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

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!

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.