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

"The largest high-redshift cosmological simulation of galaxy formation ever has been recently completed by a group of astrophysicists (Drs. Feng, Di-Matteo, Croft, Bird, and Battaglia) from the U.S. and the U.K. This tour-de-force simulation was performed on the Blue Waters Cray XE/XK system at NCSA and employed 648,000 cores. They utilized approximately 700 billion particles (!) to represent dark matter and ordinary matter and to create virtual galaxies inside the supercomputer. The authors, who represent Carnegie Mellon University, UC Berkeley, Princeton University, and the University of Sussex, have given their simulation the moniker BlueTides."The post BlueTides on Blue Waters: The First Galaxies appeared first on insideHPC.

"SpaceX is designing a new, methane-fueled engine powerful enough to lift the equipment and personnel needed to colonize Mars. A vital aspect of this effort involves the creation of a multi-physics code to accurately model a running rocket engine. The scale and complexity of turbulent non-premixed combustion has so far made it impractical to simulate, even on today's largest supercomputers. We present a novel approach using wavelets on GPUs, capable of capturing physics down to the finest turbulent scales."The post Video: GPUs Power Simulation of the SpaceX Mars Rocket Engine appeared first on insideHPC.

Louisiana State University will host the Beowulf Boot Camp, July 6-10, on the LSU campus. The course offers students and teachers a unique opportunity to work with advanced research technology not usually available in a typical classroom setting.

The post Beowulf Boot Camp Returns to LSU July 6-10 appeared first on insideHPC.

Ian Lumb from Bright Computing will be presenting at the University of Toronto’s annual TechKnowFile event on May 6, 2015.The post OpenStack Talk coming to Toronto TechKnowFile Event May 6 appeared first on insideHPC.

Cyfronet recently celebrated the launch of Poland's fastest supercomputer. As the world's largest deployment of the HP Apollo 8000 platform, the 1.68 Petaflop Prometheus system is powered by 41,472 Intel Haswell cores and 216 Terabytes of memory.The post Cyfronet Launches World’s Largest HP Apollo 8000 Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

In this Software Engineering Radio podcast, Netflix senior performance architect Brendan Gregg discusses systems performance and how the hardware and OS layers affect application behavior.The post Podcast: Brendan Gregg on System Performance Methodologies appeared first on insideHPC.

In this interview, Intel's Alan Gara describes the Aurora system, a 180 Petaflop supercomputer coming to Argonne. "The Aurora system is based on our Omni-Path second generation. This is an Intel interconnect that we've been developing for some time now, and we're really excited about the capabilities that we expect and scalability that we expect it to bring to high performance computing."The post Interview: Intel’s Alan Gara Discusses the 180 Petaflop Aurora Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

In this Talking Machines podcast, Katherine Gorman hosts Ryan Adams from Harvard to preview their new podcast series on machine learning. "Machine learning is changing the questions we can ask of the world around us, here we explore how to ask the best questions and what to do with the answers."The post Talking Machines Podcast Looks at Machine Learning appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Seagate announced that it is combining its Cloud Storage, High Performance Computing, and Electronic Solutions groups to further align the company’s full breadth of enterprise storage hardware capabilities.The post Seagate Combines Cloud, HPC, and Electronic Solutions Groups appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Mootaz Elnozahy from KAUST discusses the arrival of the Shaheen II supercomputer. Some 25 times more powerful than its predecessor, Shaheen II is a Cray XC40 system with DataWarp burst buffer technology, a Cray Sonexion 2000 storage system, and a Cray Tiered Adaptive Storage (TAS) system.The post Video: KAUST Prepares for Shaheen II Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

"Comet is really all about providing high-performance computing to a much larger research community - what we call 'HPC for the 99 percent' - and serving as a gateway to discovery," said SDSC Director Michael Norman, the project's principal investigator. "Comet has been specifically configured to meet the needs of researchers in domains that have not traditionally relied on supercomputers to solve their problems."The post Petascale Comet Supercomputer Enters Early Operations appeared first on insideHPC.

"With the advent of massively parallel computing coprocessors, numerical optimization for deep-learning disciplines is now possible. Complex real-time pattern recognition, for example, that can be used for self driving cars and augmented reality can be developed and high performance achieved with the use of specialized, highly tuned libraries. By just using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) API, very high performance can be attained on hundreds to thousands of Intel Xeon Phi processors."The post Numerical Optimization for Deep Learning appeared first on insideHPC.

Today GCS announced that Professor Dr. Dr. Thomas Lippert has been elected Chairman of the Board of Directors at the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing. Professor Lippert also serves as Director of the Institute for Advanced Simulation at the Forschungszentrum Jülich and Head of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre.The post Thomas Lippert Elected Chairman of Gauss Supercomputing Centre appeared first on insideHPC.

From bio-engineering and climate studies to big data and high frequency trading, HPC is playing an even greater role in today’s society. Without the power of HPC, the complex analysis and data driven decisions that are made as a result would be impossible. Because these super computers and HPC clusters are so powerful, they are expensive to cool, use massive amounts of energy, and can require a great deal of space.The post Benefits of RackCDU D2C for High Performance Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

"We are now working with over 100 channel partners globally. You can get access to Intel Lustre from almost everyone who sells storage or compute worldwide. We're expanding this to include software partners, cloud partners. We want to create the best product possible out of this open source technology, and make it available economically to the channel partner, and enable you to go after these hugely expanding markets of cloud and big data, while not giving up on HPC."The post Video: Growth of Lustre Adoption and Intel’s Continued Commitment appeared first on insideHPC.

In this RCE Podcast, Brock Palen and Jeff Squyres speak with Jonathan Dursi about his recent editorial entitled HPC is dying, and MPI is killing it. The article that spawned a lot of attention in good discussion for our community.The post RCE Podcast: Jonathan Dursi on “HPC is dying, and MPI is killing it” appeared first on insideHPC.

"With the advent of massively parallel computing coprocessors, numerical optimization for deep-learning disciplines is now possible. Complex real-time pattern recognition, for example, that can be used for self driving cars and augmented reality can be developed and high performance achieved with the use of specialized, highly tuned libraries. By just using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) API, very high performance can be attained on hundreds to thousands of Intel Xeon Phi processors."The post Deep-Learning Numerical Optimization appeared first on insideHPC.

MEGWARE in Germany celebrated its 25th anniversary in February. With the company in the midst of a big cluster deployment at CERN, we caught up Jörg Heydemüller from MEGWARE to learn what they have in store for the upcoming ISC High Performance conference in July.The post Interview: MEGWARE Gears up for ISC High Performance appeared first on insideHPC.

Researchers are using the Mira supercomputer at Argonne to accelerate the discovery of new materials for improved biofuel and petroleum production.The post Supercomputing New Materials for Improved Fuel Production appeared first on insideHPC.

"Data caching can provide increased performance when using a mix of high and low performance storage, but traditional replacement algorithms like LRU may evict important data in multi-tenant environments, or in situations where the cache is “cold". By tagging and prioritizing data within the storage system, we can create a more intelligent mechanism that avoids many of the problems inherent to traditional caching. Methods for prioritizing data and passing this information through the filesystem will be discussed, as well as a performance analysis of small file IO in Lustre with cache hinting, and possible future enhancements."The post Video: Intelligent Cache Hinting in Lustre appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Optalysys announced that the company has successfully developed a demonstrable prototype that can process mathematical functions optically in a scaleable, lensless design. According to the company, Optalysys optical processing systems will “turbo-charge” existing computers by performing processor-intensive tasks at much faster rates and with a significant reduction in energy consumption.The post Optalysys Develops Prototype Optical Processing System appeared first on insideHPC.

The NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) is boosting supercomputer capacity to over 3 Petaflops to meet the exploding demands of NASA’s Earth science modeling efforts.The post NASA Triples Discover Supercomputer Capacity for Earth Science appeared first on insideHPC.

A memorial service for William C. Blake will be held on May 30, 2015, at 11:00 a.m. at the First United Methodist Church, 645 Main St. in Melrose, Massachusetts.The post Memorial Service for William C. Blake Set for May 30 appeared first on insideHPC.

Dr. David Rohr from the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS) describes how he is using AMD FirePro to accelerate high energy physics.The post Interview with Dr. David Rohr on AMD FirePro for High Energy Physics appeared first on insideHPC.

At the recent Intel Developers Forum, the company announced that the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Supercomputing Department will be the first Intel Parallel Computing Center in China. The new Intel PCC will work to modernize software code for molecular dynamics models.The post Intel Launches First IPCC Parallel Computing Center in China appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Organization announced that it is teaming up with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to use cloud computing to explore ever-increasing amounts of astronomy data. To kick things off, they just issued a Call for Proposals for AstroCompute in the Cloud, a grant program to accelerate the development of innovative tools and techniques for processing, storing and analyzing the global astronomy community’s vast amounts of astronomic data.The post SKA & AWS Seeking Proposals for AstroCompute in the Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

The Louisiana State University Center for Computation and Technology recently received a large grant from the National Science Foundation to begin updating the coastal modeling system known as Advanced Circulation, or ADCIRC. The project, known as STORM, began in October of 2014 and work on the program will continue for four more years.The post Supercomputing Tidal Models with the STORM Project at LSU appeared first on insideHPC.

"In this talk, Seagate presents details on its efforts and achievements around improving Hadoop performance on Lustre including a summary on why and how HDFS and Lustre are different and how those differences affect Hadoop performance on Lustre compared to HDFS, Hadoop ecosystem benchmarks and best practices on HDFS and Lustre, Seagate’s open-source efforts to enhance performance of Lustre within “diskless” compute nodes involving core Hadoop source code modification (and the unexpected results), and general takeaways ways on running Hadoop on Lustre more rapidly."The post Video: Understanding Hadoop Performance on Lustre appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Penguin Computing announced the Arctica 4804ip switch and a collaboration with Cumulus Networks.The post Penguin Computing Extends Open Networking with Artica Switches appeared first on insideHPC.

The Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program is now accepting proposals for high-impact, computationally intensive research campaigns.The post INCITE Seeking Proposals for U.S. Leadership Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from LUG 2015 in Denver, James Simmons from ORNL presents: Lustre + Linux - Putting the House in Order. "In the last year great strides have been made to sync up the lustre Intel branch to what is upstream. We present what that current state is as well as what is left for the intel branch to bring this to completion."The post Video: Lustre + Linux – Putting the House in Order appeared first on insideHPC.

"For a period of time, it didn't look like flash drives were going to decrease in price very much. Flash cell technology is limited to around 20nm because of cost and complexity considerations, but manufacturers have found ways around the limitation. Rather than decrease the features size, they now store more bits per cell (TLC) and have started to create 3D flash chips. This combination, plus the growth in flash storage sales, has driven down the price per gigabyte."The post Jeff Layton on How 3D Flash is Changing the Market appeared first on insideHPC.

"Monitoring a large Lustre site, running multiple generations of Lustre filesystems can be a challenge. Some equipment offer vendor specific monitoring interfaces while others, built on open source Lustre, have minimal monitoring capabilities. This talk will report on our operational experience using a homegrown python module to collect data from each filesystem. We will discuss in detail how the data is visualized centrally in Splunk and cross-referenced with users workload to analyze and troubleshoot our environment."The post Video: Monitoring a Heterogeneous Lustre Environment with Splunk appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Niall Wilson describes how ICHEC delivers top-quality technology services and support to universities and enterprises. "Based on the solution’s superior price performance, ICHEC deployed Fionn, a supercomputer built on SGI ICE X hardware running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. On implementing Fionn, ICHEC was funded by Intel to work on its new many-core technology as an official Intel Parallel Computing Center."The post SGI Powers Fionn Supercomputer at ICHEC in Ireland appeared first on insideHPC.

NVlink will be the backbone of 150 Petaflop Coral supercomputers coming to ORNL and LLNL. As the world’s first high-speed GPU interconnect, NVLink will let data move between GPUs and CPUs 5-12 times faster than possible today.The post Steve Oberlin on How NVLink will Power Coral Supercomputers appeared first on insideHPC.