High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

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.)

"As long as setting up an energy inefficient datacentre is an economically viable option for IT equipment owners, it is unlikely that substantial progress will be made towards reversing a dangerous trend. While the issue is a planetary one, now is a good time for Europe to take it in its own hands and show the planet the way towards a more responsible and energy conscious future for the IT industry and High Performance Computing."

This is the third article in a series designed to address the needs of government and business or collaborative and secure information sharing within a Multilevel Security (MLS) framework. Learn the key elements of a workable Multilevel Security framework.

CHPC Communications Manager Noxolo Moyake describes how the South African Center for High Performance Computing is fostering the use of supercomputing in the region. "CHPC will be a critical resource for tackling the big scientific challenges of the continent, such as the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), climate research, and data-intensive applications in the big data regime."

"Geoscientists need tools to allow them to rapidly develop algorithms that run fast on accelerators, while at the same time deliver portability and improve productivity. They demand a single source code, with no need to maintain multiple code paths, using a high-level approach that presents a low learning curve. OpenACC provides directives-based approaches to rapidly accelerating applications for GPUs and other parallel architectures. This talk will serve as an introduction to programming with OpenACC 2.0."

In this video from the University of Houston CACDS HPC Workshop, Duncan Poole from the OpenACC Standards Group moderates a panel discussion on OpenACC.

Because the requirements in terms of energy, emissions, and fuel efficiency have not been globally standardized, vehicle manufacturers are making use of increasingly sophisticated simulation to get new vehicles developed as quickly and cheaply as possible while making sure their newest models meet these standards.

In this podcast, Computer scientist Doug Jennewein discusses how the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) has enhanced his work as USD's research computing manager.

"Does your archive strategy match up with today's storage economics? Henry contends that this is really worth a look as the notion that "write once to tape and forget" is a recipe for disaster. In an era where this WGBH archive could easily fit on 38 hard drives, does migration to tape still make sense?"

Volvo is pushing the boundaries of NVH (noise, vibration and harshness) simulation in order to improve the quality of new automobiles.

"In 2015, the HPCC will begin plans to acquire a new machine that will singularly increase our available compute power at MSU. With MSU's continuing commitment to iCER, the HPCC, the creation of a new department focused on the computational sciences, and a new Datacenter on the horizon, the future of HPC at MSU is bright."

The SC15 theme is ‘HPC Transforms’ and we’re looking to do as much as we can so that our student attendees’ ideas about school and careers are also transformed,” said Jeanine Cook, Student Program Chair. “In my 10 years as a professor, I saw many times how just the right opportunity or word of encouragement could have a powerful effect on a student’s career choice and development. At SC15, we want to provide that kind of inspiration to as many students as possible.”

Today Pointwise announced the latest release of its computational fluid dynamics (CFD) meshing software featuring direct integration with overset grid assembly (OGA) software.

"The UberCloud Community brings together over 3,000 participants to pave the way for the Technical Computing Cloud. UberCloud Experiment teams explore the end-to-end process of accessing remote computing resources in HPC centers and in the Cloud to study and overcome the potential roadblocks for industry applications such as CAE, Bio and Life Sciences."

"An increasing number of GPU enabled applications are available to the HPC community. The key issues are understanding the enhanced application performance and corresponding increase in power consumption due to GPUs. In most cases these depend on the CPU to GPU ratio and the way GPUs and connected to CPUs. Latest compute node designs allow flexibility to select the number of GPUs and how they are connected CPUs. This offers users a unique opportunity to select the a suitable operating point according to their application characteristics. This talk is about studying the performance vs. power tradeoff on a few common HPC applications."

"Through the advent of cinema, video games, in-vehicle Infotainment and virtual reality, the industry has created a roadmap for the future. A true quality upgrade of the overall audience experience is on-going. HPCmusic is here to keep music and sound on par with those innovations and exceed the expectations of the audience. We introduce the Aural Computing Engine to bring Digital Audio 2.0 to life."

"Over the last five years HPC performance growth has been slowing measurably, and in this presentation several reasons for this slowdown will be analyzed. To reach usable exascale performance over the next decade, some fundamental changes will have to occur in HPC systems architecture. In particular, a transition from a compute centric to a data movement centric point of view needs to be considered. Alternatives including quantum and neuromorphic computing have also been considered. The prospects of these technologies for post-Moore’s Law supercomputing will be explored."

This week ThinkParQ launched BeeGFS on Demand parallel storage offering. Dubbed BeeOND, the new offering allows users with HPC clusters to generate job-dedicated parallel filesystem instances on demand.

"As cloud resources increase, users should be cognizant of the HPC platforms available in the cloud. Scalable and customizable resources are readily available, however, security, ease of use, and full integration of simulation software are important factors to consider when choosing to run analyses remotely. Cloud resources designed for engineering and science CAE simulations allow users to leverage high performance computing to fully explore the design space and develop innovative products. In this presentation, Joris will discuss the cloud HPC market trends, CAE simulations using cloud HPC, cloud software integration for CAE use, security around HPC cloud environments, data management and collaboration."

"Alongside the increasingly high demands of streaming bandwidth in HPC storage solutions, there is a growing need for higher levels of metadata performance for various applications and workloads. The Lustre parallel file system provides a distributed namespace, divided across multiple metadata servers, that allows the metadata throughput to scale with increasing servers. This presentation addresses meeting the increasing requirements for high performance metadata in Lustre environments with the ultimate aim of reducing the time to results and improving overall efficiency."

Å koda Auto, was in need of scalable, high performance computing systems to perform complex product performance and safety analysis. In this case study we learn how they used HPC to rapidly develop more innovative vehicles with excellent value-to-power ratios.

"Following up on the “Streamlining Research Computing Infrastructure: A Small School’s Perspective”, this talk will discuss how a researcher’s priority in a shared HPC cluster is computed based on her/his usage pattern as well as productivity. Coupled with transparent functionality and reporting scheme at nearly every level, this merit based priority scheme has enabled consistently high usage (85+%) throughout 20 months of operation and has helped researchers at Michigan Technological University to produce 30+ publications from approximately 30 different projects."

In this video, former SC Conference Student Volunteer Christine Harvey describes how volunteering led to her current career at Mitre Corporation.

"As HPC systems and solutions become more focused on specific workloads, the need to address system level power, cooling, and power management while maintaining usability remains. This presentation will review recent developments within several of SGI’s platforms. These developments enable socially responsible computing and better use of power and cooling."

"PayPal is a world-class leader in online and offline payment innovations. This tradition continues by combining enterprise and HPC architectures to deliver integrated solutions to large scale compute and analytics problems. This presentation will discuss the need for HPC, the growth and application of HPC and discuss innovative work that will radically change the future of real time analytics."

The UK Met Office is rolling out the Allinea DDT debugger on its newest supercomputers. The debugging tool will be used to help the scientists and developers to develop their widely used forecasting software for the new Cray XC40 systems.