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

SAN JOSE — Sept. 2, 2020 — Quantum Corp. (NASDAQ: QMCO), a global leader in unstructured data and video solutions, today announced that the Joint Network Center (GNZ) at the Fritz Haber Institute (FHI) reduced its backup window by 50 percent, ensured the long-term integrity of vital data, and gained scalability to support fast-growing scientific […]The post The Joint Network Center Archives Scientific Data for Max Planck Society with Quantum appeared first on insideHPC.

Altair® PBS Professional® is the industry-leading workload manager that’s been an HPC workhorse for decades, enabling efficient job scheduling, management, monitoring, and reporting with reliable scaling from small clusters to the world’s biggest data centers. Altair CTO Sam Mahalingam shared details about some of the new features in a Q&A session.The post Altair CTO Interview: PBS Professional Gets a Major Upgrade appeared first on insideHPC.

The Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC), Ireland’s high-performance computing authority, today, Wednesday 2nd September launched Ireland’s Euro-HPC Competence Centre, which is hosted at ICHEC. ICHEC analyzes complex data to provide intelligent solutions that deliver effective policy change, providing solutions to some of the toughest challenges across public, academic and enterprise sectors in Ireland. 1 […]The post New Competence Centre to Fast-Track Academic and SME Participation in EU Supercomputing Initiative appeared first on insideHPC.

Roy Chartier, founder and CTO of Cancer Computer, Ottawa, with more than 25 years in HPC, HPDA and AI, has assembled a team of volunteers who support cancer researchers by connecting them with the computer hardware, processing capacity and IT support they need to save lives. During this pandemic year, the organizations has expanded its mission to support COVID-19 researchers. A member of the Dell Technologies HPC Community, Chartier in this interview talks about Cancer Computer’s work, its partnership with Dell and the value of cross-discipline meetings, such as those held organized by Dell for its HPC community members.The post Dell Technologies HPC Community: Cancer Computer Founder Roy Chartier Talks HPC in Support of Cancer, COVID Research appeared first on insideHPC.

New York — September 2, 2020 —GigaSpaces, the provider of InsightEdge, the fastest in-memory data and analytics processing platform, announced today the release of GigaSpaces InsightEdge version 15.5, to simplify and scale hybrid and multi-cloud deployments to empower digital transformation initiatives. GigaSpaces version 15.5 adds new efficiency and automation capabilities to its Ops Manager module for easier […]The post GigaSpaces Announces Version 15.5 for Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Deployments to Empower Digital Transformation Initiatives appeared first on insideHPC.

Those predicting another “AI winter” will have a quarrel on their hands with industry analyst firm International Data Corp., which forecasts global spending on AI will more than than double over the next four years, from $50.1 billion in 2020 to more than $110 billion in 2024. According to IDC’s Worldwide Artificial Intelligence Spending Guide, AI […]The post IDC: Led by U.S., Global AI Spending Will More than Double by 2024 appeared first on insideHPC.

Summer inventory clearance days for Radio Free HPC! In this episode, we talk about the spate of MLperf benchmarks and how AMD hit it out of the park on their most recent quarterly earnings.The post Radio Free HPC: MLperf Wars and AMD’s Gawdy Earnings appeared first on insideHPC.

From the front lines of this year’s ModSim conference, Charity Plata, Computational Science Initiative, Communications, Brookhaven National Laboratory, send this report: Recently, the ninth annual Workshop on Modeling & Simulation of Systems and Applications, known as ModSim 2020 — usually a 2.5-day event held amid the picturesque backdrop of the University of Washington Botanic Gardens in […]The post Taking a Virtual Turn, ModSim 2020 Focuses on the AI Era appeared first on insideHPC.

In this contributed article, Bill Wagner, CEO of Bright Computing, discusses how the HPC industry has entered an era of change in the past few years. New technologies, cloud, edge, and a broadening set of commercial use cases in the areas of data analytics and machine learning have set in motion a tsunami of change for HPC. This is no longer a tool for rocket scientists and the research elite. HPC is quickly becoming a strategic necessity for all industries that want to gain a competitive advantage in their markets, or at least keep pace with their industry peers in order to survive.The post Managing Complexity in the New Era of HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

At this point in the career of HPC luminary Simon Burbridge of the University of Bristol, he’s focused on HPC system design based on ARM-designed processors. Citing the world’s top ranked supercomputer, Japan’s Fugaku, Burbridge says in this interview: “If you redesign your CPUs to have the capability of doing the amount of math that you need and if you have, for example, the memory bandwidth to get those vectors and matrices in and out of the memory, then why wouldn’t they be better than a GPU?”The post The Hyperion-insideHPC Interviews: Simon Burbridge Gives ARM a Hand – ‘Maybe We Don’t Need to Have Accelerators’ appeared first on insideHPC.

Due to reporting error, insideHPC yesterday ran an article mistakenly reporting that supercomputers at the National Energy National Scientific Computing Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab had recently been the target of hacker activity, resulting in a guilty plea by the accused hacker. This incident happened in 2013 and Berkeley Lab systems were not compromised. insideHPC regrets […]The post Article Retraction appeared first on insideHPC.

Technologists from the national labs, universities, federal agencies and industry have been named by the U.S. Department of Energy and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to the National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee (NQIAC). Announced today, the NQAIC’s mission is to “counsel the Administration on ways to ensure continued American leadership […]The post DOE, White House Announce Members of U.S. Quantum Advisory Committee appeared first on insideHPC.

A guilty plea was entered today by a hacker, allegedly a member of the hacking group Underground Intelligence Agency, for tying to sell access to supercomputers at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. According to an online story in Wired magazine today, Andrew J. Miller, 24, of Pennsylvania, […]The post NERSC Supercomputers Targeted by Hacker: Guilty Plea in Attempted Sale of Access appeared first on insideHPC.

San Jose – August 27, 2020 – Enterprises are struggling with their IT performance, as almost half (47%) admitted they lack visibility and insight into their systems in a recent survey. In response, Virtana, a leader in enterprise hybrid cloud migration and optimization today announced an integration with Pure Storage, an IT pioneer that delivers storage as-a-service in a […]The post Virtana Integrates with Pure Storage for Real-Time IT Intelligence appeared first on insideHPC.

The RIKEN Center for Computational Science, Kobe, Japan, owner of the world’s no. 1-ranked supercomputer, Fugaku, has chosen Oracle Cloud as the public cloud provider for its elastic HPC storage and to enable universities and research organizations to connect through Japan’s Science Information Network (SINET). Performing at 415 quadrillion computations a second, or 415 petaFLOPS, Fugaku […]The post RIKEN’s Fugaku to Connect via Oracle Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced the creation of five new Quantum Information Science Research Centers, led by DOE’s National Laboratories, including Q-NEXT, led by Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, Ill. Q-NEXT will be funded by DOE at $115 million over five years, with $15 million in fiscal […]The post DOE Launches $115M, 5-Year Effort to Create 5 Quantum Research Centers appeared first on insideHPC.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – August 25, 2020 — Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG), the IT pioneer that delivers storage as-a-service in a multi-cloud world, today announced enhancements to FlashArray//C, delivering the industry’s only all-QLC storage array, built on Pure’s DirectFlash technology and designed to cost-effectively meet the performance requirements of a broad set of high-capacity enterprise […]The post Pure Storage FlashArray//C Extends QLC with First Enterprise-grade All-QLC Array appeared first on insideHPC.

In this Q&A, SDSC Chief Data Science Officer Ilkay Altintas explains the rationale for composable systems and the approach taken with the new Expanse supercomputer. With its new Expanse supercomputer, San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) is pioneering composable HPC systems to enable the dynamic allocation of resources tailored to individual workloads. One of the critical innovations in the SDSC’s new Expanse supercomputer from Dell Technologies, is the ability to support composable systems with dynamic capabilities.The post Composable Computing at SDSC appeared first on insideHPC.

Long-time IBM HPC strategist David Turek has left the company after 25 years and has joined Catalog, which calls itself the world’s first DNA-based platform for massive digital storage and computation. He will serve as CTO of the start-up. Catalog also announced today $10 million Series A funding in a round led by Horizons Ventures. […]The post Long-time IBM HPC Strategist Dave Turek Named CTO of DNA-based Storage Start-up appeared first on insideHPC.

The University at Buffalo has chosen Panasas ActiveStor Ultra HPC data storage for the university’s Center for Computational Research (CCR), a supercomputing center serving the 64 campuses of the State Universities of New York (SUNY) network and affiliated partners, including industry. In its announced, the university (UB) said it moved to Panasas because it was challenged by higher […]The post Panasas Picked for SUNY Supercomputing Center appeared first on insideHPC.

The Department of Defense has made HPC news twice in the last few days – in one, the Army will spend $32 million on supercomputing technology from composable infrastructure vendor Liqid; in the other, DOD will partner with the Department of Energy and Microsoft to develop AI algorithms to support natural disaster first responders. In […]The post DOD Inks $32M HPC Deal with Liqid; Forms AI Partnership with DOE, Microsoft appeared first on insideHPC.

Hosted by the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI Australia) in collaboration with the HPC-AI Advisory Council, the HPC-AI Advisory Council 2020 Australia Conference brings together leaders from academia, government and industry to explore the innovative research, techniques, tools and technologies that are fueling economies, productivity and progress globally.The post HPC-AI Advisory Council 2020 Australia Conference Features Inspired Experts & Works appeared first on insideHPC.

The show starts on a high note, with Henry’s audio being amazingly echo free. Usually we hear a lot of echo as Henry talks, which is due to the rammed earth walls of his new abode, plus the fact that there isn’t any carpeting or anything else to absorb his nasal tones. But somehow Henry […]The post Radio Free HPC: Is Amazon’s Graviton2 Ready for Prime (Time)? appeared first on insideHPC.

The Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (ACM SIGKDD) will hold its flagship annual conference, KDD 2020, virtually, August 23-27. The KDD conference series, started in 1989, is the world’s oldest and largest data mining conference, and is the venue where concepts such as big data, data science, […]The post KDD 2020 Data Mining Conference Goes Virtual Aug. 23-27 appeared first on insideHPC.

Arm and the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have announced a three-year partnership agreement to “enable the research community that supports DARPA’s programs to quickly and easily take advantage of Arm’s leading IP, tools and support, accelerating innovation in a variety of fields.” Under the auspices of DARPA’s Electronics Resurgence Initiative, the agreement establishes […]The post Arm and DARPA Announce 3-Year Development Agreement appeared first on insideHPC.

By supercomputing standards, Argonne National Lab’s Bebop (stood up in 2017, 1.75 teraflops, bumped off the Top500 list after the June 2019 ranking) seems something of a second-tier player. But veteran, formerly non-Top500 systems like Bebop can still take a star turn, as shown by the results of a research team from Northern Illinois University […]The post Veteran Argonne System Helps Find Method to Convert CO2 into Ethanol appeared first on insideHPC.

In this sponsored post by Adam Marko, Director of Life Science Solutions – Panasas, Inc., we look at what we are calling Research Cost of Ownership (RCO) and the effect of HPC storage downtime and reduced productivity on the overall scientific mission.The post I Really Don’t Care About TCO … It’s RCO I am Worried About appeared first on insideHPC.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP) is tasked with guiding the U.S. effort to build a “capable exascale ecosystem” by the early to mid-2020s and is part of the Exascale Computing Initiative, a partnership between DOE’s Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration. In this podcast, members of ECP’s leadership […]The post Let’s Talk Exascale Podcast – ECP Leadership Discuss Project Highlights, Challenges, Impact appeared first on insideHPC.

University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and its Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) are part of a research team that has secured a $10 million grant to extend the cloud computing testbed project called Chameleon. The four-year grant, funded by the National Science Foundation, will enable the multi-institutional initiative to “broaden in scope.” Among the new features: reproducibility, […]The post UNC, RENCI Part of NSF Grant for Cloud Testbed appeared first on insideHPC.

Intel and Accenture today announced support for an Intel Neuromorphic Research Community (INRC) project led by the Neuro-Biomorphic Engineering Lab at the Open University of Israel in collaboration with ALYN Hospital. Using funding and technology support from Accenture, as well as Intel’s neuromorphic technology and algorithmic support from Applied Brain Research (ABR), the Israeli research […]The post Intel and Accenture Support Neuromorphic Research Project for Wheelchair-Bound Pediatric Patients appeared first on insideHPC.

August 19, 2020—Kazuhm, a developer of technology and tools for maximizing IT efficiency, today announced that Dr. Larry Smarr will provide support to the Kazuhm leadership team as Technology Evangelist. With over 40 years of experience driving information technology innovation in academia, government agencies, and private industry, Dr. Smarr brings a practical vision for the […]The post UCSD’s Dr. Larry Smarr Named Tech Evangelist at Kazuhm appeared first on insideHPC.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and AI company Cerebras Systems today announced the integration of the 1.2-trillion Cerebras’ Wafer Scale Engine (WSE) chip into the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) 23-petaflop Lassen supercomputer. The pairing of Lassen’s simulation capability with Cerebras’ machine learning compute system, along with the CS-1 accelerator system that houses the chip, […]The post Cerebras 1.2 Trillion Chip Integrated with LLNL’s Lassen System for AI Research appeared first on insideHPC.

Rescale Inc., the enterprise big compute in the cloud specialist, today announced the appointment of two new senior executives: Gerhard Esterhuizen, who joins the company as VP of engineering, where he will be responsible for building out the company’s HPC platform technologies; and Terry Denzer, a 25-year sales leadership veteran, who joins Rescale as the […]The post Rescale Announces Two Executive Appointments appeared first on insideHPC.

In this sponsored post on behalf of Intel, we see that in today’s high-performance computing applications, many different pieces of hardware can perform data-centric functions. With diverse accelerators entering the market, programming for multiple architectures has created significant development barriers for software developers.The post Brightskies Deploys Open Source RTM Application for Easy Optimization across Multiple Architectures appeared first on insideHPC.

CAMPBELL, Calif. – August 18, 2020 – WekaIO (Weka), provider of high-performance, scalable file storage for data-intensive applications, today introduced the Kubernetes (K8s) CSI (Container Storage Interface) plugin, allowing its customers to deliver Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) functionality utilizing the Weka File System (WekaFS), the world’s fastest and most scalable parallel file system for high performance workloads. Stateful applications […]The post WekaIO Expands Cloud Offering with Kubernetes Container Storage Interface appeared first on insideHPC.

Suzy Tichenor is a long-time champion of helping companies gain access to the country’s most powerful computers. At the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory – site of Summit, no. 2 in the world, according to the latest Top500 supercomputing ranking – she is director of an industrial partnership program dedicated to that mission. […]The post The Hyperion-insideHPC Interviews: Suzy Tichenor on the Need for Industrial HPC Users to Get on the GPU Bandwagon appeared first on insideHPC.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (DOE/NNSA) will host a Nuclear Security Enterprise (NSE) virtual job fair Wednesday, Aug. 26, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. (EDT) to help fill more than 600 open positions. The virtual job fair will include hiring officials from NNSA and its National Laboratories, plants, and sites […]The post NNSA to Hold Nuclear Security Enterprise Virtual Job Fair August 26 appeared first on insideHPC.

IBM today announced a new IBM POWER10 CPU family, its first 7nm form factor platform, built with Samsung, designed for enterprise hybrid cloud computing with up to 3x greater processor energy efficiency, workload capacity, and container density than its predecessor, according to the company. According to IBM, POWER10 highlights include: Support for multi-petabyte memory clusters […]The post IBM Launches 7nm POWER10 CPU appeared first on insideHPC.

In this sponsored post from our friends over at Quanta Cloud Technology (QCT), we see that from many years of experience working with numerous customers, the company found that converged HPC and AI environments can bring benefits for customers and remain flexible enough to meet their workload demands. A proven approach to getting customers HPC and AI systems productive quickly is to deliver all the components together, integrated, and tested. The components should be selected based on the known and anticipated workloads and optimized for these requirements.The post An Adaptive Platform for Converged HPC/AI Workloads appeared first on insideHPC.

The most talked-about topic in HPC these days – another Intel chip delay and therefore delay of the U.S.’s flagship Aurora exascale system – is something no one directly involved wants to talk about. Not Argonne National Laboratory, where Intel was to install Aurora in 2021; not the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project, guiding […]The post Exascale Exasperation: Why DOE Gave Intel a 2nd Chance; Can Nvidia GPUs Ride to Aurora’s Rescue? appeared first on insideHPC.

Amazon Web Services today announced the general availability of Amazon Braket, a development environment for exploring and designing quantum algorithms. AWS said Braket tests and troubleshoots quantum algorithms on simulated quantum computers running on computing resources in AWS. Users can then use Braket to run their quantum algorithms on their choice of quantum processors based on […]The post AWS Announces GA of Quantum Development Environment appeared first on insideHPC.

Open source private HPC cloud specialist vScaler today announced the integration of SLURM workload manager with GigaIO’s FabreX for elastic scaling of PCI devices and HPC disaggregation. FabreX, which GigaIO describes as the “first in-memory network,” supports vScaler’s private cloud appliances for such workloads such as deep learning, biotechnology and big data analytics. vScaler’s disaggregated […]The post vScaler Integrates SLURM with GigaIO FabreX for Elastic HPC Cloud Device Scaling appeared first on insideHPC.

Panasas has released this timely new white paper “Panasas PanFS 8: Architectural Overview.” The report takes a “breadth-first” tour of the architecture of the PanFS® parallel file system, looking at its key components then diving deep into the main benefits. HPC environments, by their very nature, tend to be large and are usually quite complex. […]The post Panasas PanFS 8: Architectural Overview appeared first on insideHPC.

Several organizations have released updates on upcoming conferences and user group meetings. Here’s a summary with links to further information. The MVAPICH User Group Meeting (MUG ’20), built around an implementation of the MPI standard developed by Ohio State University, will be an online event held on Monday, August 24th through Wednesday, August 26th. This […]The post MUG ’20, Altair, Arm DevSummit Announce Conference Agendas appeared first on insideHPC.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. and SAN JOSE, Calif. – August 12, 2020 – Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG), the storage-as-a-service in a multi-cloud world vendor, and Cohesity, the modern data management company that simplifies back up and data management, announced a strategic partnership that brings to market Pure FlashRecover, Powered by Cohesity, designed to meet the most […]The post Pure Storage and Cohesity in Partnership to Deliver Rapid Recovery at Scale appeared first on insideHPC.

Intel announced today that its Optane persistent memory (PMem), in combination with Intel’s open-source distributed asynchronous object storage (DAOS) solution, has taken the no. 1 position on the Virtual Institute for I/O IO500 list for file system performance. Intel said DAOS, with 30 servers of Intel Optane PMem, came in ahead of systems on the […]The post Intel Optane Persistent Memory Tops IO500 List appeared first on insideHPC.

Oracle announced today that Nissan Motor Co. is migrating its on-premises engineering simulation HPC workloads to run on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Nissan uses computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and structural simulation techniques to design and test cars for external aerodynamics and structural failures. Oracle said Nissan chose its cloud platform for its bare-metal compute, RDMA […]The post Nissan Shifts to Oracle Cloud for CFD, 3D Visualization HPC Design Workloads appeared first on insideHPC.

Oak Ridge National Lab has released a virtual tour of the facility that houses Summit, the world’s second most power supercomputer. The tour is offered by the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF). They’re giving access to Building 5600 on the Oak Ridge campus where resides Summit, […]The post ORNL Offers Virtual Tour of Summit’s Supercomputer Center appeared first on insideHPC.

Sometimes, vendors just won’t take customers’ money for a cluster no matter how hard the customer pleads. Last month, HPC technology strategist Ryan Quick, co-founder and principal at Providentia Worldwide consulting firm, told us that while vendors have technologies capable of delivering solutions across the stack, too often they have disconnects between business units that makes buying an integrated solution difficult, if not impossible. In this interview, Quick expands on those comments with problem scenarios and advice on handling vendors.The post Prying an Integrated HPC Cluster from Vendors’ Hands: ‘We Had to Force Them to Get into the Same Room’ appeared first on insideHPC.

UK colocation provider Kao Data talks about the changing data center requirements of HPC organizations in the “Innovation Corridor,” between London and Cambridge. Kao Data Vice President Spencer Lamb talks with the late Rich Brueckner about his company’s adoption of hyperscalers’ infrastructure principles to offer state-of-the-art, high density data centers. For more insights from Kao […]The post Kao Data Talks HPC-class Colocation Data Center Requirements in the UK’s ‘Innovation Corridor’ appeared first on insideHPC.