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

"The second generation of SDSC’s Data Oasis Lustre storage is coming online to support Comet, a new XSEDE cluster targeted at the long tail of science. The servers have been designed with Lustre on ZFS in mind, and also update the network to use bonded 40GbE interfaces. The raw storage totals 7.7 PB and are again based on commodity hardware provided by Aeon Computing, maintaining our focus on cost."The post Video: SDSC’s Data Oasis Gen II: ZFS, 40GbE, and Replication appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the University of Oxford unveiled its new Arcus Phase B cluster. Integrated by OCF in the UK, the 5000 core Lenovo cluster will support research across all four Divisions at the University; Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences; Medical Sciences; Social Sciences; and Humanities.The post OCF Deploys Lenovo Arcus Cluster at University of Oxford appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from LUG 2015 in Denver, Jason Goodman from Cray presents: Cray’s Storage History and Outlook – Lustre+. "As a leader in open systems and parallel file systems, Cray builds on open source Lustre to unlock any industry-standard x86 Linux compute cluster using InfiniBand or 10/40 GbE utilizing proven Cray storage architectures."The post Video: Cray’s Storage History and Outlook – Lustre+ appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from LUG 2015, Charlie Carroll from Cray presents an OpenSFS update. "An important new trend is Lustre file system usage in the enterprise environment. Through community input and new or existing working groups, OpenSFS is moving to support this trend as required by the community."The post Video: OpenSFS Update appeared first on insideHPC.

Recently, insideHPC featured an interview with IBM's Jay Muelhoefer on the topic of software defined infrastructure. To learn more about the storage sign of that coin, we caught up with Jim Gutowski and Scott Fadden from IBM.The post Interview: Software Defined Storage for Bridging HPC and Big Data Analytics appeared first on insideHPC.

Full paper submissions for SC15 Technical Papers are due by Friday, April 17.The post Final SC15 Technical Papers due Friday, April 17 appeared first on insideHPC.

Lustre Development UpdateThe post Video: Lustre Development Update from LUG 2015 appeared first on insideHPC.

The clock is ticking down for teams to submit their applications for the SC15 Student Cluster Competition. The deadline to apply for a spot in this year’s competition is Friday, April 17.The post Hurry! Enter SC15 Student Cluster Competition by April 17 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from LUG 2015, Hugo Falter presents an EOFS Update. "The EOFS (European Open File System) was founded in 2010 too promote the establishment and adoption of open source parallel file systems, sustain and enhance its quality, capabilities and functionality and ensure that specific requirements of European organizations, institutions and companies are upheld."The post Video: EOFS Update from LUG 2015 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Teracala announced that San Diego State University is using a Terascala-powered HPC storage solution to study the DNA of viruses and bacteria.The post Terascala Powers Bioinformatics at SDSU appeared first on insideHPC.

The Open Compute Project is a way for organization to increase computing power while lowering associated costs with hyper-scale computing. This article is the 4th in a series from insideHPC that showcases the benefits of open computing to specific industries.The post Open Computing Benefits Many Industry Segments appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Steve Simms from Indiana University kicks off LUG 2015 with a talk on Lustre 101. "Lustre is a mature and stable file system that through its developers has consistently been able to respond to the needs of organizations that require high performance throughput and expanding capacity."The post Video: Steve Simms Teaches Lustre 101 at LUG 2015 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the 180 Aurora supercomputer coming to Argonne in 2018. "As the third of three Coral supercomputer procurements, the deal will comprise an 8.5 Petaflop “Theta” system based on Knights Landing in 2016 and a much larger 180 Petaflop “Aurora” supercomputer in 2018. Intel will be the prime contractor on the deal, with sub-contractor Cray building the actual supercomputers."The post Radio Free HPC Looks at the Aurora Supercomputer Coming to Argonne in 2018 appeared first on insideHPC.

Intel has been banned by the US Government from selling any more Xeon processors for use in the world's fastest supercomputer, the Tiahane-2 'Milky Way' machine at the Guangzhou Supercomputer Centre in China.The post Feds Restrict Intel Processors in China appeared first on insideHPC.

According to the latest edition of the local Top50 list of the most powerful supercomputers in Russia and CIS region, RSC has increased its share by 80%.The post RSC Leads Russian Supercomputer Market appeared first on insideHPC.

"The selection of Intel to deliver the Aurora supercomputer is validation of our unique position to lead a new era in HPC,” said Raj Hazra, vice president, Data Center Group and general manager, Technical Computing Group at Intel. “Intel’s HPC scalable system framework enables balanced, scalable and efficient systems while extending the ecosystem’s decades of software investment to future generations. We look forward to the numerous scientific discoveries and the far-reaching impacts on society that Aurora will enable.”The post Video: How Aurora Will Usher in a New Era for HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

In this Tech Shift podcast, Michael Papka and Susan Coghlan from Argonne National Laboratory discuss the 180 Petaflop Aurora supercomputer scheduled for deployment in 2018.The post Podcast: Michael Papka and Susan Coghlan on the 180 Petaflop Aurora Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

"Pharmacokinetic (PK) and Pharmacodynamic(PD) parameters determine the develop-ability of a drug candidate and estimation of them are time consuming and there is an urgent need for time efficient approaches. In the present talk, we showcase the parallel implementation of Grid search method on Xeon Phi using stepwise optimization techniques as a promising approach for the robust estimation of PK-PD parameters. The solution described herein, is of great importance in decision making in Pharmaceutical Industry."The post Parallel Implementation of PK-PD Parameter Estimation on Intel Xeon Phi appeared first on insideHPC.

A number of challenges exist for both the wider adoption of technologies that can impede personalized medicine workflows and the implementation of such systems. Learn more on how companies like Dell and Intel are delivering complete integrated genomic processing infrastructure.The post HPC Helps Solve Challenges of Personalized Medicine appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Ohio Supercomputer Center unveiled their new 144 Teraflop Ruby supercomputer. Powered by Intel Xeon Phi, the 144 Teraflop HP system is named after Cleveland-born activist Ruby Dee.The post New OSC Supercomputer Named After Civil Rights Activist Ruby Dee appeared first on insideHPC.

This morning Intel and the U.S. Department of Energy announced a $200 million supercomputing investment coming to Argonne National Laboratory. As the third of three Coral supercomputer procurements, the deal will comprise an 8.5 Petaflop "Theta" system based on Knights Landing in 2016 and a much larger 180 Petaflop "Aurora" supercomputer in 2018. Intel will be the prime contractor on the deal, with sub-contractor Cray building the actual supercomputers.The post A Closer Look at Intel’s Coral Supercomputers Coming to Argonne appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Intel announced that the company will deliver two next-generation supercomputers to Argonne National Laboratory. "The contract is part of the DOE’s multimillion dollar initiative to build state-of-the-art supercomputers at Argonne, Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge National Laboratories that will be five to seven times more powerful than today’s top supercomputers."The post Intel to Deliver Nation’s Most Powerful Supercomputer at Argonne appeared first on insideHPC.

In many large threaded applications, synchronizing all of the threads by use of barriers can results in significant wasted processing time. If the application lends itself, loosely synchronous barriers instead of strictly synchronous barriers should be used and can recover lost time.The post Phasing Barriers for Performance appeared first on insideHPC.

"Metadata, or data about data, lets scientists find the valuable data they are looking for. Metadata especially helps find value in data that’s been created by others, no matter when or where. Without rich metadata, scientists increasingly risk spending their time just looking for data, or worse, losing it – instead of exploiting that data for analysis and discovery."The post Keeping Up with the Growth of Scientific Data appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video from the 2015 OFS Developer's Workshop, Dave Dunning from Intel presents: Fabrics - Why We Love Them and Why We Hate Them.The post Video: Fabrics – Why We Love Them and Why We Hate Them appeared first on insideHPC.

The SGI UV system allows computational biologists to take a different, far more effective approach to dealing with the huge data sets generated by contemporary Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) and analytic applications.The post SGI Solutions for Next Generation Sequencing appeared first on insideHPC.

Staff members at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are evaluating how supercomputers can be cooled more efficiently.The post Optimizing Chilled Water Systems at ORNL appeared first on insideHPC.

"IBM Spectrum Scale is a proven, scalable, high-performance data and file management solution (based upon IBM General Parallel File System or GPFS, also formerly known as code name Elastic Storage). IBM Spectrum Scale provides world-class storage management with extreme scalability, flash accelerated performance, and automatic policy-based storage tiering from flash through disk to tape. IBM Spectrum Scale reduces storage costs up to 90% while improving security and management efficiency in cloud, big data & analytics environments."The post Slidecast: Bridging HPC and Big Data Analytics with Software Defined Storage appeared first on insideHPC.

This week NCSA celebrated two years of Blue Waters supercomputing in an event convened by U.S. Senator Mark Kirk. The powerful Cray supercomputer is used by scientists and engineers across the country to tackle challenging research for the benefit of science and society.The post Celebrating Two Years of Blue Waters Supercomputing at NCSA appeared first on insideHPC.

Google’s investment in artificial intelligence does more than just create better search results; it allows Google’s engineers to make constant algorithm changes right under our noses.The post Radio Free HPC on the Silence of the Google appeared first on insideHPC.

"This talk will give an overview of training and graduate education initiatives in Sweden in the eScience and high performance computing areas and show why these are important but also different. Lessons learned from giving courses at six super computer centers and current and future courses will be discussed."The post Video: eScience Training and Education in Sweden appeared first on insideHPC.

"To achieve good scalability performance on the HPC scientific applications typically involves good understanding of the workload though performing profile analysis, and comparing behaviors of using different hardware which pinpoint bottlenecks in different areas of the HPC cluster. In this session, a selection of HPC applications will be shown to demonstrate various methods of profiling and analysis to determine the bottleneck, and the effectiveness of the tuning to improve on the application performance."The post Video: Applications Performance Optimizations – Best Practices appeared first on insideHPC.

The Open Compute Project partners with leading CPU vendors such as Intel, AMD and ARM-based vendors to create reference designs that may be used by board and system vendors. These designs are bare-bones systems, with expansion options designed in for other types of I/O and storage. The reference design from Intel (REF) is 6.5 inches wide and 20 inches deep. These dimensions allow for three servers to be placed side by side in a newly designed Open Compute rack, increasing density.The post Open Compute Solutions appeared first on insideHPC.

"Computers used as datacenter servers have usage patterns that differ substantially from those of desktop or laptop computers. We discuss four key differences in usage and their first-order implications for designing computers that are particularly well-suited as servers: data movement, thousands of transactions per second, program isolation, and measurement underpinnings. Maintaining high-bandwidth data movement requires coordinated design decisions throughout the memory system, instruction-issue system, and even instruction set."The post Video: Datacenter Computers – Modern Challenges in CPU Design appeared first on insideHPC.

Another year has passed and, with it, more growth for Lustre and the community around it. This year, as well as welcoming many new HPC sites to the community, we also delight in the evidence of activity from non-traditional Lustre sites and users.The post The State of the Lustre Community appeared first on insideHPC.

Over at Live Science, Shannon Hall writes that new global map of the world's oceans is so visually stunning that it could be mistaken for art. Computed on LANL supercomputers, the simulation is a component of the DOE's Accelerated Climate Model for Energy (ACME), which is expected to be the most complete climate and Earth system model once it is finished.The post Supercomputing Global Ocean Temperatures with ACME appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Vadim Karpusenko from Colfax International describes the software tools for developing applications for Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. The session begins with software that is necessary to boot coprocessors and to run pre-compiled executables on them.The post Video: Software Tools for Intel Xeon Phi Co-processors appeared first on insideHPC.

"Cloud computing provides pay-per-use access to scalable compute resources. However, IaaS and HPC-on-demand offerings are still often complex. Instead, the CloudBroker Platform and AppCenter create a SaaS layer on top of the compute resources. In the CloudSME EU project, this is used to develop a simulation platform for manufacturing and engineering."The post Video: CloudBroker – Bringing HPC to the Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

The University of Vermont is seeking an HPC Linux Systems Administrator in our Job of the Week.The post Job of the Week: HPC Linux Systems Administrator at University of Vermont appeared first on insideHPC.

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are contributing to the BigNeuron project, a community effort to define and advance the state of the art of single neuron reconstruction and analysis and create a common platform for analyzing 3D neuronal structure.The post LBNL to Help Create Standard 3D Neuron Model appeared first on insideHPC.

Besides the obvious benefits to individuals, who will receive more targeted diagnosis and treatment, organizations that implement or contribute to personalized medicine can expect a number of benefits.The post Benefits HPC Brings to Genomics appeared first on insideHPC.