High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

Today WekaIO announced that The Business Intelligence Group has named Weka a winner in its Artificial Intelligence Excellence Awards program. “the WekaFS file system can deliver 80 GB/sec of bandwidth to a single GPU server, scale to Exabytes in a single namespace, and support an entire pipeline for edge-to-core-to-cloud workflows. The system also delivers operational agility with versioning, explainability, and reproducibility along with governance and compliance with in-line encryption and data protection."The post WekaIO Receives Artificial Intelligence Excellence Award appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Intel introduced the oneAPI DevCloud to make it easier and more productive for coders currently working from home. "Developing code at home requires access to compute cycles, the latest software development tools, access across diverse hardware architectures—CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs, and expanded storage capabilities. Through the new oneAPI DevCloud, Intel aims to provide extended access, capacity and support for oneAPI developers working from home."The post New Intel oneAPI DevCloud makes it easier for coders working from home appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Wolfgang Gentzsch from the UberCloud describes how engineers can perform work from home in the same way they do at their offices, while maintaining or even increasing productivity. "In our short post, here, we are looking at how product development engineers – e.g. in manufacturing – are able to perform the same work they are used to perform at their office, maintaining (or even increasing) their productivity while working from home."The post Manufacturing Engineers can turn to Cloud HPC for Work from Home appeared first on insideHPC.

Backed by five high performance computing (HPC) clusters and years of expertise in vaccine and countermeasure development, a COVID-19 response team of LLNL researchers from various disciplines has used modeling & simulation, along with machine learning, to identify about 20 initial, yet promising, antibody designs from a nearly infinite set of potentials and to examine millions of small molecules that could have anti-viral properties. The candidates will need to be synthesized and experimentally tested — which Lab researchers cautioned could take time — but progress is being made.The post LLNL Researchers aid COVID-19 response in anti-viral research appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Rigetti Computing announced the company has been awarded up to $8.6 million from DARPA to develop a full-stack system with proven quantum advantage for solving real world problems. “We believe strongly in an integrated hardware and software approach, which is why we’re bringing together the scalable Rigetti chip architecture with the algorithm design and optimization techniques pioneered by the NASA-USRA team.”The post DARPA Grant to Foster Practical Quantum Computing with Rigetti appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Dave Frattura from Dell Technologies writes that the company is helping customers simplify and drive data science and AI initiatives that can deliver valuable insights, automation and intelligence to fuel innovation across their IT landscape — from edge locations to core data center and public clouds. "Dell has developed new solutions to help data scientists and developers get their AI applications and projects up and running without delay."The post New AI Solutions from Dell Technologies appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, our friends over at Inspur write that for new workloads that are highly compute intensive, accelerators are often required. Accelerators can speed up the computation and allow for AI and ML algorithms to be used in real time. Inspur is a leading supplier of solutions for HPC and AI/ML workloads.The post Fast Track your AI Workflows appeared first on insideHPC.

The UK government has backed their leading clinicians and scientists this week with new resources to map how COVID-19 spreads and evolves using whole-genome sequencing. Through a £20 million investment, the consortium will look for breakthroughs that help the UK respond to this and future pandemics, and save lives. "The government’s investment is well-timed to accelerate the pace of viral genome sequence production and ensure this information is openly available to epidemiologists and virologists worldwide. This will provide an unprecedented real-time view of COVID-19 virus evolution.”The post University of Birmingham joins COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium appeared first on insideHPC.

Researchers from Intel and Ayar Labs working on PIPES have successfully replaced the traditional electrical input/output (I/O) of a state-of-the-art field programmable gate array (FPGA) with efficient optical signaling interfaces. The demonstration leverages an optical interface developed by Ayar Labs called TeraPHY, an optical I/O chiplet that replaces electrical serializer/deserializer (SERDES) chiplets. "FPGAs with photonic interfaces will have broad impact, improving high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, large-scale emulation, and DoD-specific capabilities such as advanced radars."The post Ayar Labs, DARPA and Intel Replace Electronic I/O with Efficient Optical Signaling appeared first on insideHPC.

Student teams are encouraged to apply for the 2020 APAC HPC-AI Competition. Continuing the success of the previous competitions, student teams will square off against international teams to produce solutions and applications in the High-Performance Computing and Artificial Intelligence domains. "We hope that the HPC-AI training established among our young aspiring programmers can help us tackle global threats such as COVID-19 and accelerate an improved response to future pandemics."The post Student Teams Encouraged to Join the 3rd APAC HPC-AI Competition appeared first on insideHPC.

A new whitepaper from NEC X delves into the world of unstructured data and explores how vector processors and their optimization software can help solve the challenges of wrangling the ever-growing volumes of data generated globally. "In short, vector processing with SX-Aurora TSUBASA will play a key role in changing the way big data is handled while stripping away the barriers to achieving even higher performance in the future."The post The Role of Middleware in Optimizing Vector Processing appeared first on insideHPC.

Scientists are preparing a massive computer model of the coronavirus that they expect will give insight into how it infects in the body. They've taken the first steps, testing the first parts of the model and optimizing code on the Frontera supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of UT Austin. The knowledge gained from the full model can help researchers design new drugs and vaccines to combat the coronavirus.The post Podcast: Supercomputing the Coronavirus on Frontera appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, technicians install the Sawtooth supercomputer at Idaho National Laboratory. "Named after a central Idaho mountain range, Sawtooth arrived in December and will be available to users soon. The $19.2 million system ranks #37 on the 2019 Top500 fastest supercomputers in the world. That is the highest ranking reached by an INL supercomputer. Of 102 new systems added to the list in the past six months, only three were faster than Sawtooth."The post Timelapse Video: Sawtooth Supercomputer Assembly appeared first on insideHPC.

The European PRACE initiative has released a list of partner activities and initiatives to help conbat COVID-19. While medical professionals are working around the clock to help those affected, PRACE partners, HPC centres, and research infrastructures are doing their bit by opening up their facilities for urgent/priority access to the HPC systems and other resources to support the research to combat the coronavirus.The post European HPC ecosystem supports the fight against COVID-19 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Jaan Mannik from One Stop Systems gives a tour of the company's virtual booth at GTC Digital. "OSS is the leader in specialized high-performance computers for vertical markets requiring the fastest processing and storage on the planet. These technology-hungry applications include AI (artificial intelligence), deep learning, seismic exploration, financial modeling, media and entertainment, security and defense. Watch the video and to learn about how to enter to win an RTX4000 GPU!"The post Video: OSS Showcases AI on Fly at GTC Digital appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Supermicro announced the industry’s broadest portfolio of validated NGC-Ready systems optimized to accelerate AI and deep learning applications. Supermicro is highlighting many of these systems today at the Supermicro GPU Live Forum in conjunction with NVIDIA GTC Digital. “With support for fast networking and storage, as well as NVIDIA GPUs, our Supermicro NGC-Ready systems are the most scalable and reliable servers to support AI. Customers can run their AI infrastructure with the highest ROI.”The post Supermicro Accelerates AI and Deep Learning with NGC-Ready Servers appeared first on insideHPC.

The 13th Workshop on Resiliency in High Performance Computing has issued its Call for Papers. The event takes place August 24 - 28 in Warsaw, Poland in conjunction with Euro-Par 2020. "Resilience is a critical challenge as high performance computing (HPC) systems continue to increase component counts, individual component reliability decreases (such as due to shrinking process technology and near-threshold voltage (NTV) operation), hardware complexity increases (such as due to heterogeneous computing) and software complexity increases (such as due to complex data- and workflows, real-time requirements and integration of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies with traditional applications)."The post Call for Papers: Workshop on Resiliency in High Performance Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

Steve Scott from HPE gave this talk at the Rice Oil & Gas Conference. "With the announcement of multiple exascale systems, we’re now entering the Exascale Era, marked by several important trends. This talk provides an overview of the Cray Shasta system architecture, which was motivated by these trends, and designed for this new heterogeneous, data-driven world."The post Video: The Cray Shasta Architecture for the Exascale Era appeared first on insideHPC.

The IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center at VSB – Technical University of Ostrava has offered its users from academic institutions priority access to its computational resources to solve problems regarding COVID-19 disease research. "Today, we have called on our users to apply for our computational resources provided that they are currently involved in research addressing the COVID-19 disease," said Vit Vondrak, IT4Innovations Managing Director. "Projects to be supported do not necessarily need to be focused only on drug design but could include development of nanomaterials or pandemic spread modeling among others.”The post Czech supercomputers at IT4Innovations ready to combat coronavirus appeared first on insideHPC.

Polarisqb has partnered with Fujitsu to create a ground-breaking drug discovery platform combining quantum-inspired technology, machine learning, hybrid quantum mechanics and molecular mechanics simulations (QM/MM). This new platform enables significantly faster, more cost-effective discovery of novel lead molecules to develop new drugs. Polarisqb and Fujitsu have begun a drug discovery project targeting Dengue Fever which has no approved treatments.The post PolarisQB and Fujitsu Launch Drug Discovery Platform appeared first on insideHPC.

GTC Digital begins this week as virtual event with free registration. While the annual GPU Technology Conference typically packs hundreds of hours of talks, presentations and conversations into a five-day event in San Jose, NVIDIA's goal with GTC Digital is to bring some of the best aspects of this event to a global audience, and make it accessible for months. "Apart from the instructor-led, hands-on workshops and training sessions, which require a nominal fee, we’re delighted to bring this content to the global community at no cost. And we’ve incorporated new platforms to facilitate interaction and engagement."The post GTC Digital Kicks off Tuesday with Free Registration appeared first on insideHPC.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is enlisting AiMOS, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, in the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic. Rensselaer is reaching out to the research community, including government entities, universities, and industry, to offer access to AiMOS in support of research related to the new coronavirus disease. “This effort requires expertise, collaboration, and the ability to process incredible amounts of data, and Rensselaer is offering all three at this critical time. In particular, the ability to model at very large scales requires the unique capabilities of AiMOS.”The post AiMOS Supercomputer at Rensselaer to Battle COVID-19 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this keynote talk from the 2020 HiPEAC conference, Alesssandro Cremonesi from STMicroelectronics describes how artificial intelligence (AI) is the central nervous system of an increasingly connected world. He sets out both the benefits and potential pitfalls of AI, before arguing that AI now has to move beyond performance to efficiency in order to be sustainable. "So far, AI developments have been focused on performances regardless of the computational power needed, reaching in some applications performances better than the human ones. Now it is time to focus on efficient computation."The post Efficient AI Computing for the Planet appeared first on insideHPC.

In this new whitepaper from our friends over at Panasas, we take a look at whether your storage infrastructure is ready for the robust requirements in support of AI workloads. AI promises to not only create entirely new industries, but it will also fundamentally change the way organizations large and small conduct business. IT planners need to start revising their storage infrastructure now to prepare the organization for the coming AI wave.The post Is Your Storage Infrastructure Ready for the Coming AI Wave? appeared first on insideHPC.

Today, IBM, in collaboration with the DOE, launched the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium. "The consortium bring together an unprecedented amount of supercomputing power—16 systems with more than 330 petaflops, 775,000 CPU cores, 34,000 GPUs, and counting—to help researchers everywhere tackle this global challenge. These high-performance computing systems allow researchers to run very large numbers of calculations in epidemiology, bioinformatics, and molecular modeling in hours or days, not weeks, months or years."The post IBM & DOE Launch COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the organizers of Supercomputing Frontiers Europe 2020 announced that it has waived registration for their virtual conference this week. "Over twenty outstanding keynote and invited speakers at Supercomputing Frontiers Europe 2020 will deliver talks on topics spanning various fields of science and technology. Participants will be able to join remotely, ask questions, and learn at a three-day long virtual event."The post Free Registration: Supercomputing Frontiers Europe Virtual Conference this Week appeared first on insideHPC.

NOAA is seeking a technology partner to help design and build the Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC). This extramural center will accelerate scientific research and engineering to create the world’s most accurate and reliable operational weather forecast model. "Through EPIC, the United States has a unique opportunity to harness the talents of the most brilliant modelers in the world to advance operational global numerical weather prediction,” said Neil Jacobs, Ph.D., acting NOAA administrator.The post NOAA seeks proposals to help develop world’s best weather forecast model appeared first on insideHPC.

Dr. Patricia Persaud from Louisiana State University gave this talk in a recent IRIS webinar. "Our goal is to first map the structure of the basins in the Los Angeles area, and to integrate the basins’ structure into computer simulations of ground motion. As part of the BASIN project, we have deployed 744 nodal seismometers along 10 densely-spaced seismic profiles in the greater Los Angeles area."The post Urban Seismology in Megacities: the Los Angeles BASIN Experiment appeared first on insideHPC.

William & Mary in Virginia seeks an HPC Systems Engineer in our Job of the Week. "The HPC Systems Engineer provides day-to-day operations, maintenance and hardware engineering support for computer systems managed by the Research Computing (RC) within the Office of Information Technology. These systems include Linux-based HPC clusters; departmental servers and workstations under the control of RC; These systems and the applications that run on them are characterized by leading-edge computing, networking, and software technologies, complex and demanding computational requirements, and large data-sets."The post Job of the Week: HPC Systems Engineer at William & Mary appeared first on insideHPC.

According to IDC, Inspur ranked the top three vendors in global server revenue in 2019. Inspur was the only mainstream manufacturer in the world to maintain a double-digit growth, with an increase of 18.1% in sales and a market share of 7.0%. "Inspur has focused on the development of intelligent computing for many years, leading in the fields of AI, cloud data centers, open computing, and new data storage. With full-stack solution development capabilities in chips, boards, systems and software, Inspur is able to nimbly develop application-optimized custom computing solutions for users, and take advantage of the JDM (Joint Design Manufacturing) model to help Internet companies and large industry players remain competitive."The post Inspur Ranks in Top Three in 2019 IDC Global Server Market Report appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Amazon launched the AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative, a program to support customers who are working to bring better, more accurate, diagnostics solutions to market faster and promote better collaboration across organizations that are working on similar problems. "Organizations working on diagnostics need reliable, scalable compute power, which we can deliver to them along with industry-leading services like analytics and machine learning, so they can process and analyze large data sets and iterate quickly."The post AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative to fight COVID-19 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this Let's Talk Exascale podcast, researchers from the ECP describe progress at the ExaLearn project. ExaLearn is focused on ML and related activities to inform the requirements for these pending exascale machines. "ExaLearn’s algorithms and tools will be used by the ECP applications, other ECP co-design centers, and DOE experimental facilities and leadership-class computing facilities."The post Podcast: Delivering Exascale Machine Learning Algorithms at the ExaLearn Project appeared first on insideHPC.

NVIDIA is offering COVID-19 Researchers free access to Parabricks genome-sequencing software for GPUs. "Starting today, NVIDIA will provide a free 90-day license to Parabricks to any researcher in the worldwide effort to fight the novel coronavirus. Based on the well-known Genome Analysis Toolkit, Parabricks uses GPUs to accelerate by as much as 50x the analysis of sequence data. We recognize this pandemic is evolving, so we’ll monitor the situation and extend the offer as needed."The post NVIDIA Gives COVID-19 Researchers Free Access Genome-sequencing software for GPUs appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Rescale, in cooperation with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, announced a new program that immediately offers high performance computing resources at no cost to teams working to develop test kits and vaccines for COVID-19. "Those working on coronavirus vaccines and testing who would benefit from HPC in the cloud at no cost should apply at techagainstcovid.com. Researchers can rapidly run simulations in the cloud without setup time or IT teams using Rescale’s turnkey platform combined with cloud computing resources from Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure."The post Rescale Partners with Google Cloud and Azure to Offer Cloud HPC for COVID-19 Researchers appeared first on insideHPC.

Today PSSC Labs touted impressive performance on their server lineup powered by AMD EPYC processors. Recently named an AMD Elite Partner, PSSC Labs is developing a unique set of platforms leveraging EPYC processors for AI, Big Data, HPC and IOT. In addition, these platforms will be optimized for computationally extensive workloads in the design & engineering, life science and weather modeling industries.The post PSSC Labs Speeds HPC with AMD EPYC Processors appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the Alibaba Cloud announced it has offered medical personnel around the world a set of advanced cloud-based technology applications in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. Included are artificial intelligence-enhanced innovations based on learnings and insights garnered during the initial outbreak of the virus. "The series of cloud-native anti-coronavirus solutions stem from joint efforts of Alibaba Cloud’s solution experts, scientists and researchers from Alibaba DAMO Academy and the technical team at DingTalk, one of the platforms UNESCO has tabbed as facilitating distance learning during the coronavirus outbreak."The post Alibaba Cloud Offers AI Cloud Services to Help Battle COVID-19 Globally appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Intel unveiled Pohoiki Springs, its latest and most powerful neuromorphic research system providing the computational capacity of 100 million neurons. "Pohoiki Springs scales up our Loihi neuromorphic research chip by more than 750 times, while operating at a power level of under 500 watts," said Mike Davies, director of Intel’s Neuromorphic Computing Lab. "The system enables our research partners to explore ways to accelerate workloads that run slowly today on conventional architectures, including high-performance computing (HPC) systems.”The post Intel Scales Neuromorphic System to 100 Million Neurons appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Bright Computing announced that Atipa Technologies has become the latest company to join the Bright Computing Partner Program, as an Advanced Reseller. “Through our partnership with Bright Computing, we will incorporate Bright’s industry-leading cluster management technology into our HPC solutions so that our customers who are less familiar with the Linux command line or who do not have the financial resources to hire an experienced Linux sysadmin can dive in and start using the cluster on day one.”The post Atipa Technologies Joins Bright Reseller Program appeared first on insideHPC.

Fundamental research supported by XSEDE supercomputers could help lead to new strategies and better technology that combats infectious and genetic diseases. "Chemical reactions, life, doesn't happen that quickly," Roston said. "It happens on a timescale of people talking to each other. Bridging this gap in timescale of many, many orders of magnitude requires many steps in your simulations. It very quickly becomes computationally intractable."The post XSEDE Supercomputers Complete Simulations Pertinent to coronavirus, DNA Replication appeared first on insideHPC.

Today OnScale announced that it will provide free cloud core-hours to customers to promote customer safety and mitigate any productivity loss due to office shutdowns. "OnScale will offer free cloud core-hours to our customers who are currently working from home because of the coronavirus outbreak and don’t have access to their hardware and the OnScale engineering simulation platform."The post OnScale Offering Free Cloud Core-Hours to Engineers Working from Home appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Hyperion Research released a statement on the impact of the coronavirus on the HPC Market. "Because the trajectory and current extent of COVID-19 are unclear and hard to predict, Hyperion Research believes it is too soon to accurately quantify the impact of the virus on the worldwide HPC market. Based on developments to date and discussions with HPC vendors around the globe, however, we believe several impacts are likely: delayed product shipments, delayed revenues, and delayed revenues among others."The post Hyperion Research Looks at COVID-19’s Impact on the Global HPC Market appeared first on insideHPC.

The AMD and Microsoft partnership continues to expand this week with the launch of Microsoft Azure NVv4 Virtual Machines. Powered by 2nd Gen AMD EPYC Processors and AMD Radeon Instinct GPUs, the powerful new VMs are now generally available to customers in South Central US, East US, and West Europe regions, with additional regions planned for the coming months. "These VMs, the first in the industry to be powered by both AMD EPYC CPUs and Radeon Instinct GPUs, enable customers to scale virtual desktops in the cloud that support a variety of workloads."The post AMD Powers Azure HBv2 Virtual Machines for HPC Workloads appeared first on insideHPC.

James Mickens from Harvard University gave this talk at HiPEAC 2020. "In this presentation, I will describe some of the benefits that would emerge from a new kind of processor that aggressively exposes microarchitectural state and allows it to be programmed. Using elaborate hand gestures and cheap pleas for sympathy, I will explain why my proposals are different than prior “open microarchitecture” ideas like transport-triggered designs."The post Software-defined Microarchitecture: An Arguably Terrible Idea, But Certainly Not The Worst Idea appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the ISC 2020 conference announced that registration will open on March 19 along with a Covid-19 Advisory. The conference takes place June 21-25 in Frankfurt. "In light of the ever-changing situation, we are offering our attendees as much flexibility and planning comfort as possible with our cancellation policy. Up until May 11 (39 days before the conference), you can request a full refund on your conference registration fee."The post ISC 2020 Registration to Open this Week with COVID-19 Advisory appeared first on insideHPC.

Today GigaIO announced availability of FabreX for vScaler's management interface. As the industry's first in-memory network, FabreX will bolster vScaler's cloud appliances for artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning, biotechnology and big data analytics. "GigaIO entered a strategic partnership with vScaler in November 2019 to bring their excellent user interface and ease of use into the FabreX environment," says Alan Benjamin, CEO of GigaIO. "FabreX's integration with vScaler delivers an elegant and straight forward way for customers to improve resource utilization and create highly-composable, unified infrastructures. I am thrilled this optimization has finally come to fruition and is available to the general public."The post GigaIO Brings FabreX to vScaler Cloud Platform appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Tim Miller from One Stop Systems writes that by bringing specialized, high performance computing capabilities to the edge through AI on the Fly, OSS is helping the industry deliver on the enormous potential of precision medicine. "The common elements of these solutions are high data rate acquisition, high speed low latency storage, and efficient high performance compute analytics. With OSS, all of these building block elements are connected seamlessly with memory mapped PCI Express interconnect configured and customized as appropriate, to meet the specific environmental requirements of ‘in the field’ installations."The post Precision Medicine pushes demand for HPC at the Edge: AI on the Fly ® Delivers appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at Intel's oneAPI project. "The OneAPI project is a highly ambitious initiative; trying to design a single API to handle CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and other types of processors. In the discussion, we look under the hood and see how this might work. One thing working in Intel’s favor is that they’re using data parallel C++, which is highly compatible with CUDA – and which is probably Intel’s target with this new initiative."The post Podcast: One Big Debate over OneAPI appeared first on insideHPC.

Ronald Cogswell from Shell gave this talk at the Rice Oil & Gas Conference. "In this presentation we will compare the benchmarking results from the latest 2 generations of CPU hardware from AMD and Intel. The benchmarks were conducted using proprietary Seismic kernels as well as known open source benchmarks. The study focused on memory bandwidth, flops and overall performance and provides results of real-world production Seismic workloads."The post Benchmarking CPUs at Shell appeared first on insideHPC.

This whitepaper contains a compelling HPC data storage solution case study highlighting the use of Panasas ActiveStor® by Magseis Fairfield, a geophysics firm that specializes in providing seismic 3D and 4D data acquisition services to exploration and production (E&P) companies. The whitepaper, “Magseis Fairfield Uses a Sea of Data to Support Environmentally Responsible Energy Exploration,” […]The post Case Study: Magseis Fairfield Uses a Sea of Data to Support Environmentally Responsible Energy Exploration appeared first on insideHPC.

Over 500 global experts in quantum technologies will descend on Dublin in November this year for the European Quantum Technologies Conference (EQTC). Taking place Nov. 23-27 in Dublin, the event is the flagship event of the European Quantum Initiative a €1 billion initiative launched by the EU in 2018 to bring together research institutions, industry and public funders, to expand European scientific leadership and excellence in Quantum. "EQTC is an important stepping stone in positioning Ireland as an international global hub for quantum technologies and applications," said Prof. Jean-Christophe (JC) Desplat, Director of ICHEC and Chair of the EQTC 2020 organizing committee.The post ICHEC to Bring European Quantum Technologies Conference to Dublin appeared first on insideHPC.