High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

Today the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Organization announced that it is teaming up with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to use cloud computing to explore ever-increasing amounts of astronomy data. To kick things off, they just issued a Call for Proposals for AstroCompute in the Cloud, a grant program to accelerate the development of innovative tools and techniques for processing, storing and analyzing the global astronomy community’s vast amounts of astronomic data.The post SKA & AWS Seeking Proposals for AstroCompute in the Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

The Louisiana State University Center for Computation and Technology recently received a large grant from the National Science Foundation to begin updating the coastal modeling system known as Advanced Circulation, or ADCIRC. The project, known as STORM, began in October of 2014 and work on the program will continue for four more years.The post Supercomputing Tidal Models with the STORM Project at LSU appeared first on insideHPC.

"In this talk, Seagate presents details on its efforts and achievements around improving Hadoop performance on Lustre including a summary on why and how HDFS and Lustre are different and how those differences affect Hadoop performance on Lustre compared to HDFS, Hadoop ecosystem benchmarks and best practices on HDFS and Lustre, Seagate’s open-source efforts to enhance performance of Lustre within “diskless” compute nodes involving core Hadoop source code modification (and the unexpected results), and general takeaways ways on running Hadoop on Lustre more rapidly."The post Video: Understanding Hadoop Performance on Lustre appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Penguin Computing announced the Arctica 4804ip switch and a collaboration with Cumulus Networks.The post Penguin Computing Extends Open Networking with Artica Switches appeared first on insideHPC.

The Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program is now accepting proposals for high-impact, computationally intensive research campaigns.The post INCITE Seeking Proposals for U.S. Leadership Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from LUG 2015 in Denver, James Simmons from ORNL presents: Lustre + Linux - Putting the House in Order. "In the last year great strides have been made to sync up the lustre Intel branch to what is upstream. We present what that current state is as well as what is left for the intel branch to bring this to completion."The post Video: Lustre + Linux – Putting the House in Order appeared first on insideHPC.

"For a period of time, it didn't look like flash drives were going to decrease in price very much. Flash cell technology is limited to around 20nm because of cost and complexity considerations, but manufacturers have found ways around the limitation. Rather than decrease the features size, they now store more bits per cell (TLC) and have started to create 3D flash chips. This combination, plus the growth in flash storage sales, has driven down the price per gigabyte."The post Jeff Layton on How 3D Flash is Changing the Market appeared first on insideHPC.

"Monitoring a large Lustre site, running multiple generations of Lustre filesystems can be a challenge. Some equipment offer vendor specific monitoring interfaces while others, built on open source Lustre, have minimal monitoring capabilities. This talk will report on our operational experience using a homegrown python module to collect data from each filesystem. We will discuss in detail how the data is visualized centrally in Splunk and cross-referenced with users workload to analyze and troubleshoot our environment."The post Video: Monitoring a Heterogeneous Lustre Environment with Splunk appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Niall Wilson describes how ICHEC delivers top-quality technology services and support to universities and enterprises. "Based on the solution’s superior price performance, ICHEC deployed Fionn, a supercomputer built on SGI ICE X hardware running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. On implementing Fionn, ICHEC was funded by Intel to work on its new many-core technology as an official Intel Parallel Computing Center."The post SGI Powers Fionn Supercomputer at ICHEC in Ireland appeared first on insideHPC.

NVlink will be the backbone of 150 Petaflop Coral supercomputers coming to ORNL and LLNL. As the world’s first high-speed GPU interconnect, NVLink will let data move between GPUs and CPUs 5-12 times faster than possible today.The post Steve Oberlin on How NVLink will Power Coral Supercomputers appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from LUG 2015 in Denver, J.Mario Gallegos from Dell presents: Deploying Hadoop on Lustre Storage: Lessons Learned and Best Practices. "Merging of strengths of both technologies to solve big data problems permits harvesting the power of HPC clusters on very fast storage."The post Deploying Hadoop on Lustre Storage: Lessons Learned and Best Practices appeared first on insideHPC.

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center is using Comcast Business Ethernet for secure, private network connections to eight associated colleges.The post PSC Brings Big Bandwidth to Eight Pennsylvania Schools appeared first on insideHPC.

Louisiana State University is seeking an HPC User Services Analyst in our Job of the Week.The post Job of the Week: HPC User Services Analyst at LSU appeared first on insideHPC.

Today SGI announced that the Earthquake and Volcano Information Center of the Earthquake Research Institute (ERI) at the University of Tokyo, has deployed a large-scale parallel computing solution from SGI for leading-edge seismological and volcanological research.The post SGI Powers Earthquake Research in Japan appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Allinea Software released details on partnership that is helping scientists in research and industry to exploit Piz Daint - Europe's most powerful supercomputer.The post Accelerating the Piz Daint Supercomputer with Allinea appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the PRACE Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe celebrated its fifth anniversary. In the past five years, PRACE has come a long way, growing from a project-based consortium into a fully-fledged international association of 25 countries.The post PRACE Celebrates Fifth Anniversary appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Univa announced the Universal Resource Broker, an enterprise-class workload optimization solution for high performance, containerized and shared data centers.The post Univa Rolls Out Universal Resource Broker appeared first on insideHPC.

Dell has teamed with Intel to create innovative solutions that can accelerate the research, diagnosis and treatment of diseases through personalized medicine. The combination of leading-edge CPUs from Intel and the systems and storage expertise from Dell create a state-of-the-art solution that is easy to install, manage and expand as required.The post Dell’s GDAP Delivers an Integrated Genomic Processing Infrastructure appeared first on insideHPC.

"Intel supports users, system integrators, and OEMs using ZFS with Intel Lustre. In this presentation, we summarize the results of proof-of-concept (PoC) on a variety of the ZFS configurations. We cover sequential and metadata performance, data Integrity, manageability, availability and reliability. The work identifies the areas where development should be focused in order to fill gap in performance or functionality and encourage system administrator to integrate this technology with the existing high availability framework like Pacemaker/Corosync. We also cover the most important tunables for ZFS in combination with Lustre and the most notable metrics for Lustre and ZFS."The post Video: Current Status of ZFS as Backend File System for Lustre appeared first on insideHPC.

Asetek has announced its first production order for its RackCDU Direct-to-Chip data center liquid cooling system under the previously announced OEM purchase agreement with Fujitsu.The post Asetek Lands Largest Order Yet for RackCDU with Fujitsu appeared first on insideHPC.

How does a woman break through the glass ceiling? In this video from the Re/Code Conference, Intel's Diane Bryant discusses the pathway to diversity in the tech sector.The post Intel’s Diane Bryant on Bringing Diversity to the Tech Sector appeared first on insideHPC.

"n this session, Seagate covers configuration guidelines and tuning of LNET Routing from InfiniBand to Ethernet using Lustre 2.1 through 2.6 server/clients as well demonstrating performance results by means of a synthetic benchmark called IOR. In addition, this presentation includes the topic of LNET Router failure and recovery during I/O as well as what environments can expect during these failure events."The post Video: Lustre Network (LNET) Router Configuration and Tuning appeared first on insideHPC.

Today NERSC announced that their Cori Phase 1 system will be the first supercomputer installed in the new Computational Research and Theory Facility, which is now in the final stages of construction at LBNL. Expected to be delivered this summer, the Cray XC40 supercomputer will be powered by Intel Haswell processors and Cray's DataWarp burst buffer technology.The post NERSC to Install Cori Phase 1 Supercomputer this Summer appeared first on insideHPC.

Although there are a number of truly huge implementations of Lustre today, the community is still far from reaching the maximum configurations that the Lustre architecture is designed for. Inside the Lustre File System describes the basics of how the Lustre File System operates with descriptions of the newest features.The post Introduction to the Lustre File System appeared first on insideHPC.

In this RCE Podcast, Brock Palen and Jeff Squyres speak with Mike Place about SaltStack, a fast and scalable systems and configuration management software for predictive orchestration, cloud and data center automation, server provisioning, application deployment and more.The post RCE Podcast Looks at SaltStack Scalable System Configuration Manager appeared first on insideHPC.

This week LANL announced that high school students Meghan Hill and Katelynn James took the top prize in the 25th New Mexico Supercomputing Challenge. Their research project, “Using Concentrated Heat Systems to Shock the P53 Protein to Direct Cancer into Apoptosis.” posited that using nanotechnology robots can kill cancer cells without damaging healthy cells.The post Supercomputing Challenge Winners Examine Nanotech for Fighting Cancer appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Texas Advanced Computing Center announced that the Wrangler data analysis and management supercomputing system is now in early operations for the open science community. Supported by a grant from the NSF, Wrangler uses innovative DSSD technology for data-intensive computing.The post TACC’s “Wrangler” Uses DSSD Technology for Data-Intensive Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, Rich Brueckner reports back from the LUG 2015 Lustre User Group Meeting. With something like 188 attendees this year, LUG reflects a user community that has come together to foster the world’s fastest parallel file system.The post Radio Free HPC Field Report from LUG2014 appeared first on insideHPC.

Over at NICS, Scott Gibson writes that researchers are using supercomputers to model the spread of wildfires.The post Supercomputing Sudden Firestorms appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Bright Computing announced a partnership with CVIS, a Dutch-based company that delivers innovative HPC solutions to organizations in the Benelux region.The post Bright Partners with CVIS for Benelux HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

As data analytics becomes more mission critical, hardware and software need to evolve to handle both historical data (batch) and real time streaming data. This combined ability to manage different types of data is critical for a wide range of organizations.The post The High Performance Data Analytics Market appeared first on insideHPC.

"Industrial Applications of High-Performance Computing: Best Global Practices offers a global overview of HPC for industrial applications, along with a discussion of software challenges, business models, access models (e.g., cloud computing), public-private partnerships, simulation and modeling, visualization, big data analysis, and governmental and industrial influence."The post NCSA’s Merle Giles Publishes New Book on Industrial HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

"Andreas Dilger from Intel 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 2.8 and Beyond appeared first on insideHPC.

NCI in Australia has signed a $2M deal with Fujitsu to work with storage and data management company NetApp to supply and install all-flash storage arrays with a raw storage capacity of 11 petabytes, bringing NCI’s total raw storage capacity from 33 petabytes to 44 petabytes.The post NCI Boosts Storage to 44 Petabytes with Fujitsu & NetApp appeared first on insideHPC.

"With the current Lustre Performance Monitoring Tool (LMT) no longer in active development, and the current version incompatible with DNE based Lustre 2.5 deployments, there is a critical need for a new set of tools delivering the same basic Lustre performance metrics with the added ability to work compatibly with contemporary releases of Lustre."The post Video: New and Improved Lustre Performance Monitoring Tool appeared first on insideHPC.

The Open Compute Project, initiated by Facebook as a way to increase computing power while lowering associated costs with hyper-scale computing, has gained a significant industry following. Several vendors have released, or will soon release, servers based on Open Compute specifications.The post Open Computing: Vendor Landscape appeared first on insideHPC.

“The Cray-Seagate partnership is helping expand the boundaries of what’s possible in large-scale, data-intensive computing, far beyond what we could have imagined just 10 years ago. This continued innovation using the Lustre open file system is helping assist data-intense applications critical to advancements in important industries around the world.”The post Seagate Powers 120 Petabytes of HPC Storage with Cray appeared first on insideHPC.

We had a great time covering the Lustre User Group meeting in Denver last week. In this special feature, we added a blues music track to the OpenSFS slideshow from the event. Enjoy!The post Special Feature: Slideshow from #LUG2015 appeared first on insideHPC.

"The combination of the ephemeral nature of the cloud and directly addressable archives such as S3 suggest novel methods for using the Lustre HSM interface. Persistent data sets in the cloud need to be managed independently from a ephemeral filesystem and compute resources. Managing datasets in the cloud could, for example, involves importing data from Amazon's S3 back into a freshly-created Lustre filesystem, performing I/O intensive computations, and then persisting the datasets back to S3 before terminating the filesystem and compute resources. Alternatives for archive formats will also be discussed. AWS S3 will be used for concrete examples, but the general methods should be applicable to other cloud environments as well."The post Video: Lustre HSM in the Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

Today's large-scale compute clusters take a lot of preparation for shipping. "Logistics planning for the KAUST shipment started months in advance, and it took 12 Cray personnel almost five days to prepare and pack the system. The KAUST shipment consisted of 184 boxes, weighed 127 tons, and filled an entire Boeing 747 airplane — plus part of another. Ten semi-trucks were required to transport Shaheen II from Cray’s manufacturing facility in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, to the airport in Chicago."The post Video: Preparing the Cray XC40 for Shipment to KAUST appeared first on insideHPC.

The SGI UV system is uniquely suited for bioinformatics and genomics by providing the computational capabilities and global shared memory architecture needed for even the most demanding sequencing and analytic tasks, including post sequencing and other data intensive workflows.The post Key Benefits of SGI UV 2000 Architecture for Life Sciences appeared first on insideHPC.