to support science-based researchers, especially those with large data requirements that preclude commercial cloud use, or who require collaboration with cloud engineers for building cloud-based services.The post SDSC Steps up with Upgraded Cloud and Storage Services appeared first on insideHPC.

Chris Morrone from OpenSFS/LLNL gave this talk at LAD'15. "The first thing I want to talk about is that Lustre.org is now managed collectively by OpenSFS and EOFS. So the Lustre.org site is now managed by the community. One of the major benefits of this is that the major mailing lists (lustre-announce, lustre-discuss, and lustre-devel) are now under our control, so we want everyone to come back to those mailing lists and start using them again."The post Lustre Development Update from LAD’15 appeared first on insideHPC.

The Cal Poly San Luis Obispo Computer Science Department is hiring a tenure-track faculty position in our HPC Job of the Week.The post Job of the Week: Tenure-track Faculty Position in HPC at Cal Poly appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team goes over a Trip Report from Rich Brueckner from insideHPC, who's been on the road at a series of HPC conferences. We captured more that 50 talks in the past month, and we have them all right here with the very latest in High Performance Computing.The post Radio Free HPC Looks at Highlights from Fall 2015 HPC Conferences appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the PRACE Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe issued their 12th Call for Proposals. By providing access to some of the fastest supercomputer in Europe, the Call for Proposals targets large-scale, computationally intensive projects that would not be possible or productive without access to PRACE resources.The post PRACE Opens 12th Call for Proposals appeared first on insideHPC.

"NVLink enables fast data exchange between CPU and GPU, thereby improving data throughput through the computing system and overcoming a key bottleneck for accelerated computing today. NVLink makes it easier for developers to modify high-performance and data analytics applications to take advantage of accelerated CPU-GPU systems. We think this technology represents another significant contribution to our OpenPOWER ecosystem.”The post Video: NVLink Interconnect for GPUs appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Mellanox announced a definitive agreement to acquire EZchip, a leader in high-performance processing solutions for carrier and data center networks. You may recognize EZchip from their recent Tilera acquisition, makers of Tile-Gx multicore network processors.The post Mellanox to Acquire EZchip AKA Tilera appeared first on insideHPC.

For some applications, cloud based clusters may be limited due to communication and/or storage latency and speeds. With GPUs, however, these issue are not present because application running on cloud GPUs perform exactly the same as those in your local cluster -- unless the application span multiple nodes and are sensitive to MPI speeds. For those GPU applications that can work well in the cloud environment, a remote cloud may be an attractive option for both production and feasibility studies.The post Developing a Plan for Cloud Based GPU Processing appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Cray announced the Company has been awarded a contract to provide a Cray XC40 supercomputer to the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP) at Kyoto University in Japan. The two-cabinet Cray XC40 system will provide the YITP user community with a supercomputer that occupies one-fourth of the physical footprint of the Institute's previous system and a 4x improvement in overall compute performance. The liquid-cooled system will power a wide range of theoretical physics research at YITP, such as astrophysics, nuclear physics and particle physics, and will also serve as a shared supercomputing resource supporting theoretical physicists all across Japan.The post Kyoto University to Install Cray XC40 Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

DK Panda from Ohio State University presented this talk at the HPC Advisory Council Spain Conference. “Dr. Panda and his research group members have been doing extensive research on modern networking technologies including InfiniBand and 10-40GE/iWARP. His research group is currently collaborating with National Laboratories and leading InfiniBand and 10-40GE/iWARP companies on designing various subsystems of next generation high-end systems."The post Communication Frameworks for HPC and Big Data appeared first on insideHPC.

"Our vision is to deliver accelerated graphics and high performance computing to any connected device, regardless of location," said Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "We are excited to collaborate with Microsoft Azure to give engineers, designers, content creators, researchers and other professionals the ability to visualize complex, data-intensive designs accurately from anywhere."The post NVIDIA GRID 2.0 comes to Microsoft Azure appeared first on insideHPC.

Bob Sorensen from IDC presented this talk at the HPC User Forum. In a recent study, IDC assessed the EU's progress towards their 2012 action plan and made recommendations for funding exascale systems and fostering industrial HPC in the coming decade.The post EU/European HPC Plans for the Next Decade appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the European Commission announced HLRS, JSC, and LRZ have been named “Centers of Excellence for computing applications. Funded by the EC and the Horizon 2020 program, the new Centers of Excellence will provide their petascale HPC infrastructure for developing services for European users in science and industry.The post German Supercomputing Sites Become Centers of Excellence for Horizon 2020 appeared first on insideHPC.

While there is much discussion and products in the market regarding cloud computing and the ability to spin up a virtual machines quickly and efficiently, the fact remains that without planning for cloud based storage, the data will get lost. Simply put, without storage, there is no data.The post IBM Storage With OpenStack appeared first on insideHPC.

The performance-savvy HPC developer is in high demand today. Leaps in intra-node parallelism, memory performance and capacity are set to meet applications struggling to exploit existing systems head-on.The post Stepping up to the performance challenge appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Data Vortex Technologies announced that the company has sold and delivered a DV205 system, “PEPSY”, to the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). PEPSY is specifically designed to solve problems requiring extensive processor-to-processor communication in parallel computing systems.The post PNNL Installs Data Vortex System appeared first on insideHPC.

Nathan Rutman from Seagate presented this talk at the LAD'15 Conference. "So why is a spinning disk company talking about Flash? Last year, Seagate acquired Avago LSI's flash division. We now have an array of flash-based storage. So I have nothing against Flash. This presentation is really on: Where does Flash make sense? I also have a personal agenda because I hate the term "Burst Buffer." Everyone says "Burst Buffer" instead of saying "Flash." It drives me crazy. So I'm going to explain what a Burst Buffer is and what it is not."The post Video: On the Role of Flash in Large-Scale Storage Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

Today D-Wave Systems announced a new agreement covering the installation of a succession of D-Wave systems located at NASA's Ames Research Center. "The new agreement is the largest order in D-Wave's history, and indicative of the importance of quantum computing in its evolution toward solving problems that are difficult for even the largest supercomputers," said D-Wave CEO Vern Brownell. "We highly value the commitment that our partners have made to D-Wave and our technology, and are excited about the potential use of our systems for machine learning and complex optimization problems."The post D-Wave to Collaborate with Google, NASA, and USRA on Quantum Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

"The UCX Unified Communication X project is a collaboration between industry, laboratories, and academia to create an open-source production grade communication framework for data centric and high-performance applications. At the core of the UCX project are the combined features, ideas, and concepts of industry leading technologies including MXM, PAMI and UCCS. Mellanox Technologies has contributed their MXM technology, which provides enhancements to parallel communication."The post UCX: Co-Design Architecture For Next Generation HPC Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

Pointwise has announced the latest release of its meshing software featuring new native interfaces to computational fluid dynamics codes.The post Pointwise Improves Mesh Generation Capabilities appeared first on insideHPC.

Rich Brueckner from insideHPC moderated this panel discussion on current trends in HPC. "President Obama's Executive Order establishing the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) will set the stage for a new chapter in leadership computing for the United States. In this panel discussion, thought leaders from leading supercomputing vendors share their perspectives on current HPC trends and the way forward."The post Video: HPC Technology Panel at the PBS Works User Group appeared first on insideHPC.

Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee will keynote the first-ever Intel HPC Developer Conference, Nov. 14-15 in Austin, Texas. "The Intel HPC Developer Conference offers high levels of access. This is your best opportunity to connect with Intel architecture experts, meet HPC industry leaders, and build a lasting network of peers. This is your best opportunity to connect with Intel architecture experts, meet HPC industry leaders, and build a lasting network of peers. The conference will also offer insights into the future of HPC with Intel experts on visualization, machine learning, software tools and much more."The post Jack Dongarra to Keynote Intel HPC Developer Conference at SC15 appeared first on insideHPC.

Earl Joseph from IDC presented this talk at the HPC User Forum. "This study investigates how HPC investments can improve economic success and increase scientific innovation. This research is focused on the common good and should be useful to DOE, other government agencies, industry, and academia."The post IDC Presents an Update on ROI with HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

ARM in Austin is seeking an HPC R&D Engineer in our Job of the Week.The post Job of the Week: HPC R&D Engineer at ARM in Austin appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the Disruptive Technologies session at the 2015 HPC User Forum, Nick Ihli from Adaptive Computing presents: Leveraging Containers in Elastic Environments.The post Video: Leveraging Containers in Elastic Environments appeared first on insideHPC.

High Performance Computing has long been dominated by men, but there seems to be little hard data as to how our HPC community really looks in terms of diversity. Over at TOP500.org, John West calls for every HPC center, company, and research organization to create a diversity page that reflects the current state of their institution.The post SC16 Chair Calls for HPC Organizations to Create Diversity Pages appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the 2015 HPC Advisory Council Spain Conference, Gilad Shainer moderates a panel discussion on Exascale computing.The post Exascale Panel Discussion from HPCAC Spain Conference appeared first on insideHPC.

High Performance Computing (HPC) in the cloud has become a hot topic with new offerings targeted at this market. The demands of technical computing professional to use the cloud for HPC workloads are different than that of a general enterprise software requirement. Performance is key, which requires a different infrastructure at the cloud providers premises.The post IBM Cloud Services vs Amazon EC2 appeared first on insideHPC.

Jim Ganthier from Dell presented this talk at the HPC User Forum. "Dell HPC solutions are deployed across the globe as the computational foundation for industrial, academic and governmental research critical to scientific advancement and economic and global competitiveness. With the richness of the Dell enterprise portfolio, HPC customers are increasingly relying on Dell HPC experts to provide integrated, turnkey solutions and services resulting in enhanced performance, reliability and simplicity."The post Video: Dell’s New HPC Vision, Strategy, and Plans appeared first on insideHPC.

Peter Hopton from Iceotope presented this talk at the HPC User Forum. "ExaNeSt will develop, evaluate, and prototype the physical platform and architectural solution for a unified Communication and Storage Interconnect and the physical rack and environmental structures required to deliver European Exascale Systems. The consortium brings technology, skills, and knowledge across the entire value chain from computing IP to packaging and system deployment; and from operating systems, storage, and communication to HPC with big data management, algorithms, applications, and frameworks. Building on a decade of advanced R&D, ExaNeSt will deliver the solution that can support exascale deployment in the follow-up industrial commercialization phases."The post ExaNeSt Technology: Targeting Exascale in 2018 appeared first on insideHPC.

One of the most used algorithms in numerical simulation is the solving of large, dense matrices. Thermal analysis, boundary element methods and electromagnetic wave calculations all depend on the ability to solve these large matrices as fast as possible. The ability to use a coprocessor such as the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor will greatly speed up these calculations.The post Out of Core Solvers on a Cluster appeared first on insideHPC.

A new breakthrough battery — one that has significantly higher energy, lasts longer, and is cheaper and safer — will likely be impossible without a new material discovery. And a new material discovery could take years, if not decades, since trial and error has been the best available approach. But Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) scientist Kristin Persson says she can take some of the guesswork out of the discovery process with her Electrolyte Genome.The post LBNL to Improve Batteries with Electrolyte Genome Project appeared first on insideHPC.

"Intelligent Pharma is a biotechnology company dedicated to developing, commercializing and using new computational technologies for drug discovery. According to our clients' needs, we carry out customized computational chemistry projects using cutting-edge technologies."The post Video: HPC Tools to Discover New Drugs appeared first on insideHPC.

Oil and gas are becoming increasingly harder to find. This article looks at how oil and gas companies are using cutting edge technology, like HPC servers, compute accelerators and flash storage arrays for applications such as seismic processing, seismic interpretation and reservoir modeling.The post HPC in Seismic Processing and Interpretation and Reservoir Modeling appeared first on insideHPC.