High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

In this video from the 2015 OFS Developer’s Workshop, Sean Hefty from Intel presents: A Taste of OFI OpenFabrics Interfaces.

Advances in computational biology as applied to NGS workflows have led to an explosion of sequencing data. All that data has to be sequenced, transformed, analyzed, and stored. The machines capable of performing these computations at one point cost millions of dollars, but today the price tag has dropped into the hundreds of thousands of dollars range.

The OpenPOWER Foundation showed off real hardware for the first time today with 13 systems including a a prototype HPC server from IBM and new microprocessor customized for China.

In his Monday address at ISC High Performance on July 13, Dr. Kohler, who is also the Chair of the PRACE Industrial Advisory Committee, will introduce the integration of digital prototyping at the business unit, Mercedes-Benz Cars Development.

AMD powers the L-CSC cluster at the GSI research facility which achieved the number one position for most energy efficient supercomputers on the latest Green500™ List. The L-CSC cluster is installed at the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung GmbH research facility in Darmstadt, Germany, and is powered by AMD FirePro™ S9150 server GPUs.

Today Los Alamos National Laboratory announced that it decreased its water usage by 26 percent in 2014, with about one-third of the reduction attributable to using reclaimed water to cool its supercomputing center.

"I came to IBM via the acquisition of Platform Computing. There's also been other IBM assets around HPC, namely GPFS. What's been the evolution of those items as well and how they really come together under this concept of software-defined infrastructure, and how we're now taking these capabilities and expanding them into other initiatives that have sort of bled into the HPC space."

Clusters that are purchased for specific applications tend not to be flexible as workloads change. What is needed is an infrastructure that can expand or contract as the workload changes. IBM, a recognized leader in High Performance Computing is applying its expertise in both HPC and Cloud computing to bring together the technologies to create the HPC Cloud.

Today Nvidia announced that researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center have won the inaugural Global Impact Award and its $150,000 prize. The researchers were honored for their work using high performance computing to understand how earthquakes occur and their impact on the earth’s behavior.

In this video from the 2015 OFS Developer's Workshop, Katie Antypas from LBNL describes preparations for the Cori supercomputer. "We need to emphasize here that the Knights Landing processor is self-hosted, and so that means it’s not an accelerator. It’s not a coprocessor and the particular kernel processor that will be having for NERSC-8, will have more than 60 cores and it will have multiple hardware threads for the core. That’s a lot, right? Having 60 cores per node with multiple hardware threads. That a significant increase from both our Hopper and Edison system, which has 24 cores each."

CORAL (Collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne and Lawrence Livermore National Labs) is a project that was launched in 2013 to develop the technology and meet the Department of Energy's 2017-2018 leadership computing needs with supercomputers. The collaboration between Mellanox, IBM and NVIDIA was selected by the CORAL project team after a comprehensive evaluation of future technologies from a variety of vendors. The development of these supercomputers is well underway with installation expected in 2017.

"As our 2014 results and momentum into the first quarter of 2015 demonstrate, DDN’s product strategy to offer integrated end-to-end solutions for large scale data problems is in high demand," said Alex Bouzari, DDN CEO and co-founder. "DDN is leading the industry with innovation in application acceleration, high performance file systems and both private and public cloud enabling solutions."

The human body is host to 100 trillion microorganisms, ten times the number of cells in the human body, and these microbes contain 100 times the number of DNA genes that our human DNA does. UC San Diego CSE Professor, Larry Smarr, discusses how data from these trillions of DNA bases are fed into supercomputers, resulting in innovative scalable visualization systems that allow for the examination of patterns that can be used to suggest new hypotheses for clinical application.

As we pack our bags for a series of Springtime HPC conferences, it's time to clear the decks and point to some notable news items from this week that didn't make it to the front page.

In this Purematter video, SGI CEO Jorge Titinger discusses the role that his experiences as a professional soccer player has had in both his professional development and his company’s success. He also provides insights into how SGI is leveraging High Performance Computing to scale innovation faster than ever before.

"Facebook had the forethought to create the Open Compute Foundation and share IP from designing a highly efficient computing infrastructure at an extremely low cost. We are now building on that collaborative development model to bring expanded flexibility with regard to form factors, processors and configurations for a broad range of customer requirements."

In this video, Satoshi Matsuoka discusses the 2022 outlook for supercomputing as he accepts the IEEE Computer Society 2014 Sidney Fernbach Award. He received the award for his work on advanced infrastructural platforms, large-scale supercomputers, and heterogeneous GPU/CPU supercomputers.

The SC15 conference is now now accepting nominations for the Seymour Cray, Sidney Fernbach, and Ken Kennedy Awards.

Today Sandia National Laboratories announced the appointment of Marianne Walck as vice president of Sandia’s California laboratory.

Simulation of physical processes such as the waves in an ocean or the wake behind a boat, although similar in a number of ways, require different approaches. With current systems designed with many parallel computational units, it is important to take advantage of the range of architectural features. Using HYDRO2D, the performance of the code can be examined and improved by taking advantage of a range of system features.

Researchers at Clemson University are using the Palmetto supercomputers to study biomass production and disease resistance. As one of the fastest supercomputers in Academia, the Palmetto2 cluster is an HP system with 12,080 compute cores and a peak performance of 739 Teraflops.

Today Battelle announced the appointment of Dr. Steven Ashby as Laboratory Director for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).

Southern Methodist University in Dallas is seeking an HPC Applications Specialist in our Job of the Week.

Demands by users that are running applications in the scientific, technical, financial or research areas can easily outstrip the capabilities of in-house clusters of servers. IT departments have to anticipate compute and storage needs for their most demanding users, which can lead to extra spending on both CAPEX and OPEX once the workload changes.

Oak Ridges is preparing for their upcoming Summit supercomputer with two modest test bed systems using Power8 processors. "Summit will deliver more than five times the computational performance of Titan’s 18,688 nodes, using only approximately 3,400 nodes when it arrives in 2017."

Today Penguin Computing gave customers a peek at the future of increased customization and choice in high performance computing at the Open Compute Project Summit.

The term next generation sequencing (NGS) is really a misnomer. NGS implies a single methodology, but the fact is that over the past 10 to 15 years there have been multiple generations and the end is nowhere in sight. Technological advances in the field are continuing to emerge at a record setting pace.

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team takes a look at Big Data Analytics in sports. According to recent reports, at least one team in Major League Baseball is using a Cray Urika system in a bid to gain competitive advantage.

"An analysis of changes to the climate that occur over several decades suggests that these changes are happening faster than historical levels and are starting to speed up. The Earth is now entering a period of changing climate that will likely be faster than what's occurred naturally over the last thousand years, according to a new paper in Nature Climate Change, committing people to live through and adapt to a warming world."

In this slidecast, Bill Lee and Rupert Dance from the InfiniBand Trade Association describe the new IBTA Volume 1 Specification Release. "The new release defines new capabilities that will enable computer systems to keep up with the requirements for increased scalability and bandwidth, along with high computing efficiency and high availability for both high performance computing and commercial enterprise data centers."

The Green Grid Liquid Cooling Work Group has elected Geoff Lyon as Chairman. Lyon is CEO/CTO at CoolIT Systems, the world leader in Direct Contact Liquid Cooling.

In this Chip Chat podcast, John Nguyen from Supermicro discusses the new "System on a Chip" Intel Xeon Processor D-1500 and how Supermicro is integrating this new solution into their products.

Today Bright Computing announced that Izmir Institute of Technology (IYTE) is using the company's software to manage its HPC infrastructure.

"Imagine an entire IT infrastructure controlled not by hands and hardware, but by software. One in which application workloads such as big data, analytics, simulation and design are serviced automatically by the most appropriate resource, whether running locally or in the cloud. A Software Defined Infrastructure enables your organization to deliver IT services in the most efficient way possible, optimizing resource utilization to accelerate time to results and reduce costs."

The SC15 housing site is now open through October. "Get your reservations in early! Hotels are looking to be a bit more expensive than we've seen at past conferences and the places with reasonable rates will go fast."

In this South by Southwest podcast, Maytal Dahan from the Texas Advanced Computing Center describes an upcoming meet up session entitled: Science and Tech Meet Up: Scientists and Geeks Unite!