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

Tejas Karmarkar from Microsoft presented this talk at SC15. "Azure provides on-demand compute resources that enable you to run large parallel and batch compute jobs in the cloud. Extend your on-premises HPC cluster to the cloud when you need more capacity, or run work entirely in Azure. Scale easily and take advantage of advanced networking features such as RDMA to run true HPC applications using MPI to get the results you want, when you need them."The post Video: Microsoft Azure for Engineering Analysis and Simulation appeared first on insideHPC.

Although the cloud has become an accepted part of commercial and consumer computing, science and engineering have been less welcoming to the concept, but this could be on the point of changing with the announcement this month that the ESI Group will be delivering advanced engineering simulation in the cloud, across multiple physics and engineering disciplines.The post ESI Opens Datacenter at Teratec for Engineering in the Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the Intel HPC Developer Conference at SC15, Kevin O'Leary from Intel presents: Vectorization Advisor in Action for Computer-Aided Formulation. "The talk will focus on a step-by-step walkthrough of optimizations for an industry code by using the new Vectorization Advisor (as part of Intel® Advisor XE 2016). Using this tool, HPC experts at UK Daresbury Lab were able to spot new SIMD modernization and optimization opportunities in the DL_MESO application - an industry engine currently used by “computer-aided formulation” companies like Unilever."The post Video: Vectorization Advisor in Action for Computer-Aided Formulation appeared first on insideHPC.

The 32nd International Conference on Massive Storage Systems and Technology (MSST 2016) has issued its Call for Participation & Papers. The event takes place April 30 - May 6 in Santa Clara, CA. "The Program Committee requests presentation proposals on issues in designing, building, maintaining, and migrating large-scale systems that implement databases and other kinds of large, typically persistent, web-scale stores (HSM, NoSQL, key-value stores, etc.), and archives at scales of tens of petabytes to exabytes and beyond."The post Call for Papers: International Conference on Massive Storage Systems and Technology appeared first on insideHPC.

Lawrence Livermore National Lab is seeking an HPC Compiler & Tools Engineer in our Job of the Week. "As a member of the Development Environment Group in the Livermore Computing (LC) supercomputing center, will work as a software developer specializing in compilers and application development tools for supporting High Performance Computing (HPC). Will work with scientific computing teams, the open source software community, and HPC vendor partners on the development of enabling technologies for the state-of-the-art platforms currently in use and under procurement."The post Job of the Week: HPC Compiler & Tools Engineer at LLNL appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Intersect360 Research released its eighth 2015 Site Budget Allocation Map, a look at how HPC sites divide and spend their budgets.The post 2015 Site Budget Map Reflects HPC Spending appeared first on insideHPC.

"Computers are an invaluable tool for most scientific fields. It is used to process measurement data and make simulation models of e.g. the climate or the universe. Brian Vinter talks about what makes a computer a supercomputer, and why it is so hard to build and program supercomputers."The post Video: An Overview of Supercomputing appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Baidu’s Silicon Valley AI Lab (SVAIL) released Warp-CTC open source software for the machine learning community. Warp-CTC is an implementation of the #‎CTC algorithm for #‎CPUs and NVIDIA #‎GPUs. "According to SVAIL, Warp-CTC is 10-400x faster than current implementations. It makes end-to-end deep learning easier and faster so researchers can make progress more rapidly."The post Accelerating Machine Learning with Open Source Warp-CTC appeared first on insideHPC.

The fastest supercomputers are built with the fastest microprocessor chips, which in turn are built upon the fastest switching technology. But, even the best semiconductors are reaching their limits as more is demanded of them. In the closing months of this year, came news of several developments that could break through silicon’s performance barrier and herald an age of smaller, faster, lower-power chips. It is possible that they could be commercially viable in the next few years.The post In Search Of: A Quantum Leap in Processors appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Nick Nystrom from PSC describes the new Bridges Supercomputer. Bridges sports a unique architecture featuring Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) large-memory servers including HPE Integrity Superdome X, HPE ProLiant DL580, and HPE Apollo 2000. Bridges is interconnected by Intel Omni-Path Architecture fabric, deployed in a custom topology for Bridges’ anticipated workloads.The post Video: Bridges Supercomputer to be a Flexible Resource for Data Analytics appeared first on insideHPC.

Géant, Europe’s collaboration on e-infrastructure and services for research and education, and operator of the network that interconnects Europe’s National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), has extended its 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) network into data centers.The post Géant Expands Europe’s National Research and Education Network appeared first on insideHPC.

Researchers are using XSEDE compute resources to study how lasers can be used to make useful materials. In this podcast, Dr. Zhigilei discusses the practical applications of zapping surfaces with short laser pulses. Laser ablation, which refers to the ejection of materials from the irradiated target, generates chemical-free nanoparticles that can be used in medical applications, for example.The post Podcast: Simulating how Lasers can Transform Materials appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Seagate announced that the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) has selected the Seagate ClusterStor L300 for its GS1K HPC storage needs. GS1K is the next-generation supercomputing data management infrastructure for CEA’s Military Applications Division.The post Seagate to Power CEA Supercomputing Data Management Infrastructure appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Allinea reports that developers of Roxar Software Solutions at Emerson Process Management used the Allinea Forge to increase the performance of their Tempest MORE next-generation reservoir simulator by 30 percent.The post Allinea Tools Help Deliver 30% Performance Boost in Reservoir Simulation appeared first on insideHPC.

"The path to Exascale computing is clearly paved with Co-Design architecture. By using a Co-Design approach, the network infrastructure becomes more intelligent, which reduces the overhead on the CPU and streamlines the process of passing data throughout the network. A smart network is the only way that HPC data centers can deal with the massive demands to scale, to deliver constant performance improvements, and to handle exponential data growth."The post InfiniBand Enables Intelligent Networks appeared first on insideHPC.

"In GPAW, the high level nature of Python allows developers to design the algorithms, while C can be implemented for numeric intensive portions of the application through the use of highly optimized math kernels. In this application, the Python portions of the code are serial, which makes offloading to the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor not feasible. However, and interface has been developed, pyMIC, which allows the application to launch kernels and control data transfers to the coprocessor."The post Python for HPC and the Intel Xeon Phi appeared first on insideHPC.

A new paper from ORNL's Sparsh Mittal presents a survey of approximate computing techniques. Recently published in ACM Computing Surveys 2016, A Survey Of Techniques for Approximate Computing reviews nearly 85 papers on this increasingly hot topic.The post New Paper Surveys Approximate Computing Techniques appeared first on insideHPC.

Today DDN announced that it fortified its position as the HPC storage market leader during 2015. According to a recently published Intersect360 Research HPC User Site Census report, DDN has largest share of installed systems at surveyed HPC sites.The post Survey Shows DDN as HPC Storage Market Leader appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the ASC Student Supercomputer Challenge (ASC16) announced details from their Preliminary Contest on January 6. College students from around the world were asked to design a high performance computer system that optimizes HPCG and MASNUM_WAM applications under 3000W as well as to conduct a DNN performance optimization on a standalone hybrid CPU+MIC platform. All system designs along with the result and the code of the optimization application are to be submitted by March 2.The post Deep Learning, Ocean Modeling, and HPCG Come to ASC16 Student Supercomputer Challenge appeared first on insideHPC.

The 2016 ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers has issued its Call for Papers. The event takes place May 16-18 in Como, Italy. "We seek contributions that push the envelope in a wide range of computing topics, from more traditional research in architecture and systems to new technologies and devices. We seek contributions on novel computing paradigms, computational models, algorithms, application paradigms, development environments, compilers, operating environments, computer architecture, hardware substrates, memory technologies, and smarter life applications."The post Call for Papers: ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Fujitsu Limited announced it has developed the world's largest magnetic-reversal simulator. Developed in joint research with the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), the simulator runs on the famous K computer using a mesh covering more than 300 million micro-regions. Based on the large-scale magnetic-reversal simulation technology first developed in 2013, this new development offers a faster calculation algorithm and more efficient massive parallel processing.The post K Computer Runs World’s Largest-Scale Magnetic-Reversal Simulator appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Brookhaven National Laboratory announced that it has expanded its Computational Science Initiative (CSI). The programs within this initiative leverage computational science, computer science, and mathematics expertise and investments across multiple research areas at the Laboratory-including the flagship facilities that attract thousands of scientific users each year-further establishing Brookhaven as a leader in tackling the "big data" challenges at experimental facilities and expanding the frontiers of scientific discovery.The post Brookhaven Lab Expands Computational Science Initiative appeared first on insideHPC.

Today NOAA reported a nearly four-fold increase in computing capacity to innovate U.S. forecasting in 2016. NOAA’s Weather and Climate Operational Supercomputer System is now running at record speed, with the capacity to process and analyze earth observations at quadrillions of calculations per second to support weather, water and climate forecast models. This investment to advance the field of meteorology and improve global forecasts secures the U.S. reputation as a world leader in atmospheric and water prediction sciences and services.The post NOAA Upgrades Supercomputers to 5.78 Petaflops appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Zadara Storage announced that PCPC Direct has added the Zadara Storage Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA) solution to their product portfolio to provide enterprise-grade storage-as-a-service to their HPC customers in a wide variety of markets. "PCPC Direct has an 18-year history of providing IT operations and managed services to some of the most demanding customers in the HPC market. PCPC Direct provides the underlying infrastructure for companies developing scientific calculations in the aerospace industry, cutting-edge research in higher education and medical research, seismic research for multi-national energy companies and Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) for genomic research projects."The post Zadara Storage-as-a-Service comes to PCPC Direct appeared first on insideHPC.

Parallel file systems have become the norm for HPC environments. While typically used in high end simulations, these parallel file systems can greatly affect the performance and thus the customer experience when using analytics from leading organizations such as SAS. This whitepaper is an excellent summary of how parallel file systems can enhance the workflow and insight that SAS Analytics gives.The post Faster SAS Analytics Using DDN Storage Solutions appeared first on insideHPC.

Today FlyElephant announced new tools, a series of webinars, and the formation of a community around the platform. FlyElephant is a platform that provides scientists with computing infrastructure for calculation and automates routine tasks and allows focus on the core issues of research.The post FlyElephant Announces New Tools for Scientific Computing Data Management appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) announced it has joined the iRODS Partner Program.The post TACC Joins iRODS Partners Program appeared first on insideHPC.

Sean Hefty from Intel presented this talk at the Intel HPC Developer Conference at SC15. "OpenFabrics Interfaces (OFI) is a framework focused on exporting fabric communication services to applications. OFI is best described as a collection of libraries and applications used to export fabric services. The key components of OFI are: application interfaces, provider libraries, kernel services, daemons, and test applications. Libfabric is a core component of OFI. It is the library that defines and exports the user-space API of OFI, and is typically the only software that applications deal with directly. It works in conjunction with provider libraries, which are often integrated directly into libfabric."The post Video: A Brief Introduction to OpenFabrics appeared first on insideHPC.

Today DDN announced that the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has selected DDN’s new SFA14K high-performance hyper-converged storage platform to drive the performance and deliver the capacity needed for scientific breakthroughs in climate, weather and atmospheric-related science to power its Cheyenne supercomputer. “Having a centralized, large-scale storage resource delivers a real benefit to our scientists,” said Anke Kamrath, director of the operations and services division at NCAR’s computing lab. “With the new system, we have a balance between capacity and performance so that researchers will be able to start looking at the model output immediately without having to move data around. Now, they’ll be able to get right down to the work of analyzing the results and figuring out what the models reveal.”The post DDN Storage Enables NCAR to Advance Weather and Climate Science appeared first on insideHPC.

The HiPEAC16 High Performance and Embedded Architecture and Compilation conference returns to Prague next week. With three keynote talks, 33 workshops, nine tutorials, and 37 papers, the three-day conference takes place January 18-20.The post HiPEAC16 Conference Returns to Prague January 18-20 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the National Center for Atmospheric Research announced that it has selected SGI to build one of the world’s most advanced compute systems used to develop models for predicting the impact of climate change and severe weather events on both a global and local scale. As part of a new procurement coming online in 2017, an SGI ICE XA system named “Cheyenne” will perform some of the world’s most data intensive calculations for weather and climate modeling to improve the resolution and precision by orders of magnitude. As a result, NCAR’s scientists will provide more actionable projections about the impact of climate change for specific regions and assist agencies throughout the world develop more accurate weather predictions on a local and global scale.The post NCAR Selects SGI Supercomputer for Advanced Modeling and Research appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Comsol announced the availability of COMSOL Multiphysics software on the Rescale Cloud simulation platform. "For customers seeking HPC resources for bigger analyses, this important initiative with Rescale allows our users to take full advantage of both the COMSOL Multiphysics software and Rescale's secure and flexible simulation environments," said Phil Kinnane, COMSOL's VP of Business Development.The post COMSOL Multiphysics Comes to Rescale Cloud Simulation Platform appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the Intel HPC Developer Conference at SC15, James Reinders hosts an Intel Black Belt discussion on Code Modernization. "Modern high performance computers are built with a combination of resources including: multi-core processors, many core processors, large caches, high speed memory, high bandwidth inter-processor communications fabric, and high speed I/O capabilities. High performance software needs to be designed to take full advantage of these wealth of resources. Whether re-architecting and/or tuning existing applications for maximum performance or architecting new applications for existing or future machines, it is critical to be aware of the interplay between programming models and the efficient use of these resources. Consider this a starting point for information regarding Code Modernization. When it comes to performance, your code matters!"The post Video: Intel Black Belt Discussion on HPC Code Modernization appeared first on insideHPC.

“The virtually infinite scale of cloud compute resources is now within easy reach from either existing network-attached or object-based storage. No longer is the location of your storage a roadblock to reaping the ease, timeliness, and cost offered by cloud compute services. Avere’s Enterprise Cloud Bursting solution utilizes the Virtual FXT Edge filer (vFXT) which puts high-performance, scalable NAS where you need it to enable massive compute on-demand for enterprise apps with simple installation and zero hardware maintenance. Avere makes your NAS data accessible to cloud compute without experiencing latency or requiring that your data be moved to the cloud.”The post Video: Overcoming Storage Roadblocks in HPC Clouds appeared first on insideHPC.

Dell in Austin is seeking an HPC Benchmarking Principal Engineer in our Job of the Week.The post Job of the Week: HPC Benchmarking Principal Engineer at Dell in Austin appeared first on insideHPC.

The National Science Foundation’s premier data management platform for the life sciences has rebranded, shedding the project’s original label of iPlant Collaborative and donning the new name CyVerse. The rebrand emphasizes the project’s capacity to provide data management and computation services beyond plant sciences, for collaborations across scientific disciplines.The post NSF’s iPlant Rebrands to CyVerse, Provides Data Management and Computation Across Scientific Disciplines appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the Dell booth at SC15, Addison Snell from Intersect360 Research discusses why HPC is now important to a broader group of use cases, and dug deep into overviews of HPC for research, life sciences and manufacturing. Participants learned more about why HPC, Big Data, and Cloud are converging.The post Video: Intersect360 Research Describes HPC Market Trends at SC15 appeared first on insideHPC.

The fifth annual Optical Interconnects Conference has issued its Call for Papers. Hosted by the IEEE Photonics Society, the event takes place May 9-11 in San Diego. "Optical interconnect strategies can only be fully realized when optimized at the system level,” said Lukas Chrostowski, University of British Columbia and Samuel Palermo, Texas A&M University, OI Conference 2016 General Co-Chairs. “This year’s Optical Interconnects Conference promises to be an important step in the exploration of the interconnect potential for future petascale and exascale platforms in supercomputers and datacenters.”The post Call for Papers: 2016 Optical Interconnects Conference appeared first on insideHPC.

Many will be familiar with HPC and industrial or scientific applications, but now HPC is making its impact on something that touches the soul of millions and millions of people every day — music. In an interview with the inventor of HPC for Music, Antonis Karalis shared a brief explanation of how the future of music has been compromised and what steps are being taken to revolutionize music composition, the creative workflow, and deliver new entertainment experiences. Along the way, Karalis is applying cutting edge computing technologies including Intel Optane 3D memory and the Scalable System Framework.The post The Impact of HPC on Music appeared first on insideHPC.

PRACE is seeking students interested in spending the summer working abroad. Consisting of a training week and two months at a European High Performance Computing Center, the program affords participants the opportunity to learn and share more about PRACE and HPC, and includes accommodation, a stipend and travel to their HPC center placement.The post Students: Apply Now for Summer of HPC in Europe appeared first on insideHPC.

Barbara Chapman, a leading researcher in programming languages, programming models, and compilers, has been named head of the Computer Science and Mathematics Group (CSM) under the new Computational Science Initiative at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory. Chapman is also a professor of Applied Mathematics & Statistics and Computer Science at Stony Brook University, where she serves as a joint appointee affiliated with the university's Institute for Advanced Computational Science (IACS).The post Barbara Chapman Named Head of Brookhaven Lab’s Computer Science and Mathematics Group appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Baidu Chief Scientist Andrew Ng discusses what machine learning is, how it relies on high performance computing, and touches on the many ways that machine learning will advance commercial and scientific applications.The post Video: Machine Learning Possibilities with HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

OCF in the U.K. recently deployed a new Fujitsu HPC cluster at the University of East Anglia. As the University’s second new HPC system in 4-years, the cluster can be easily scaled and expanded in the coming months through a framework agreement to match rapidly increasing demand for compute power.The post OCF Deploys Fujitsu HPC Cluster at University of East Anglia appeared first on insideHPC.

Astronomers are using iRODs data technology to study the evolution of galaxies and the nature of dark matter. "By partnering with data specialists at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) who develop the integrated Rule-Oriented Data System (iRODS) researchers and students now have online databases for two large astronomical data sets: the REsolved Spectroscopy of a Local VolumE (RESOLVE) survey and the Environmental COntext (ECO) catalog."The post Astronomers Using iRODS to Wrangle Massive Survey Data appeared first on insideHPC.

"There are a number of exciting technologies we should see in 2016, and a leader will be Intel’s next-generation Xeon Phi coprocessor – a hybrid between an accelerator and general purpose processor. This new class of processors will have a large impact on the industry with its innovative design that combines a many-core architecture with general-purpose productivity. Cray, for example, will be delivering Intel Xeon Phi processors with some of our largest systems, including those going to Los Alamos National Labs (the “Trinity” supercomputer) and NERSC (the “Cori” supercomputer)."The post Five Supercomputing Predictions from Cray’s Barry Bolding appeared first on insideHPC.

"In the case of the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor, although 60 cores are commonly used for computation, there is another core that is available, but not traditionally used as part of a simulation. Experiments using the 61st core for actual computation while running a reverse Monte Carlo ray tracing application for the modeling of radiative heat transfer, demonstrated that the use of another core improved performance, and that oversubscribing the coprocessor operating system thread did not degrade the performance."The post Reserved Cores in the Intel Xeon Phi appeared first on insideHPC.

Fans of High Performance Data Analytics got a boost today with news that the High-Performance Big Data (HiBD) team at Ohio State University has released RDMA-Apache-Spark 0.9.1.The post New Version of RDMA-Spark Runs Native InfiniBand and RoCE appeared first on insideHPC.

Today DDN announced the winners of the 2015 Pioneer User Awards. The awards recognize and celebrate visionary individuals, organizations and/or multiple people who are embracing leading-edge high performance computing technologies to shatter long-standing technical limits and to accelerate business results and scientific insights.The post DDN Announces Winners of the 2015 Pioneer Awards appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from SC15, Peter Hopton from Iceotope describes the company's innovative liquid cooling technology for the European ExaNeSt project. “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 post Iceotope Showcases ExaNeSt Cooling Technology for Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.

"HPC in India is getting noticed on a different scale today. Starting with lot of initiatives across, the National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) gives clear HPC roadmap with assert confidence of dominating HPC in India. The student cluster competition to me is a perfect way to introduce, develop and enhance the HPC technologies around. ISSC opens up an interesting and innovative platform for HPC student fraternity in India to experience the computer science and computational science."The post Interview: How de-HPC.org is bringing the Student Cluster Competition to India appeared first on insideHPC.