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

The summer of 2016 will see a raft of summer schools and other initiatives to train more people in high-performance computing, including efforts to increase the diversity of HPC specialists with a specific program aimed at ethnic minorities. But interested students need to get their applications in now.The post Apply Now for Supercomputing Summer School appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, researchers describe how the Jetstream project at Indiana University. Jetstream is a user-friendly cloud environment designed to give researchers access to interactive computing and data analysis resources on demand, whenever and wherever they want to analyze their data. It will provide a library of virtual machines designed to do discipline specific scientific analysis. Software creators and researchers will also be able to create their own customized virtual machines or their own private computing system within Jetstream.The post Video: Jetstream to Make HPC a Breeze for Researchers appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the Top Technology Stories for High Performance Computing in 2015. "From 3D XPoint memory to Co-Design Architecture and NVM Express, these new approaches are poised to have a significant impact on supercomputing in the near future." We also take a look at the most-shared stories from 2015.The post Radio Free HPC Looks at the Top HPC Tech Stories from 2015 appeared first on insideHPC.

The National Academy of Sciences is presenting its 2016 Public Welfare Medal to actor, director, writer, and science communicator Alan Alda in recognition of his "extraordinary application of the skills honed as an actor to communicating science on television and stage, and by teaching scientists innovative techniques that allow them to tell their stories to the public." Alda, who was the keynote speaker at SC15, will receive the award on May 1 during the Academy's 153nd annual meeting.The post Alan Alda to Receive Public Welfare Medal from National Academy of Sciences appeared first on insideHPC.

A new major collaborative project is set to transform the UK pharmaceutical industry by enabling the manufacturing processes of the innovative medicines of the future to be designed digitally. The STFC Hartree Centre is a partner in the £20.4m ADDoPT (Advanced Digital Design of Pharmaceutical Therapeutics) project, which involves major pharmaceutical companies, Pfizer, GSK, AstraZeneca and Bristol-Myers Squibb.The post Hartree Centre Collaborates to Transform UK Pharmaceutical Development appeared first on insideHPC.

As multi-socket, then multi-core systems have become the standard, the Message Passing Interface (MPI) has become one of the most popular programming models for applications that can run in parallel using many sockets and cores. Shared memory programming interfaces, such as OpenMP, have allowed developers to take advantage of systems that combine many individual servers and shared memory within the server itself. However, two different programming models have been used at the same time. The MPI 3.0 standard allows for a new MPI interprocess shared memory extension (MPI SHM).The post Shared Memory and MPI 3.0 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Compute Canada and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) announced a collaboration to build a scalable national platform for research data management and discovery. The partnership joins information management expertise from the CARL Portage Network with information technology expertise from Compute Canada to develop services that researchers need to respond to the demands of data-intensive research and to comply with funding bodies’ data sharing policies.The post Compute Canada Collaborates on National Research Data Platform appeared first on insideHPC.

In this week's industry Perspective, Katie Garrison of One Stop Systems explains how GPUltima allows HPC professionals to create a highly dense compute platform that delivers a petaflop of performance at greatly reduced cost and space requirements.compute power needed to quickly process the amount of data generated in intensive applications.The post The GPUltima: Up to a Petaflop of Networked GPUs in a Single Rack appeared first on insideHPC.

The Call for Submissions is open for the upcoming GPU Programming Hackathon at University of Delaware (UDEL). The event takes place from May 2-6, 2016 at UDEL in Newark, Delaware.The post Call for Submissions: GPU Hackathon at the University of Delaware appeared first on insideHPC.

The U.S Department of Energy has awarded a total of 80 million processor hours on Titan supercomputer to an astrophysical project based at the DOE's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). The grants will enable researchers to study the dynamics of magnetic fields in the high-energy density plasmas that lasers create. Such plasmas can closely approximate those that occur in some astrophysical objects.The post Princeton Plasma Physics Lab Wins 80 Million Processor Hours on Titan Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

Today ANSYS announced that engineers across disciplines – from structures to fluids to electromagnetics to systems – will realize step-change improvements in the way they develop products using the newly released ANSYS 17.0. This next generation of ANSYS industry-leading engineering simulation solutions set the scene for the next quantum leaps in product development, enabling unprecedented advancements across an array of industry initiatives from smart devices to autonomous vehicles to more energy-efficient machines. The most feature-rich release in the company's 45-year history, available today, delivers 10x improvements to product development productivity, insight and performance.The post ANSYS Release 17.0 Provides 10X Performance Improvement appeared first on insideHPC.

"Upgrading legacy HPC systems relies as much on the requirements of the user base as it does on the budget of the institution buying the system. There is a gamut of technology and deployment methods to choose from, and the picture is further complicated by infrastructure such as cooling equipment, storage, networking – all of which must fit into the available space. However, in most cases it is the requirements of the codes and applications being run on the system that ultimately define choice of architecture when upgrading a legacy system. In the most extreme cases, these requirements can restrict the available technology, effectively locking a HPC center into a single technology, or restricting the application of new architectures because of the added complexity associated with code modernization, or porting existing codes to new technology platforms."The post Long Live the King – The Complicated Business of Upgrading Legacy HPC Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

Apexx5_hero_web_smallToday BOXX Technologies introduced the redesigned APEXX 5, the "world’s most advanced professional workstation." Built to accommodate demanding engineering, architectural, VFX, and animation workflows, the newly upgraded and highly configurable APEXX 5 is designed to maximize I/O expandability with up to 5 dual-width GPUs with a sync card, a single-width GPU, or any combination of seven, full-length expansion cards while reaching new levels of rendering and simulation performance.The post GPUs & Liquid-Cooling Speed APEXX 5 Advanced Computer Workstation appeared first on insideHPC.

Computational scientists now have the opportunity to apply for the upcoming Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing (ATPESC), to take place from July 31-August 12, 2016. "With the challenges posed by the architecture and software environments of today’s most powerful supercomputers, and even greater complexity on the horizon from next-generation and exascale systems, there is a critical need for specialized, in-depth training for the computational scientists poised to facilitate breakthrough science and engineering using these amazing resources. This program provides intensive hands-on training on the key skills, approaches and tools to design, implement, and execute computational science and engineering applications on current supercomputers and the HPC systems of the future. As a bridge to that future, this two-week program to be held at the Pheasant Run Resort in suburban Chicago fills many gaps that exist in the training computational scientists typically receive through formal education or shorter courses."The post Apply Now for Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

siemensToday Siemens AG in Germany announced plans Monday to acquire HPC software maker CD-adapco in a stock purchase agreement valued at $970 million. "As part of its Vision 2020, Siemens is acquiring CD-adapco and sharpening its focus on growth in digital business and expanding its portfolio in the area of industry software," said Siemens managing board member Klaus Helmrich.The post Siemens to Acquire CD-adapco appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Bright Computing announced that it has collaborated with BitNet in Turkey to provide an infrastructure management solution to FNSS. As is a leading manufacturer and supplier of tracked and wheeled armored combat vehicles, FNSS provides weapon systems for the Turkish and Allied Armed Forces.The post Bright Computing & BitNet Manage Simulation Infrastructure at FNSS in Turkey appeared first on insideHPC.

The ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge (ASC16) Training kicked off in Beijing on January 26. First initiated and organized in China, ASC16 has gained support from experts and technology organizations in US, Europe, and Asia. With a goal to inspire more innovative applications in various fields, it has attracted more and more talent to supercomputing and has greatly promoted communications in the supercomputing community throughout the world. Within 5 years, the ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge has become the world’s largest supercomputing hackathon.The post 175 Teams to Compete in ASC16 Student Supercomputer Challenge appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Centerprise International (Ci) in the UK announced a collaboration with E4 Computer Engineering to develop next-generation datacenter technologies for HPC. "This is an exciting development for both companies, as it combines the specialist knowledge of E4 in the field of high performance computing with our considerable experience in building quality, customized hardware solutions and our expansive reach in the UK IT channel," said Jeremy Nash, Centerprise Sales Director."The post E4 Computer Engineering Collaborates with Ci on HPC Technologies appeared first on insideHPC.

Today SGI Japan announced that the Nagaoka University of Technology has selected the SGI UV 300, SGI UV 30EX and SGI Rackable servers and SGI InfiniteStorage 5600 for its next education and research integrated high-performance computing system. With a tenfold performance increase over the previous system, the new supercomputer will will start operation on March 1, 2016.The post SGI to Deliver Advanced Data Processing for Nagaoka University of Technology appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, engineers move the NERSC Edison Supercomputer from Oakland to Berkeley. The one week long move is condensed into :41 seconds in this time lapse video, shot during the entire process. Edison is a Cray XC30, with a peak performance of 2.57 petaflops/sec, 133,824 compute cores, 357 terabytes of memory, and 7.56 petabytes of disk.The post Time-lapse Video: Edison Supercomputer Moves to Berkeley appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the STFC Hartree Centre in the U.K. announced that Alison Kennedy will be joining the centre as its new Director at the end of March 2016. As Director, Alison will drive the continued growth and development of the Hartree Centre. This follows the UK Government and IBM’s recent five year investment to enable UK industry to exploit the opportunities presented by big data and cognitive computing technologies.The post Alison Kennedy Named Hartree Centre Director appeared first on insideHPC.

India's Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has developed an affordable supercomputer for universities conducting high-end research. Already deployed at 25 institutions, the Param Shavak is a GPU-accelerated desktop machine that sports over 2 Teraflops of performance.The post C-DAC Deploys 25 Param Shavak Desktop Supercomputers Across India appeared first on insideHPC.

EuroMPI has issued its Call for Submissions. The aim of this conference is to bring together all of the stakeholders involved in developments and applications related to the Message Passing Interface (MPI). As the preeminent meeting for users, developers and researchers to interact and discuss new developments and applications of message-passing parallel computing, the meeting takes place Sept. 25-28 in Edinburgh.The post Call for Submissions: EuroMPI in Edinburgh appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Cray announced a $36 million contract to upgrade and expand the Cray XC supercomputers and Cray Sonexion storage system at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). When the project is completed, the enhanced systems will allow the world-class numerical weather prediction and research center to continue to drive improvements in its highly-complex models to provide more accurate weather forecasts.The post ECMWF to Upgrade Cray XC Supercomputers for Weather Forecasting appeared first on insideHPC.

Over at the UberCloud, Wolfgang Gentzsch writes that, despite the ever increasing complexity of CAE tools, hardware, and system components engineers have never been this close to ubiquitous CAE as a common tool for every engineer.The post How Containers will Enable Ubiquitous CAE as a Common Tool for Every Engineer appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the HPC in the Cloud Educational Series, Marco Novaes, Solutions Engineer with the Google Cloud Platform team explains how the Broad Institute was able to use Google Pre-Emptible VMs to leverage over 50,000 cores to advance cancer research. "Cancer researchers saw value in a highly-complex genome analysis, but even though they already had powerful processing systems in-house, running the analysis would take months or more. We thought this would be a perfect opportunity to utilize Google Compute Engine’s Preemptible VMs to further their cancer research, which was a natural part of our mission. And now that Preemptible VMs are generally available, we’re excited to tell you about this work."The post Video: Using Google Compute Engine Pre-Emptible VMs for Cancer Research appeared first on insideHPC.

The Health Cyberinfrastructure Division of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) is participating in a multi-million dollar project with City of Hope Cancer Center to create a research cyberinfrastructure that includes a secure, cloud-based data management platform.The post SDSC Health Division to Create Cancer Research Infrastructure appeared first on insideHPC.

engilityEngility in California is seeking an HPC Program Director in our Job of the Week. "Engility is recruiting for a Sr. HPC Program Director to lead a large Scientific Program within the government space. This individual will manage a large team; to include technical, functional and administrative staff. The program will focus on updating, implementing technologies into the customer space with the goal of seamless integration with minimal downtime. This is a HPC focused program that will be responsible for the full lifecycle of HPC services from technology identification and road mapping, HPC architecture design, development, acquisition integration and testing through 24/7 operations including user support. The PM will work proactively with the customer and stakeholders to develop work statements, prioritize personnel and resource deployment, and create and manage complex multi-year budgets and schedules, including risk and opportunity management."The post Job of the Week: HPC Program Director at Engility appeared first on insideHPC.

Flow Science has just released FLOW-3D/MP v6.1, the high-performance computing version of its flagship CFD software, FLOW-3D. Enhancements include active simulation control, batch post processing and report generation. "Our 5-6 day simulations became 15-18 hour simulations using FLOW-3D/MP running on our cluster with Infiniband interconnect," said Dr. Justin Crapps of Los Alamos National Labs. "Decreased simulation time allows us to investigate more design options and additional physics/phenomenological complexity."The post FLOW-3D Release Scales CFD up to 512 Cores appeared first on insideHPC.

"The Intel’s next generation Xeon Phi processor family x200 product (code-name Knights Landing) brings in new memory technology, a high bandwidth on package memory called Multi-Channel DRAM (MCDRAM) in addition to the traditional DDR4. MCDRAM is a high bandwidth (~4x more than DDR4), low capacity (up to 16GB) memory, packaged with the Knights Landing Silicon. MCDRAM can be configured as a third level cache (memory side cache) or as a distinct NUMA node (allocatable memory) or somewhere in between. With the different memory modes by which the system can be booted, it becomes very challenging from a software perspective to understand the best mode suitable for an application."The post Video: MCDRAM (High Bandwidth Memory) on Knights Landing appeared first on insideHPC.

Today AliCloud signed a strategic partnership with Nvidia to provide the first GPU-based cloud HPC platform in China. The partnership also plans to provide emerging companies support in areas of HPC and deep learning with comprehensive GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) computing. "Innovative companies in deep learning are one of our most important user communities," said Zhang Wensong, chief scientist of AliCloud. "Together with Nvidia, AliCloud will use its strength in public cloud computing and experiences accumulated in HPC to offer emerging companies in deep learning greater support in the future."The post AliCloud & Nvidia to Expand HPC and Deep Learning Market appeared first on insideHPC.

Bright Cluster Manager Version 7.2 is out today, a new release that "extends insight, integration, and ease-of-use for managing clustered and cloud-based IT infrastructures." The new release incorporates a wide range of new features and significantly enhanced monitoring capabilities. "Bright Computing has always prided itself on upgrading its product offerings to respond to new technological trends and user feedback,” said Martijn de Vries, Chief Technology Officer of Bright Computing. “The enhancements we have made in Version 7.2 address recent technology trends, such as the rapid adoption of containers to drive IT efficiency, and support our customers’ ongoing need to stay on top of their dynamic, complex, and converging IT infrastructures.”The post Bright Cluster Manager 7.2 adds Support for Docker and Intel Omni-Path appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Adaptive Computing announces it has set a new record in High Throughput Computing (HTC) in collaboration with Supermicro, a leader in high-performance green computing solutions. Supermicro SuperServers, custom optimized for Nitro, the new high throughput resource manager from Adaptive Computing, were able to launch up to 530 tasks per second per core on Supermicro based low latency UP SuperServer and over 17,600 tasks per second on its 4-Way based SuperServer. This record-breaking throughput can accelerate financial risk analysis, EDA regression tests, life sciences research, and other data analysis-driven projects. It can expedite the process of gaining critical insights, thereby delivering products and services to market faster.The post Adaptive Computing Achieves Record High Throughput with Supermicro Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

The consensus of the panel was that making full use of Intel SSF requires system thinking at the highest level. This entails deep collaboration with the company’s application end-user customers as well as with its OEM partners, who have to design, build and support these systems at the customer site. Mark Seager commented: “For the high-end we’re going after density and (solving) the power problem to create very dense solutions that, in many cases, are water-cooled going forward. We are also asking how can we do a less dense design where cost is more of a driver.” In the latter case, lower end solutions can relinquish some scalability features while still retaining application efficiency.The post The Death and Life of Traditional HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Compute Canada is partnering with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to launch the first ever Human Dimensions Open Data Challenge. This challenge, led by social sciences and humanities researchers, will see research teams compete against one another using open-data sets to develop systems, processes, or fully-functional technology applications that address the human dimensions to key challenges in the natural resources and energy sectors. The Ontario Centres of Excellence, and ThinkData Works have also partnered on this project to provide additional resources and support.The post Compute Canada Sponsors Human Dimensions Open Data Challenge appeared first on insideHPC.

Application deadlines are fast approaching for the Blue Waters Graduate Program and the International Summer School on HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences.The post Apply now for HPC Summer School & Blue Waters Graduate Program appeared first on insideHPC.

Matrix multiplies can be decomposed into tiles and executed very fast on the latest generations of coprocessors. Intel has developed the hStreams library that supports task concurrency on heterogeneous platforms. The concurrency may be across nodes (Xeon, KNC, KNL-SB, KNL-LB); within a node for small matrix operations; and in the overlapping of computation and communication, particularly for tiled solutions. It relieves the user of complexity in dealing with thread affinitization, offloading, memory types, and memory affinitization.The post Heterogeneous Streams with Intel Xeon Phi appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Bright Computing announced that Italy-based Do IT Systems has signed up to the Bright Partner Program. "Together, Bright Computing and Do IT Systems offer a compelling proposition for Italian customers that require high quality HPC solutions and remote HPC management," said Roberto Strano, Technical Manager at Do IT Systems. “We have been very impressed with the Bright software, and we are confident that it will enable our customers to develop and manage HPC clusters in an affordable and efficient way.”The post Do IT Systems Joins Bright Partner Program appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Ruchir Puri, an IBM Fellow at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center talks about building large-scale big data systems and delivering real-time solutions such as using machine learning to predict drug reactions. “There is a need for systems that provide greater speed to insight -- for data and analytics workloads to help businesses and organization make sense of the data, to outthink competitors as we usher in a new era of Cognitive Computing."The post Video: Accelerating Cognitive Workloads with Machine Learning appeared first on insideHPC.

The Supercomputing Frontiers 2016 conference has issued its Call for Papers. Held in conjunction of the launch of the new Singapore National Supercomputing Center, the event takes place March 15-18. "Supercomputing Frontiers 2016 is Singapore’s annual international conference that provides a platform for thought leaders from both academia and industry to interact and discuss visionary ideas, important global trends and substantial innovations in supercomputing. You are invited to submit 4-page extended abstract by February 8, 2016."The post Call for Papers: Supercomputing Frontiers in Singapore appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the ACTnowHPC on demand cloud cluster joined the UberCloud online marketplace, where engineers, scientists and their service providers discover, try, and buy computing power and software in the cloud as a service. ACTnowHPC enables users to harness the power of high performance computing resources on a pay-as-you-go basis without having to invest in the hardware and infrastructure. “We welcome ACTnowHPC to the UberCloud marketplace, the online platform where hardware and software providers exhibit their cloud-related HPC products as a service,” said Wolfgang Gentzsch, Cofounder and President of UberCloud. “Now Advanced Clustering Technologies’ customers can buy and access HPC for their peak demand projects in an extremely user-friendly way.”The post ACTnowHPC Joins UberCloud Marketplace appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) announced that the Lonestar 5 supercomputer is in full production and is ready to contribute to advancing science across the state of Texas. Managed by TACC, the center's second petaflop system is primed to be a leading computing resource for the engineering and science research community. "An analysis of strong-scaling on Lonestar 5 shows gains over other comparable resources," said Scott Waibel, a graduate student in the Department of Geological Sciences at Portland State University. "Lonestar 5 provides the perfect high performance computing resource for our efforts."The post TACC’s Lonestar 5 Begins Full Production appeared first on insideHPC.

The HPC Advisory Council Stanford Conference 2016 has posted its speaker agenda. The event will take place Feb 24-25, 2016 on the Stanford University campus at the new Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center. "The HPC Advisory Council Stanford Conference 2016 will focus on High-Performance Computing usage models and benefits, the future of supercomputing, latest technology developments, best practices and advanced HPC topics. In addition, there will be a strong focus on new topics such as Machine Learning and Big Data. The conference is open to the public free of charge and will bring together system managers, researchers, developers, computational scientists and industry affiliates."The post Agenda Posted for HPC Advisory Council Stanford Conference 2016 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this Intel Chip Chat podcast, Dan Ferber, Open Source Server Based Storage Technologist at Intel and Ross Turk, Director of Product Marketing for Red Hat describe how Ceph plays a critical role in delivering the full enterprise capability of OpenStack. Ross explains how Ceph allows you to build storage using open source software and standard servers and disks providing a lot of flexibility and enabling you to easily scale out storage. By lowering hardware costs, lowering the vendor lock-in threshold, and enabling customers to fix and enhance their own code, open source and software defined storage (SDS) solutions are enabling the future of next generation storage.The post Podcast: Ceph and the Future of Software Defined Storage appeared first on insideHPC.

Today HPC cloud provider Rescale announced that Zack Smocha has joined the company as vice president of product marketing, bringing two decades of experience in cloud and enterprise software marketing to his new role. As a member of the Rescale executive team, Smocha will play a key role in supporting Rescale’s mission to provide the leading cloud based high performance computing (HPC) and simulation platform empowering the world’s engineers, scientists, developers and IT professionals to design innovative products and transform IT into unified, agile environments.The post Zack Smocha Joins Rescale as VP of Product Marketing appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Samsung Electronics announced that it has begun mass producing the industry’s first 4-gigabyte DRAM package based on the second-generation High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2) interface, for use in high performance computing, advanced graphics and network systems, as well as enterprise servers. Samsung’s new HBM solution will offer unprecedented DRAM performance – more than seven times faster than the current DRAM performance limit, allowing faster responsiveness for high-end computing tasks including parallel computing, graphics rendering and machine learning.The post Samsung Mass Producing HBM2 – World’s Fastest DRAM appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Allinea announced that Oak Ridge National Laboratory has deployed its code performance profiler Allinea MAP in strength on the Titan supercomputer. Allinea MAP enables developers of software for supercomputers of all sizes to produce faster code. Its deployment on Titan will help to use the system’s 299,008 CPU cores and 18,688 GPUs more efficiently. Software teams at Oak Ridge are also preparing for the arrival of the next generation supercomputer, the Summit pre-Exascale system – which will be capable of over 150 PetaFLOPS in 2018.The post Allinea Scalable Profiler Speeds Application Readiness for Summit Supercomputer at Oak Ridge appeared first on insideHPC.

"Scientific research is dependent on maintaining and advancing a wide variety of software. However, software development, production, and maintenance are people-intensive; software lifetimes are long compared to hardware; and the value of software is often underappreciated. Because software is not a one-time effort, it must be sustained, meaning that it must be continually updated to work in environments that are changing and to solve changing problems. Software that is not maintained will either simply stop working, or will stop being useful."The post Why Sustainable Software Needs a Change in the Culture of Science appeared first on insideHPC.