High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

Today NICE in Italy released the latest version of their DCV remote visualization technology.

In this video, Tanzima Islam from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory discusses how her experiences as a graduate student at the SC conference propelled her career in HPC.

Clusters FOR DUMMIES is an excellent read for both experienced and novice administrators, users, purchasing departments, and developers who are considering purchasing or specifying a cluster.

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team splits on the topic of Net Neutrality. The FCC will soon publish its new rules for ensuring an even playing field for Internet Bandwidth. "Dan doesn't like the idea one bit. Henry disagrees and thinks we need Net Neutrality to keep the Comcasts of the world from running amok. As for Rich, he just finds the whole argument rather amusing since it's pretty much a done deal."

"Written by one of the foremost experts in high-performance computing and the inventor of Gustafson’s Law, The End of Error: Unum Computing explains a new approach to computer arithmetic: the universal number (unum). The unum encompasses all IEEE floating-point formats as well as fixed-point and exact integer arithmetic. This new number type obtains more accurate answers than floating-point arithmetic yet uses fewer bits in many cases, saving memory, bandwidth, energy, and power."

"Today, energy companies mark the world leaders in commercial supercomputing. Companies like Total are utilizing high performance computing (HPC) to deliver an optimal combination of performance, price and efficiency. Supercomputers like Pangea deliver 10 times the computing capacity of the system it replaced, helping Total identify and exploit new reserves more effectively."

In this video from the University of Houston CACDS HPC Workshop, Jeff Larkin from Nvidia presents: The Past, Present, and Future of OpenACC. "OpenACC is an open specification for programming accelerators with compiler directives. It aims to provide a simple path for accelerating existing applications for a wide range of devices in a performance portable way. This talk with discuss the history and goals of OpenACC, how it is being used today, and what challenges it will address in the future."

In this video, Fujitsu CTO Pierre Lagier describes how the company enables customers to access high performance computing capabilities on desktop PCs with the Fujitsu HPC Gateway and the Intel Cluster Ready program.

"I think it’s a very interesting period for human cosmology because it’s a golden age in which every ten years we learn breathtaking new parts of the story. We have never before been able to do that in human history – to have the chance we have now to look at and understand the universe we live in."

In the video, the DEEP-ER project paves the way to energy-efficient Exascale computing.

"Deep Learning is a new area of Machine Learning research, which has been introduced with the objective of moving Machine Learning closer to one of its original goals: Artificial Intelligence. At the 2015 GPU Technology Conference, you can join the experts who are making groundbreaking improvements in a variety of deep learning applications, including image classification, video analytics, speech recognition, and natural language processing."

As we head into the busy event season we like to call HPC March Madness, the past week has had its share of notable news items that didn't make it to the Features page.

"We are pleased to announce that ISC is introducing the Hans Meuer Award to honor the most outstanding research paper submitted to the conference’s research paper committee. This award has been introduced in the memory of the late Dr. Hans Meuer, general chair of the ISC conference from 1986 through 2014, and co-founder of the TOP500 project."

The E4 Computer Engineering team has garnered a solid reputation in Europe with high performance computing solutions for customers like CERN. To learn more, we caught up with Simone Tinti, who heads up the E4 HPC Team.

"Featuring the first AMD Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture specifically with compute workloads in mind, the AMD FirePro S9150 server GPU supports enhanced double precision floating point computation and breaks the 2.0 TFLOPS double precision barrier. With 16GB of GDDR5 memory and maximum power consumption of 235 watts, AMD FirePro S9150 server GPUs provide massive compute performance while helping maximize available power budgets."

"John Levesque is the Director of the Cray’s Supercomputer Center of Excellence based at Oakridge National Laboratory. He is responsible for the group performing application porting and optimization for break-through science projects. Levesque has been in High Performance computing for 40 years. Recently Levesque was promoted to Cray’s Chief Technology Office, heading the companies efforts in application performance."

Today DDN announced that the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute is using the company's GRIScaler storage solutions to perform rapid, accurate Ebola outbreak modeling for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

This week NERSC announced the winners of its third annual HPC Achievement Awards. The awards recognize NERSC users who have demonstrated an innovative use of HPC resources to solve a scientific problem or whose work has had an exceptional impact on scientific understanding or society.

In this video from the University of Houston CACDS HPC Workshop, Fernanda Foertter from ORNL presents: Leveraging Leadership Computing Facilities: Assisting User's Transition to Titan's Accelerated Architecture.

NCSA, ORNL, and CSCS will host a series of GPU Hackathons in 2015.

Today CoolIT Systems announced 2014 financials and growing demand for the company's Direct Contact Liquid Cooling technologies.

The Seagate ClusterStor Secure Data Appliance (SDA) is the HPC industry’s first scale-out secure storage system officially ICD-503 certified to consolidate multiple previously isolated systems, maintain data security, enforce security access controls, segregate data at different security levels, and provide audit trails, all in a single scale-out file system with proven linear performance and storage scalability.

In this video, Questacon visits NCI to take a look at Raijin, the southern hemisphere's first petaflop super computer. "Raijin, named after the Shinto God of thunder, lightning and storms, is a Fujitsu Primergy high-performance, distributed-memory cluster, procured with funding from the Australian Government."

"Developed by PGI, Cray, and NVIDIA, the OpenACC directives are a shared vision of how directives can simplify the programming model for accelerators, where each vendor is committed to support a common programming standard."

Today Terascala announced that the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) HPC Facility is using the company's software to manage Lustre-based parallel storage.

RENCI is sponsoring this year's Pearl Hacks, a two-day event designed to encourage college and high-school age women to develop their interest in technology.

While Lenovo now scrambles into Damage Control mode in the wake of the Superfish scandal, the question for our readers is: how will this affect Lenovo's ability to sell to the U.S. Federal supercomputing market?

PRACE is seeking students interested in spending the summer working abroad at a European High Performance Computing (HPC) Centre.

Researchers at LBNL have have developed a new algorithm that opens the door for real-time simulations in atomic-level materials research. "By eliminating higher energy terms, you significantly reduce the dimension of your problem, and you can also use a bigger time step,” explained Wang, describing the key to the algorithm’s success: Solving the equations in bigger time steps reduces the computational cost and increases the speed of the simulations.

In this video, Ken Kraft from Intel describes his experiences as a participant in SC Conference Mentor-Protege program. "The SC15 conference is broadening its mission to build a strong and diverse HPC student community at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, through professional development programs, opportunities to learn from mentors, and engagement with SC’s technical sessions."

In this special guest perspective from Scientific Computing World, Tom Wilkie considers some initiatives to counter the widespread impression that scientific computing is solely the preserve of nerdy men.

Bridges is a uniquely capable supercomputer designed to help researchers facing challenges in Big Data to work more intuitively. Called Bridges, the new system will consist of tiered, large-shared-memory resources with nodes having 12TB, 3TB, and 128GB each, dedicated nodes for database, web, and data transfer, high-performance shared and distributed data storage, Hadoop acceleration, powerful new CPUs and GPUs, and a new, uniquely powerful interconnection network.

Today the TGAC Genome Analysis Centre and Optalysys announced a collaboration to develop and implement an energy-efficient optical processing device for large-scale DNA sequence searches.

There is always different levels of importance assigned to various data files in a computer system, specifically a very large system that is storing petabytes of data. In order to maximize the use of the highest speed storage, Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) was developed to move and store data within easy use of users, yet at the appropriate speed and price.

According to IDC, SGI has shipped approximately 8 percent of of all the Hadoop servers in production today. In fact, did you know that SGI introduced the word "Big Data" to supercomputing in 1996? Jorge Titinger, SGI President and CEO, shares SGI's history in helping to design, develop, and deploy Hadoop clusters. (NOTE: Straw was substituted for actual hay to avoid any potential allergic reactions.)