Inside HPC & AI News | High-Performance Computing & Artificial Intelligence

Today D-Wave Systems announced that it has broken the 1000 qubit barrier, developing a processor about double the size of D-Wave’s previous generation.The post D-Wave Breaks 1000 Qubit Quantum Computing Barrier appeared first on insideHPC.

While not every industry is making the move to the Cloud at quite the same rate, the high performance side of the Financial Services industry seems to be ahead of the curve. This year, the ISC 2015 conference will feature a session on HPC & Cloud Computing in Financial Services. To learn more about the latest trends in this area, we caught up with Prof. Juho Kanniainen from Tampere University of Technology and Tuomas Eerola from Techila Technologies.The post Interview: Trends in HPC & Cloud in Financial Services appeared first on insideHPC.

"Supercomputing has reached a level of maturity and capability where many areas of science and engineering are not only advancing rapidly due to computing power, they cannot progress without it. I will illustrate examples from NCSA's Blue Waters supercomputer, and from major data-intensive projects including the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, and give thoughts on what will be needed going forward."The post Ed Seidel Presents: Supercomputing in an Era of Big Data and Big Collaboration appeared first on insideHPC.

Citigroup in Irving, Texas is seeking a Senior HPC Grid Engineer in our Job of the Week.The post Job of the Week: Senior HPC Grid Engineer at Citigroup appeared first on insideHPC.

While we're always on the lookout for HPC news, not everything makes it to the front page. Notable items from this week include big boosts for Apache Spark, Containerization, and Lustre.The post HPC News Bytes for June 19, 2015 appeared first on insideHPC.

"Increasing computational power and advances in algorithms have made it possible to resolve an ever increasing fraction of the scales of atmospheric motion. While it remains inconceivable to resolve all the relevant scales of motion we are currently in the midst of a great leap across a range of scales that have posed some of the greatest challenges to climate science over the past sixty years. This leap is bringing wholly new insights into the structure of the climate system on both ends of the spectrum of atmospheric motions."The post Video: The Great Leap (Computing the Uncomputable Climate System) appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Mellanox announced its ConnectX-4 Lx 10/25/40/50 Gigabit Ethernet adapter, delivering optimal cost-performance and scalable connectivity for Cloud, Web 2.0 and storage platforms. As the first adapter designed to serve as a direct replacement for commonly deployed 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters, the ConnectX-4 Lx allows businesses to migrate to higher-performance technology as their bandwidth requirements increase without demanding an infrastructure overhaul or added operating expense.The post Mellanox Announces ConnectX-4 Lx 25/50 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter appeared first on insideHPC.

Medical applications like CT (computed tomography) scanning and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) require quick, accurate results from processing complex algorithms. So reducing the compute time required is a primary challenge to manufacturers of CT and MRI equipment.The post HPC in Medical Applications appeared first on insideHPC.

Today SGI announced its latest win at the Institute for Solid State Physics (ISSP) of the University of Tokyo. Scheduled to start operation on July 1 of this year, the 2.65 Petaflop SGI ICE XA supercomputer will be used by material science researchers across Japan.The post SGI Ships 2.65 Petaflop ICE XA Supercomputer to ISSP in Japan appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, Karen Vasquez and Albino Bacolla of the University of Texas at Austin describe how TACC supercomputers have helped scientists find a surprising link between cross-shaped pieces of DNA and human cancer.The post Podcast: TACC Supercomputers Power Cancer Discovery appeared first on insideHPC.

Designating the appropriate provider for large MPI applications is critical to taking advantage of all of the compute power available. "A modern HPC system with multiple host cpus and multiple coprocessors such as the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor housed in numerous racks can be optimized for maximum application performance with intelligent thread placement."The post Computing With MPI in Heterogeneous Environments appeared first on insideHPC.

Could there still be a place for Windows in HPC environments? To find out, we caught up with Jan Wender from German IT service provider science+computing, who will deliver a talk on this topic at the ISC High Performance conference next month in Frankfurt, Germany.The post HPC on Windows – Does It Still Make Sense? appeared first on insideHPC.

Today CoolIT Systems announced it has successfully deployed its Rack DCLC liquid cooling solution at the Center for Biological Sequence Analysis (CBS) at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU). The installation addresses DTU’s need to be CO2 neutral in the university’s High Performance Computing facility by replacing traditional air cooling with highly efficient liquid.The post DTU Denmark Chills Computerome with CoolIT Systems appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Univa announced Univa Short Jobs for financial services. As an add-on for Univa Grid Engine, Univa Short Jobs provides the financial services industry a framework to run massive quantities of low latency tasks inside a cluster.The post Announcing Univa Short Jobs for Financial Services appeared first on insideHPC.

The annual IDC Breakfast Briefing is returning to the ISC 2015 conference next month. The meeting takes place at 8:30am on July 14 in the Panorama 3 room at the Frankfurt Messe.The post IDC Breakfast Briefing Coming to ISC 2015 appeared first on insideHPC.

"Blue Waters can tackle a very wide range of challenging tasks, not only from science, but also from engineering demonstrating the feasibility of efficiently solving extreme size real world multi-physics problems on the peta-scale and potentially exa-scale level, and thus adding tremendous value to future engineering simulation and research."The post Industrial Computational Breakthroughs on Blue Waters appeared first on insideHPC.

The "Tiny Titan" parallel computer has become interactive display at the American Museum of Science and Energy at Oak Ridge. Constructed last year at ORNL, Tiny Titan is a nine-node scale-model of Titan designed to make it easier for students to understand how a supercomputer works.The post Tiny Titan Supercomputer Debuts at Oak Ridge Museum appeared first on insideHPC.

Europe and Japan have come to the same conclusion; HPC resources must be shared and not monopolized by the individual owners of the computer systems themselves. And both have set up bodies to coordinate that process of sharing which bear remarkable resemblances to each other.The post Contrasting how Japan and Europe Promote the Use of HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Today ISC Events announced that Prof. Dr. Satoshi Matsuoka of Tokyo Institute of Technology will be the program chairman for ISC 2016. "As the program chair, Dr. Matsuoka will be actively involved in leading the ISC program team to define the ISC 2016 program, especially the focus topics, whilst also working with the steering committee in a multi-year effort to further elevate the value of ISC for the HPC community."The post Satoshi Matsuoka to Chair ISC 2016 Conference Program appeared first on insideHPC.

Over at the NASA Ames Research Center, Michelle Moyer writes that the agency is using supercomputer simulations to explore the interior dynamics of stars and giant exoplanets.The post Supercomputing the Interior Dynamics of Stars and Giant Exoplanets appeared first on insideHPC.

"Early in February, Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) successfully deployed the Mont-Blanc prototype. After three years of intensive research effort, the team installed a two-rack prototype which is now available to the Mont-Blanc consortium partners. This has been a formidable challenge as this is the first time that a large HPC system based on mobile embedded technology has been deployed and made fully operational to a scientific community composed of scientists of six of the most important research centers in Europe."The post Video: Mont-Blanc Prototype One Step Closer to Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.

Today SGI announced the signing of an OEM agreement with Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions. This agreement enables SGI’s world-class service organization to provide support of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to customers across SGI's full product line. This means that customers who choose RHEL can call SGI directly for any RHEL support they may require for their platform.The post SGI Broadens HPC Solutions with Red Hat OEM Agreement appeared first on insideHPC.

"The ability to accurately and efficiently study the absorption spectra of large chemical systems necessitates the development of new algorithms and the use of different architectures. We have developed a highly parallelizable algorithm in order to study excited state properties with ab initio electronic structure theory. This approach has recently been implemented to take advantage of graphical processing units to further improve efficiency."The post GPU Accelerated Quantum Chemistry: A New Method appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the ISC 2015 conference announced the winners of its annual awards, recognizing excellence in the development of energy-efficient supercomputers.The post ISC 2015 Recognizes Research in Energy-Efficient Supercomputing appeared first on insideHPC.

In this episode, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the recent hack of U.S. government employee data. Hackers stole personnel data and Social Security numbers for every federal employee, including military records and veterans’ status information, address, birth date, job and pay history, health insurance, life insurance and pension information; and age, gender, and race data.The post Radio Free HPC Looks at Federal Employee Hack appeared first on insideHPC.

Today SGI announced that PETRONAS in Malaysia has procured an SGI ICE X system to accelerate its research and development in subsurface imaging.The post PETRONAS Procures SGI ICE X for Seismic Imaging appeared first on insideHPC.

"Algorithmic adaptations are required to use anticipated exascale hardware near its potential, since the code base has been engineered to squeeze out flops. Instead, algorithms must now squeeze out synchronizations, memory, and transfers, while extra flops on locally cacheable data represent small costs in time and energy."The post Video: Algorithmic Adaptations to Extreme Scale appeared first on insideHPC.

The Ohio Supercomputer Center is seeking an Education and Training Specialist in our Job of the Week.The post Job of the Week: Education and Training Specialist at OSC appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Bright Computing announced that its OpenStack management software integrates with Ceph to provide OpenStack with highly available and self-healing storage backend for volumes and objects.The post Bright OpenStack Integrates with Ceph appeared first on insideHPC.

"In Deep Learning what we do is try to minimize the amount of hand engineering and get the neural nets to learn, more or less, everything. Instead of programing computers to do particular tasks, you program the computer to know how to learn. And then you can give it any old task, and the more data and the more computation you provide, the better it will get."The post Podcast: Geoffrey Hinton on the Rise of Deep Learning appeared first on insideHPC.

Over at the Nvidia Blog, George Middleton writes that Tesla K80 GPUs powered the winning team from Tsinghua University at the recent ASC15 International Student Cluster Competition.The post Students Win ASC15 Competition with K80 GPUs appeared first on insideHPC.

"The strengths and the limitations of Europe’s supercomputing strategy were laid out at the PRACEDdays15 conference in Dublin at the end of May, with the minds of many delegates concentrated by the announcement in the USA over the course of the past few months of the $425 million ‘Coral’ procurement, intended to develop supercomputers that will leapfrog the international competition and open up the way to an Exascale machine."The post Will Europe be First to Exascale? appeared first on insideHPC.

Over the past year the insideHPC editorial team have put together a series of special reports on a variety of HPC topics. These reports can be read online in an article fashion or you can download these reports from the insideHPC White Paper Library.The post InsideHPC Special Reports appeared first on insideHPC.

"Over the three decades supercomputer throughput rates have increased dramatically from 100s of MFLOPs in 1985 to tens of PFLOPS today, making U.S. universities pre-eminent in the world in computational S&E, which is a tribute to both NSF and Centers’ dedication and leadership. Looking ahead to the impacts of synaptic computing, high-performance computing coupled with data analysis, and cloud computing coupled with the Internet of Things (IOT), the challenges and opportunities in computational S&E in all sectors of U.S. Society is projected to advance dramatically."The post Video: From Megaflop to Petaflop and Beyond appeared first on insideHPC.

While we're always on the lookout for HPC news, not everything makes it to the front page. Global HPC news items from this week include updates from Cray, Dell, DSRC, Oak Ridge, and Sentient Technologies.The post HPC News Bytes for June 11, 2015 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Ciena announced that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is building a private optical network powered by the company's converged packet optical platforms. As part of its ongoing mission to connect researchers to the data and resources needed to advance environmental science, the new 100G network will connect four geographically dispersed facilities in the Washington, D.C. metro areaThe post Ciena Builds Advanced Network for NOAA Environmental Research appeared first on insideHPC.

"Exascale computing will enable combustion simulations in parameter regimes relevant to next-generation combustors burning alternative fuels. The first principles direct numerical simulations (DNS) are needed to provide the underlying science base required to develop vastly more accurate predictive combustion models used ultimately to design fuel efficient, clean burning vehicles, planes, and power plants for electricity generation."The post Video: Towards Exascale Simulation of Turbulent Combustion appeared first on insideHPC.

During last month’s PRACE Days in Dublin – where I enjoyed talks on improvements in codes and methods in areas as diverse as CFD, RTM in geophysics, and in genomics – I saw once again that “hero” performance improvements happen and happen regularly.The post Hero Performance is about the Applications appeared first on insideHPC.

Today IBM announced SuperVessel, a first-of-its-kind initiative that enables business partners, application developers and university students to conduct innovation, development, and learning for the growing OpenPOWER ecosystem.The post SuperVessel Cloud to Boost OpenPOWER Ecosystem appeared first on insideHPC.

"Modern macroeconomic theory has provided many qualitative insights into the functioning of financial and labor markets in our complex modern economies. But determining the quantitative importance of frequently countervailing forces requires much more than the pencil and paper methods used by economic theorists. My talk will describe some new economic ideas brought by economic theory and how efforts to develop computational tools promise to help macroeconomists perform quantitative analyses that can inform policy choices."The post Video: Computational Challenges in Macroeconomics appeared first on insideHPC.

The University of Sydney in Australia has deployed a new Dell supercomputer. Known as "Artemis," the 1512-core system is powered by Intel Haswell processors, 10 Terabytes of DDR4 memory, Mellanox FDR InfiniBand, and 480 Terabytes of Lustre file storage.The post Artemis Cluster Powers Research at University of Sydney appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Idaho National Laboratory (INL) announced that the lab has deployed an SGI ICE X supercomputer to power nuclear reactor simulations. Supplied through SGI's partner ComnetCo, the 511 Teraflop SGI ICE X cluster comprises 611 water-cooled nodes using Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 processors.The post Idaho National Lab Deploys SGI ICE X Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

In this report from PRACEdays15 conference in Dublin last week, Robert Roe from Scientific Computing World looks at the role of HPC in the host country, Ireland.The post PRACEdays15 Puts the Spotlight on Irish HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Satoshi Matsuoka from the Tokyo Institute of Technology discusses Big Data at the NCSA Blue Waters Symposium. "The trend towards convergence is not only strategic however but rather inevitable as the Moore’s law ends such that sustained growth in data capabilities, not compute, will advance the capacity and thus the overall capacities towards accelerating research and ultimately the industry."The post Video: Towards Inevitable Convergence of HPC and Big Data appeared first on insideHPC.