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

Today the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced a contract with Penguin Computing for a set of large-scale Open Compute HPC clusters. With 7-to-9 Petaflops of aggregate peak performance, the systems will be installed as part of NNSA’s tri-laboratory Commodity Technology Systems program. Scheduled for installation starting next year, the systems will bolster computing for national security at Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories.The post Penguin Computing to Build 7-9 Petaflops of Open Compute Clusters for NNSA appeared first on insideHPC.

The Stanford Solar Car Project is using the Sabalcore HPC Cloud to significantly improve aerodynamics for their entry in the 2015 World Solar Challenge. "The car’s asymmetrical body, or catamaran design, as it’s called, required detailed simulation to understand and refine. After initial simulations comparing symmetrical and asymmetrical cars in general, the team embarked on a CFD iteration and refinement process that took over five months and utilized over 100,000 core-hours using Sabalcore's HPC Cloud."The post Stanford Accelerates Solar Car with Sabalcore HPC Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

Neuroscientists will find an easier path to supercomputiong thanks to new SDSC funding from the NSF. The project will contribute to the national BRAIN initiative announced by the Obama administration in 2013 to advance researchers’ understanding of the human brain.The post NSF Funds Supercomputing for Neuroscientists at SDSC appeared first on insideHPC.

Across industries, companies are beginning to watch the convergence of High-performance Computing (HPC) and Big Data. Many organizations in the Financial Services Industry (FSI) are running their financial simulations on business analytics systems, some on HPC clusters. But they have a growing problem: integrating analytics of non-structured data from sources like social media with their internal data. Learn how Lustre can help solves these challenges.The post Lustre* Accelerates the Convergence of Big Data and HPC in Financial Services appeared first on insideHPC.

Bill Gropp presented this talk at the Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing. "Where it is used as an alternative to MPI, OpenMP often has difficulty achieving the performance of MPI (MPI’s much-criticized requirement that the user directly manage data motion ensures that the programmer does in fact manage that memory motion, leading to improved performance). This suggests that other programming models can be productively combined with MPI as long as they complement, rather than replace, MPI."The post Bill Gropp Presents: MPI and Hybrid Programming Models appeared first on insideHPC.

The HPC Advisory Council has published the Agenda for their China Conference. The event takes place Nov. 9 in Wuxi, China.The post Agenda Posted for HPC Advisory Council China Conference appeared first on insideHPC.

Researchers are calling for a coordinated national network of neurotechnology centers or "brain observatories." As proposed in an Opinion paper published in the Neuron journal, the observatories would augment the BRAIN Initiative involving more than 100 laboratories in the United States has already made progress in establishing large-scale neuroscience goals and developing shared tools.The post Researchers Propose “Brain Observatory” Neurotechnology Centers appeared first on insideHPC.

Rob Walsh from Altair Engineering presented this talk at the HPC User Forum. "The HyperWorks Unlimited Physical Appliance is a fully configured high-performance computing (HPC) appliance specifically designed to manage and solve today’s advanced computer-aided engineering (CAE) workload demands. Completely managed by Altair, this appliance creates an instant, secure private cloud environment allowing unlimited use of Altair’s entire HyperWorks CAE software suite."The post Optimizing Cloud and HPC Technologies for Advanced Simulation appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Qumulo announced that Sinclair Oil has chosen the company's scale-out NAS storage for increased performance and real-time data visibility necessary to properly monitor the companys rapidly growing digital system.The post Qumulo Data-Aware Scale-Out NAS Powers Analytics at Sinclair Oil appeared first on insideHPC.

"Comet is SDSC’s newest HPC cluster, designed as a high-throughput system with unique HPC virtualization capabilities to accommodate a large number of researchers looking for rapid turnaround. It is built on Dell PowerEdge C6320 servers with Intel Xeon Haswell E5 2680v3 processors."The post Video: Dell Powers Comet Supercomputer at SDSC appeared first on insideHPC.

"We describe Oclgrind, a platform designed to enable the creation of developer tools for analysis and debugging of OpenCL programs. Oclgrind simulates how OpenCL kernels execute with respect to the OpenCL standard, adhering to the execution and memory models that it defines. A simple plugin interface allows developer tools to observe the simulation and collect execution information to provide useful analysis, or catch bugs that would be otherwise difficult to spot when running the application on a real device. We give details about the implementation of the simulator, and describe how it can be extended with plugins that provide useful developer tools. We also present several example use-cases that have already been created using this platform, motivated by real-world problems that OpenCL developers face."The post Video: Oclgrind – An Extensible OpenCL Device Simulator appeared first on insideHPC.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has opened the CENATE Center for Advanced Technology Evaluation, a first-of-its-kind computing proving ground. Designed to shape future extreme-scale computing systems, CENATE evaluations will mostly concern processors; memory; networks; storage; input/output; and the physical aspects of certain systems, such as sizing and thermal effects.The post PNNL Launches CENATE Computing Proving Ground appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the SC15 HPC Matters series, NASA Aerospace Engineer Dr. Shishir Pandya describes how high performance computing helps advance airplane and rocket technologies. “Why does high-performance computing matter? Because science matters! Discovery matters! Human beings are seekers, questers, questioners. And when we get answers, we ask bigger questions. HPC extends our reach, putting more knowledge, more discovery, and more innovation within our grasp. With HPC, the future is ours to create! HPC Matters!”The post HPC Matters to Aerospace appeared first on insideHPC.

Johns Hopkins University is seeking an HPC Software Engineer in our Job of the Week.The post Job of the Week: HPC Software Engineer at Johns Hopkins University appeared first on insideHPC.

An Iceland-based "HPC in the Cloud" company called Advania has published an interesting case study with The Ubercloud, and online community and marketplace where engineers, scientists, and their service providers discover, try, and buy Computing Power and Software as a Service, from Cloud Resource and Software Providers around the world.The post Advania in Iceland Tests HPC Cloud Bursting with Docker using the Ubercloud appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Bitfusion announced Bitfusion Labs, a collaborative proving ground for delivering performance improvements for hardware-accelerated applications.The post Bitfusion Labs Opens for Boosting Application Performance appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Spectra Logic launched ArcticBlue, a new nearline disk storage system that delivers "Twice the Shelf Life of Competing Disk Platforms at Half the Cost." ArcticBlue leverages the company’s BlackPearl hybrid storage architecture and Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) disk media, creating an object storage based disk platform with maximum longevity, efficiency and cost effectiveness. Datacenter and private cloud managers can now affordably integrate a long-life nearline disk solution with online performance.The post ArcticBlue Nearline Storage from Spectra Logic Increases Data Shelf Life appeared first on insideHPC.

Bull Atos has installed the fastest supercomputer in Croatia at the University in Rijeka. With an expected debut on the TOP500 in November, the 239 Teraflop BURA supercomputer will be used by university researchers in areas including drug discovery and genomics.The post Bull Atos Installs Fastest Supercomputer in Croatia appeared first on insideHPC.

Cloud computing is changing the way that IT organizations operate and innovate. While moving enterprise type applications to a cloud service provider is progressing, technical computing has been lagging in this transformation. This is changing, as the technology that once sat in a protected data center is now available in the cloud.The post insideHPC Guide to Cloud Computing for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Pavan Balaji from Argonne presented this talk at the Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing. "More cores will drive the network, with more sharing of the network infrastructure. The aggregate amount of communication from each node will increase moderately, but will be divided into many smaller messages."The post Video: Network Architecture Trends appeared first on insideHPC.

IDC will host a complimentary Analyst Briefing and Breakfast at SC15. The popular annual event is great way to catch up with the latest trends in the HPC Market and High Performance Data Analytics.The post IDC Breakfast Briefing Returns to SC15 appeared first on insideHPC.

"This exciting course offers students and teachers a unique opportunity to work with advanced research technology not usually available in a typical classroom setting. Students will engage in the following activities: building a computer cluster from scratch; installing the Linux operating system on the computer they've built; connecting computers put together by their peers to make a mini-supercomputer; learning how to program a mini-supercomputer in parallel with Python; interactive activities to help understand how Parallel computing works in Supercomputing; running performance benchmarks to determine how your cluster ranks in comparison with the fastest and largest supercomputers in the world."The post Video: Beowulf Boot Camp Trains the Next Generation of HPC Experts appeared first on insideHPC.

The Gauss Centre for Supercomputing is sponsoring a team from the Technische Universität München for the SC15 Student Cluster Competition at SC15.The post GCS Sponsors TUM Team for SC15 Student Cluster Challenge appeared first on insideHPC.

"Modern Numerical Weather prediction (NWP) can now use many thousands of cores in a single run of the application. By using modern CPUs such as the Intel Xeon processors and the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, tremendous performance and efficiency can be obtained. It is important to remember that many of the applications are written in Fortran and many of the contributors are domain experts, not parallel programming gurus."The post Weather Prediction with Intel Xeon Phi appeared first on insideHPC.

Are you planning on attending SC15 in Austin? Discounted "Early Bird" Advance registration for the SC15 conference ends Thursday, Oct. 15. After that, fees go up and could add several hundred dollars to your costs.The post Register for SC15 by Oct 15 and Save Big appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Mellanox announced the speaker lineup for their annual Dinner Event at SC15 will include comedian Jason Alexander from Seinfeld. Special guests include: Marek Michalewicz from A*STAR, Thomas Lippert from Jülich, and Jack Wells from Oak Ridge.The post Comedian Jason Alexander to Perform at Mellanox Event at SC15 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Linda Barney writes that researchers at the University of Cambridge are using an Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor-based supercomputer from SGI to accelerate discovery efforts. “We have managed to modernize and optimize the main workhorse code used in the research so it now runs at 1/100-1/1000 of the original runtime. This allows us to tackle problems which would have taken unfeasibly long to solve. Secondly, it has opened windows for previously unthinkable research, namely using the MODAL code in cosmological parameter search: this is a problem which is constantly being solved in an iterative process, but adding the MODAL results to the process has only become possible with the improved performance.”The post Researching Origins of the Universe at the Stephen Hawking Centre for Theoretical Cosmology appeared first on insideHPC.

James Reinders from Intel presented this talk at the Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing. "We need to embrace explicit vectorization in our programming. But, generally use parallelism first (tasks, threads, MPI, etc.)."The post James Reinders Presents: Vectorization (SIMD) and Scaling (TBB and OpenMP) appeared first on insideHPC.

Leo Reiter from Nimbix presented this talk at the HPC User Forum. "Unlike conventional commodity cloud platforms, JARVICE and the Nimbix Cloud are purpose built to run any processing job at speed and scale. It means that as your problems get more complex, JARVICE simply expands to handle them."The post Heterogeneous On-Demand Storage for HPC Workflows in the Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

Five up-and-coming networking experts have been selected to take part in the Women in IT Networking at SC (WINS) program. The women, all early- to mid-career networking and computer professionals, will receive full travel support to participate in the design, construction, and management of one of the largest networks in the world at the annual SC conference this November in Austin, TX (USA).The post Agencies, Universities Announce Recipients of Inaugural Program to Expand Role of Women in Leading-Edge Networks appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Asetek announced its biggest purchase order to date for its RackCDU data center liquid cooling system. The order was placed by an undisclosed Original Equipment Manufacturing partner. The order for 21 RackCDU with Direct-to-Chip cooling loops is to satisfy an undisclosed OEM customer installation. Both the OEM and the end user will be announced when the information becomes public.The post Asetek Continues Momentum with Largest Server Installation Order to Date appeared first on insideHPC.

Today ACM and IEEE announced that Kathy Yelick from LBNL will be the recipient of the 2015 ACM/IEEE Computer Society Ken Kennedy Award for innovative research contributions to parallel computing languages that have been used in both the research community and in production environments. She was also cited for her strategic leadership of the national research laboratories and for developing novel educational and mentoring tools. The award will be presented at SC15, which takes place Nov. 15-20, in Austin, Texas.The post Kathy Yelick to Receive Ken Kennedy Award at SC15 appeared first on insideHPC.

OpenSFS is sponsoring two Lustre BoFs at SC15 in Austin. As a nonprofit organization, OpenSFS was founded in 2010 to advance Lustre development, ensuring it remains vendor-neutral, open, and free.The post OpenSFS to Sponsor Two Lustre BoFs at SC15 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Bright Computing announced that Anadolu University has chosen a collaborative solution from Bright, Dell and Eduline, for its high performance computing environment. Located in Northwest Turkey, Anadolu is the second largest university in the world by enrollment.The post Bright, Dell, & Eduline Build HPC Solution for Turkey’s Anadolu University appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks Dell's pending acquisition of EMC. "Dell Inc. and EMC Corporation have signed a definitive agreement under which Dell, together with its owners, Michael S. Dell, founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Dell, MSD Partners and Silver Lake, the global leader in technology investing, will acquire EMC Corporation, while maintaining VMware as a publicly-traded company."The post Radio Free HPC Looks at Dell’s Acquisition of EMC appeared first on insideHPC.

Training the neural networks used in deep learning is an ideal task for GPUs because GPUs can perform many calculations at once (parallel calculations), meaning the training will take much less time than it used to take. More GPUs means more computational power so if a system has multiple GPUs, it can compute data much faster than a system with CPUs only, or a system with a CPU and a single GPU. One Stop System’s High Density Compute Accelerator is the densest GPU expansion system to date.The post High Performance Computing GPU Accelerators in Deep Learning appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Adaptive Computing announced that they have fully deployed Moab 8.1 at the HPC4Health consortium in Canada. “The folks at Adaptive Computing helped us create the technology to build a converged data center that dynamically shares resources securely and allows us to account for the workloads used by each organization involved in the HPC4Health venture.”The post Moab Powers Dynamic Resource Sharing at HPC4Health in Canada appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Cray announced the creation of the Cray Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) Research Lab. The Cray EMEA Research Lab will foster the development of deep technical collaborations with key customers and partners, and will serve as the focal point for the Company’s technical engagements with the European HPC ecosystem.The post Cray Opens EMEA Research Lab in Bristol appeared first on insideHPC.

SC16 has issued a Call for Proposals for a new initiative that aims to integrate aspects of past technical papers into the Student Cluster Competition.The post Call for Benchmark Proposals: SC16 Student Cluster Competition appeared first on insideHPC.

"When looking to buy a used car, you kick the tires, make sure the radio works, check underneath for leaks, etc. You should be just as careful when deciding which nodes to use to run job scripts. At the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility (NAS), our prologue and epilogue have grown almost into an extension of the O/S to make sure resources that are nominally capable of running jobs are, in fact, able to run the jobs. This presentation describes the issues and solutions used by the NAS for this purpose."The post Video: Prologue O/S – Improving the Odds of Job Success appeared first on insideHPC.

I’ve been commissioned by insideHPC to get the scoop on who’s jumping ship and moving on up in high performance computing. Familiar names this week include Mary Bass, Wilf Pinfold, and Mike Vildibill.The post HPC People on the Move: October Edition appeared first on insideHPC.

Professor Taisuke Boku from the University of Tsukuba presented this talk at the PBS User Group. "We have been operating a large scale GPU cluster HA-PACS with 332 computation nodes equipped with 1,328 GPUs managed by PBS Professional scheduler. The users are spread out across a wide variety of computational science fields with widely distributed resource sizes from single node to full-scale parallel processing. There are also several categories of user groups with paid and free scientific projects. It is a challenging operation of such a large system keeping high system utilization rate as well as keeping fairness over these user groups. We have successfully been keeping over 85%-90% of job utilization under multiple constraints."The post Case Study: PBS Pro on a Large Scale Scientific GPU Cluster appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Kim McMahon from McMahon Consulting writes that, for High Performance Computing vendors, HPC Marketing is a completely different animal than B2B.The post 10 Reasons HPC Marketing Differs from B2B appeared first on insideHPC.

Christopher Lynnes from NASA presented this talk at the HPC User Forum. "The Earth Observing System Data and Information System is a key core capability in NASA’s Earth Science Data Systems Program. It provides end-to-end capabilities for managing NASA’s Earth science data from various sources—satellites, aircraft, field measurements, and various other programs."The post Evolution of NASA Earth Science Data Systems in the Era of Big Data appeared first on insideHPC.

"In business and commercial computing, momentum towards cloud and big data has already built up to the point where it is unstoppable. In technical computing, the growth of the Internet of Things is pressing towards convergence of technologies, but obstacles remain, in that HPC and big data have evolved different hardware and software systems while Open Stack, the Open Source cloud computing platform, does not work well with HPC."The post Scientific Cloud Computing Lags Behind the Enterprise appeared first on insideHPC.

Tommaso Cecchi from DDN presented this talk at the HPCAC Spain Conference. "IME unleashes a new I/O provisioning paradigm. This breakthrough, software defined storage application introduces a whole new new tier of transparent, extendable, non-volatile memory (NVM), that provides game-changing latency reduction and greater bandwidth and IOPS performance for the next generation of performance hungry scientific, analytic and big data applications – all while offering significantly greater economic and operational efficiency than today’s traditional disk-based and all flash array storage approaches that are currently used to scale performance."The post Video: DDN Infinite Memory Engine IME appeared first on insideHPC.

NOAA is seeking an HPC Program Manager in our HPC Job of the Week.The post Job of the Week: HPC Program Manager at NOAA appeared first on insideHPC.

ISC 2016 has issued its Call for BoFs. "Like-minded ISC High Performance conference attendees come together in our informal Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) sessions to discuss current HPC topics, network and share their thoughts and ideas. Each 60-minute BoF session addresses a different topic and is led by one or more individuals with expertise in the area. The ISC 2016 BoF sessions will be held from Monday, June 20 through Wednesday, June 22."The post ISC 2016 Issues Call for BoFs appeared first on insideHPC.

“Argonne National Laboratory is one of the labs helping to lead the exascale push for the nation with the DOE. We lead in a numbers of areas with software and storage systems and applied math. And we’re really focusing, our expertise is focusing on those new ideas, those novel new things that will allow us to sort of leapfrog the standard slow evolution of technology and get something further out ahead, three years, five years out ahead. And that’s where our research is focused.”The post Pete Beckman Presents: Exascale Architecture Trends appeared first on insideHPC.

HLRS in Stuttgart, Germany has upgraded their Hornet system to Hazel Hen, a 7.42 Petaflop Cray XC40 supercomputer. Twice as fast as its predecessor, Hazel Hen is now now ready to support European scientific and industrial users in their pursuit of R&D break-throughs. "In case you're wondering, HRLS chose the name Hazel Hen because it's the one animal that eats Hornets."The post With Hazel Hen Cray XC40, HRLS Upgrades to 7.42 Petaflops appeared first on insideHPC.