High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

In this video, Intel's James Reinders and Vadim Karpusenko from Colfax International discuss the future of parallel programming and Intel MIC architecture products.

Sign up your team today! "The Student Cluster Competition is a high energy event featuring young supercomputing talent from around the world competing to build and operate powerful cluster computers. Created as an opportunity to showcase student expertise in a friendly yet spirited competition, the Student Cluster Competition aims to introduce the next generation of students to the high-performance computing community. Over the last couple of years, the competition has drawn teams from around the world, including Australia, Canada, China, Costa Rica, Germany, Russia, Taiwan and the United States."

KAUST in Saudi Arabia is seeking a Manager of HPC in our Job of the Week.

IDC has published the agenda for their next HPC User Forum. The event will take place April 13-15 in Norfolk, VA. "Don't miss the chance to hear top experts on these high-innovation, high-growth areas of the HPC market. You'll also hear about government initiatives in the works for future-generation supercomputers."

In this podcast from the Swinburne University of Technology Astrophysics and Supercomputing series, Katherine Mack from the University of Melbourne presents: A Tour of the Universe and Selected Cosmic Mysteries.

The ClusterStor SDA is built on Seagate’s successful ClusterStor family of high performance storage solutions for HPC and Big Data, providing unmatched file system performance, optimized productivity and the HPC industry’s highest levels of efficiency, reliability, availability and serviceability. Taking full advantage of the Lustre file system, Seagate ClusterStor is designed for massive scale-out performance and capacity, with the ability to support from hundreds to tens-of-thousands of client compute nodes delivering data intensive workload throughput from several GB/sec to over 1TB/sec.

In this video, Bill Kramer from NCSA describes the ground-breaking science enabled by the Blue Waters supercomputer.

For about 40 years, developers and users could count on an increase in CPU performance that would make applications run faster. However, with the slowdown in constant clock rate increases being replaced by additional core counts and even more new instructions, rethinking algorithms, their use of the latest APIs, and using the latest compilers has become critical for the next generation of application performance enhancements.

In this video from SC14, Arni Mittal and Ethan Oayne from the John Monash Science School in Melbourne embark on a journey to New Orleans to uncover the world of supercomputing.

Today GCS in Germany announced that their new Hornet supercomputer at HLRS is ready for extreme-scale computing challenges. "To test its mettle, Hornet successfully completed six "XXL-projects" from computationally demanding scientific fields such as planetary research, climatology, environmental chemistry, and aerospace. All six XXL Projects utilized all of Hornet’s available 94,646 compute cores--results that more than satisfied the HLRS HPC experts and scientific users."

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?