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

San Francisco – August 6, 2020 – Mode Analytics, the leader in advanced analytics, today announced that it has closed a $33 million round of Series D funding led by H.I.G. Growth Partners, along with Valor Equity Partners, Foundation Capital, REV Venture Partners, and Switch Ventures. Mode will use the funds to accelerate its leading analytics platform, […]The post Mode Analytics Raises $33 Million in Series D Funding, Led by H.I.G. Growth Partners appeared first on insideHPC.

The inaugural Winter Classic Invitational Student Cluster Competition to include historically black and minority universities in the supercomputing challenge arena is slated for Jan. 25, 2021. To date, participating colleges include Prairie View A&M University, Fayetteville State University and Tennessee State University. With the support of top technology sponsors, Student Cluster Competitions train students to […]The post 1st Student Cluster Competition Focusing on Racial Inclusion Slated for January appeared first on insideHPC.

Hyperion Research is accepting submissions for the 16th round of the HPC Innovation Excellence Awards, to be announced at the SC20 (virtual) conference in November. Award entries are invited all countries and must be submitted by Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2020, by completing the form at https://www.hpcuserforum.com/innovationaward/. Hyperion asks that submissions include a clear description of the achievement’s […]The post Hyperion Research Invites Submissions for HPC Innovation Excellence Awards appeared first on insideHPC.

Scientists at GE Research have been authorized by the U.S. Department of Energy to access Oak Ridge National Lab’s (ORNL) Summit supercomputer, the world second most powerful system, to study wind power, projected to provide 20 percent of U.S. energy in the next 10 years. GE engineers – led by GE Research Aerodynamics Engineer Jing […]The post Summit Takes Center Stage in GE Wind Power Study appeared first on insideHPC.

In this sponsored post, Joy King, VP, Vertica Product Management & Product Marketing, believes that we need to stop our fixation with “data in one place.” The days of the single data repository are behind us. If you try doing that, you’ll incur so much data management time and cost that you’ll squander the savings even before you even get to the analysis stage. To put it simply, the goal is to unify, analyze, and act, because predictive analytics and proactive action is the definition of business success.The post Unify Your Analytics, and Keep Your Data Where It Suits You appeared first on insideHPC.

by RadioFreeHPC Podcast HPC Market Projected Growth It’s a few weeks since we recorded this episode so maybe things have changed, but as of the recording the HPC market is projected to grow according to Hyperion’s studies. The RadioFreeHPC team delves in, looking for validations and new insights. Armed with the halo effect of big systems like Isambard and now Fugaku, […]The post RadioFreeHPC: HPC Market Growth; Student Cluster Competition — Winter Classic Invitational appeared first on insideHPC.

San Jose, Aug. 5 – In the results released last week of MLPerf AI benchmark, Inspur NF5488A5 server set a new AI performance record in the Resnet50 training task, topping the list for single server performance. MLPerf (results here) is the most influential industry benchmarking organization in the field of AI around the world. Established […]The post Inspur NF5488A5 Breaks AI Server Performance Record in Latest MLPerf Benchmarks appeared first on insideHPC.

High performance storage vendor Panasas today released Dynamic Data Acceleration on its new PanFS parallel file system, a software feature designed to overcome inconsistent performance by automatically adapting to changing small file and mixed workloads in HPC and AI application scenarios. According to Panasas, the product alleviates the complexity and manual intervention of tiered HPC […]The post Panasas Takes on Tiered HPC Storage Headaches, New Offering Automatically Adapts to Workload Changes appeared first on insideHPC.

The University of Oxford has signed a £5 million with Atos, provider of hybrid cloud and big data solutions, to deliver what the two organizations say will be the UK’s largest AI-focused supercomputer, a deep learning system built on the Nvidia DGX SuperPOD architecture. Funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the […]The post Oxford, Atos in Deal for Nvidia 63-Node DGX System, Said to be UK’s Largest AI Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

Steve Conway of industry analyst firm Hyperion Research is one of those technologists with the rare talent for talking complex technology in a straightforward, comprehensible way. In this interview, he uses that talent to survey the history of HPC and look at what’s ahead for the industry. In his view, the simultaneous convergences of HPC […]The post The Hyperion-insideHPC Interviews: Steve Conway on the Imperative of AI Ethics and Why ‘Hardware Is Easy, Software Is Hard’ appeared first on insideHPC.

Altair invites you to join our HPC experts, along with our partners, technology users, and industry peers, to learn about the leading-edge computing solutions that will keep innovation moving forward through 2020 and beyond. Join us in September for a virtual summit on the state of HPC on Wednesday, Sept. 9 and Thursday, Sept. 10.The post Altair Virtual HPC Summit appeared first on insideHPC.

Two HPC industry conferences have announced their decisions to change the status of their events: one will go virtual, the other is cancelled. SC20, which was to have been held in Atlanta, November 9-19, said last month it was working on plans for a hybrid in-person/virtual conference – now, according to conference General Chair Christine […]The post SC20 Drops Hybrid Hopes, Goes All Virtual; HPC User Forum Events Cancelled appeared first on insideHPC.

Industry analyst firm Intersect360 has announced its forecast for the HPC industry for this year and next, predicting a 3.7 percent decline for 2020 with a market rebound in 2021. Pegging the size of the industry at $39 billion in 2019, a jump of 8.2 percent from 2018, the firm predicted “significant disruption” to the HPC market in the short term as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic followed by a corresponding spike upward in 2021.The post Intersect360: HPC Industry Down 3.7% Due to COVID-19, First Decline in a Decade appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Tim Miller, VP of Product Marketing at One Stop Systems (OSS), discuses how deploying edge HPC solutions - instead of data movement over relatively slow or unsecure networks to distant datacenters - provides significant benefits in cost, responsiveness and security. Real time decisions require sourcing and storing raw data, and converting it to actionable intelligence with high speed computing in the field close to the data source.The post NVMe over Fabrics and GPU Direct Storage Boost HPC and AI Edge Applications appeared first on insideHPC.

The saga of Intel’s inabilities to deliver a 7nm process chip and a supercomputer called Aurora to Argonne National Laboratory opened new chapters yesterday with Intel CEO Bob Swan’s statements that the company’s 7nm “Ponte Vecchio” GPU, integral to its Aurora exascale system scheduled for delivery next year, will be delayed at least six months. […]The post Another Intel 7nm Chip Delay – What Does it Mean for Aurora Exascale? appeared first on insideHPC.

At a press conference held today at the University of Chicago, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) unveiled a strategy for the development of a national quantum internet intended to bring “the United States to the forefront of the global quantum race and usher in a new era of communications.” An outgrowth of the National Quantum […]The post DOE Unveils Blueprint for ‘Unhackable’ Quantum Internet: Central Roles for Argonne, Univ. of Chicago, Fermilab appeared first on insideHPC.

Dr. Michael M. Resch of the University of Stuttgart has professorships, degrees, doctorates and honorary doctorates from around the world, he has studied and taught in Europe and the U.S., but for all the work he has done in supercomputing for the past three-plus decades, he boils down his years in HPC to working with […]The post The Hyperion-insideHPC Interviews: Dr. Michael Resch Talks about the Leap from von Neumann: ‘I Tell My PhD Candidates: Go for Quantum’ appeared first on insideHPC.

The University of Florida and Nvidia have unveiled a plan to build what they say will be the world’s fastest AI supercomputer in academia, delivering 700 petaflops of AI performance and infusing AI throughout UF’s curriculum. The $70 million project will fund construction of an AI-centric supercomputing and data center and is intended to make […]The post University of Florida, Nvidia Plan Fastest AI Supercomputer in Academia appeared first on insideHPC.

By RadioFreeHPC Podcast In this episode, the RadioFreeHPC team looks back at the success that ISC20 was and discusses what attending an online-only conference was like. Big kudos and thanks to the ISC team who pulled off one grand challenge of re-planning and did it so well! Shahin offers his reflections on scheduling an online conference […]The post RadioFreeHPC: ISC, Student Cluster Competition Recap appeared first on insideHPC.

Data center infrastructure provider Inspur Information has announced a plate liquid-cooling 2U 4-node server, the i24M5-LC, that the company said is optimized for large-scale water-cooling server data centers with PUEThe post Inspur Launches Server for Mobile Liquid Cooling Cluster appeared first on insideHPC.

This white paper from Ayar Labs, "Paradigm Change: Reinventing HPC Architectures with In-Package Optical I/O," discusses an important innovation: reinventing HPC architectures with in-package optical I/O. The introduction of in-package optical I/O technology helps HPC centers accelerate the slope of compute progress needed to tackle ever-growing scientific problem sizes and HPC/AI convergence.The post Paradigm Change: Reinventing HPC Architectures with In-Package Optical I/O appeared first on insideHPC.

The U.S. has launched a $75 million to accelerate quantum information science (QIS) research and development, funding that will establish three Quantum Leap Challenge Institutes. An announcement today from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science Foundation (NSF) said the institutes will be hosted by the University of Colorado, Cal-Berkeley and the University of Illinois and will integrate resources and expertise of the U. S. National Laboratories and industry partners. Along with R&D, the institutes will also “focus on training and educating a diverse, quantum-ready U.S. workforce.”The post U.S. Launches $75M Push to Advance Quantum Information Science – 3 University Centers appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Mike Adams, VMware’s Senior Director CPBU, AI/ML Market Development, talks with us about a new, integrated VMware vSphere 7 feature enabling “elastic infrastructure” on-demand for AI and machine learning. VMware vSphere Bitfusion is a result of VMware’s 2019 acquisition of Bitfusion, developer of virtualized hardware accelerators, including GPUs, used to improve performance of AI/ML workloads.The post Video: VMware Talks GPU Virtualization, Sharing for AI/ML appeared first on insideHPC.

One of – if not the – most famous car races in the world, the Indianapolis 500, will take AV form a year from this fall when more than 36 universities globally will compete for $1.5 million in prize money in the Indy Autonomous Challenge, to be held at the world-famous motor speedway in Indiana. […]The post Autonomous Vehicles to Race at Indy 500 Speedway appeared first on insideHPC.

In this compelling use case provided by our friends over at HPC storage solution provider Panasas, we look at how the UC San Diego Center for Microbiome Innovation (CMI) got around a number of hurdles by deploying a Panasas ActiveStor® high-performance storage solution.The post UC San Diego Center for Microbiome Innovation Breaks Data Bottlenecks appeared first on insideHPC.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have conducted what they claim is the largest simulation of flow inside an internal combustion engine. Insights gained from the simulation – run on 51,328 cores of Argonne’s Theta supercomputer – could help auto manufacturers to design greener engines. A blog post on the […]The post Argonne Claims Largest Engine Flow Simulation Using Theta Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

This interview is with Merle Giles, founder and CEO of Moonshot Research and a tireless advocate for HPC’s role as an accelerator to industrial innovation. While he was at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, his team partnered with nearly 60 percent of the manufacturers in the U.S. FORTUNE100®, as well as with bio-medical, chemical, tech, oil and gas, and agriculture companies. He and his corporate partners were founding members of two key digital manufacturing consortia....The post The Hyperion-insideHPC Interviews: Supercomputing Populist Merle Giles on the Business Realities of Commercial HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) today announced that Dor Minzer receives the 2019 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation, “On Monotonicity Testing and the 2-to-2-Games Conjecture.” The key contributions of Minzer’s dissertation are settling the complexity of testing monotonicity of Boolean functions and making a significant advance toward resolving the Unique Games Conjecture, […]The post ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Goes to Tel Aviv University Graduate appeared first on insideHPC.

Core Scientific, an infrastructure and software solutions provider for AI and blockchain led by CEO Kevin Turner, the former COO of Microsoft, announced the acquisition of certain assets and technology of Atrio Inc., a performance-critical AI and HPC cloud services company. Core Scientific has also recently partnered with Nvidia, the inventor of the GPU, as well […]The post Core Scientific Acquires Atrio, Adds to its AI Capabilities as the Cloud for Data Scientists appeared first on insideHPC.

Chenbro has launched the RB23708, a Level 6, 2U rackmount server barebone designed for mission-critical, storage-focused applications in data center and HPC enterprise. The RB23708 is pre-integrated with an Intel Server Board S2600WFTR that supports up to two 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable “Cascade Lake” processors. The RB23708 is a barebones server solution that pre-integrates […]The post Chenbro Unveils 2U 8-Bay Rack Mount Server for HPC, Data Center appeared first on insideHPC.

In this feature article from our friends over at Mellanox, we discuss how weather and climate models are both compute and data intensive. Forecast quality scales with modeling complexity and resolution. Resolution depends on the performance of supercomputers. And supercomputer performance depends on the underlying interconnect technology: to get higher performance, the interconnect must be able to move data quickly, effectively and in a scalable manner across compute resources.The post InfiniBand Powers World’s Leading Weather Forecasters’ Supercomputers appeared first on insideHPC.

Ryan Quick works at the crossroads of advanced technology innovation, where hyperscale, HPC and AI come together. A principal and co-founder of boutique consulting firm Providentia Worldwide, which implements systems solutions for its clientele, Quick says edge and IoT are two catalysts bringing about the day when HPC technologies will “really start to mix and match” – even within vendors’ own product lines.The post The Hyperion-insideHPC Interviews: Ryan Quick on the ‘Prometheus Fire’ where HPC, Hyperscale and AI Converge appeared first on insideHPC.

In this episode, we drill down on what Intel is doing with their cool Optane memory tech, shooting for speeds that remind you of memory, sizes that look like storage, and costs that make it look like a deal, with real byte-addressable persistent memory right inside the server – or block-addressable, if you want. This is a space that was bound to get filled and we’ve been watching the industry’s progress.The post Radio Free HPC: The Persistence of Memory appeared first on insideHPC.

Welcome to the 2020 OpenFabrics Workshop video gallery. The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) is focused on accelerating development of high performance fabrics. The annual OFA Workshop, held in virtual format this year, is a premier means of fostering collaboration among those who develop fabrics, deploy fabrics, and create applications that rely on fabrics. It is the […]The post 2020 OpenFabrics Alliance Workshop – Video Gallery appeared first on insideHPC.

The Flatiron Institute, New York, a community of scientists using modern computational tools to advance the basic sciences, is deploying a 320-node addition to its research cluster that will be managed by cluster management software from Bright Computing, maker of Linux cluster automation and management platform for HPC and machine learning. The implementation at Flatiron, […]The post Flatiron Institute Expands beyond 1000 Nodes with Bright Computing Cluster Management Software appeared first on insideHPC.

We're recognizing that HPC is expanding to include AI. But it's not just AI, it is big data and edge, too. Many of the large scientific instruments are turning out huge amounts of data that need to be analyzed in real time. And big data is no longer limited to the scientific instruments – it's all the weather stations and all the smart city sensors generating massive amounts of data. As a result, HPC is facing a broader challenge and Intel realizes that a single hardware solution is not going to be right for everybody.The post Dell Technologies HPC Community Interview: Bob Wisniewski, Intel’s Chief HPC Architect, Talks Aurora and Getting to Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.

Industry analyst firm Hyperion Research announced today that it and the HPC User Forum Steering Committee are accepting submissions for the 16th round of the HPC Innovation Excellence Awards. The program started in 2011 and has recognized nearly 100 HPC-supported achievements in academia, government and the private sector. Award entries are invited from any country worldwide […]The post Entries Open for Hyperion Research HPC Innovation Excellence Awards appeared first on insideHPC.

Dr. Patrick Flick, a software engineer at Google who earned his PhD in computational science from Georgia Tech in 2019, has won the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing (ACM SIGHPC) 2020 SIGHPC Doctoral Dissertation Award. This year’s award is presented for outstanding contributions to parallel string algorithms on distributed memory […]The post Google’s Dr. Patrick Flick Wins ACM SIGHPC Doctoral Dissertation Award appeared first on insideHPC.

Ramping up AI technology holds the key to deploying robotic arms at-scale. This case study "Industrial Servers Ramp Up AI for Robotic Arms" from our friends over at Advantech explores the benefits of augmenting robotic arms with AI. It also explains how AI-ready industrial servers differ from a typical server found in a data center and looks at the partnership between Advantech and Micron for memory and storage powering AI in smart manufacturing.The post Industrial Servers Ramp Up AI for Robotic Arms appeared first on insideHPC.

FOSTER CITY, Calif., July 09, 2020 — GridGain Systems, provider of enterprise-grade in-memory computing solutions based on Apache Ignite, today announced the call for papers for the In-Memory Computing Summit 2020 virtual worldwide conference, a free conference October 28-29. The Call for Papers for the virtual conference closes August 28, 2020. Organized by GridGain Systems, […]The post Call for Papers for In-Memory Computing Summit 2020 appeared first on insideHPC.

Lenovo is installing a Neptune liquid cooled supercomputer at the Max Planck Society, a delivery that began two months ago and is scheduled to be completed early next year. The €20 million project includes a 100,000-core Neptune comprised of Lenovo ThinkSystem servers with Intel CPUs (unspecified) and Nvidia Tesla A100 GPUs, software and operational support, […]The post Lenovo Standing Up Liquid-cooled Neptune System at Max Planck Society appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, our friends over at Inspur write about how the company is delivering new servers that address the most demanding performance from companies that are implementing AI and ML into their workflows. Reducing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) while increasing the productivity of their teams is critical for CIOs and Line of Business leadership.The post Inspur Introduces Leading Designs of A100 Servers for AI and HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

After more than three decades in supercomputing as a strategic marketing and communications executive, Mike Bernhardt has seen the HPC community evolve through the many phases of its existence. A “Perennial” (see below) at the annual SC industry conference, Bernhardt remains fascinated by the connection between leading-edge computation and scientific discovery. “In many ways, it’s […]The post The Hyperion-insideHPC Interviews: Rich Brueckner and Mike Bernhardt Talk Exascale and HPC Marketing: How the HPC Community Tells its Story to the World appeared first on insideHPC.

Google today introduced the Accelerator-Optimized VM (A2) instance family on Google Compute Engine based on the NVIDIA Ampere A100 Tensor Core GPU, launched in mid-May. Available in alpha and with up to 16 GPUs, A2 VMs are the first A100-based offering in a public cloud, according to Google. At its launch, Nvidia said the A100, built on the company’s new Ampere architecture, delivers “the greatest generational leap ever,” according to Nvidia, enhancing training and inference computing performance by 20x over its predecessors.The post Google Unveils 1st Public Cloud VMs using Nvidia Ampere A100 Tensor GPUs appeared first on insideHPC.

Published reports state that TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) may begin commercial production within two years of specialized supercomputer AI chips, an outgrowth of the company’s customized fabrication of the Wafer Scale Engine (WSE) developed by AI start-up Cerebras Systems. Last August, Cerebras unveiled the WSE (price: US$2 million), which it said is the largest […]The post Reports: TSMC May Commercialize Production of Cerebras-style AI Supercomputing Chips appeared first on insideHPC.

This new GigaOm Radar Report "GigaOm Radar for Evaluating Data Warehouse Platforms" provided by our friends over at Vertica, examines the leading platforms in the data warehouse marketplace, describes the fundamentals of the technology, identifies key criteria and evaluation metrics by which organizations can evaluate competing platforms, describes some potential technology developments to look out for in the future, and classifies platforms across those criteria and metrics.The post GigaOm Radar for Evaluating Data Warehouse Platforms appeared first on insideHPC.

Doug Ball is a leading expert in computational fluid dynamics and aerodynamic engineering, disciplines he became involved with more than 40 years ago. In this interview with the late Rich Brueckner of insideHPC, Ball discusses the increased scale and model complexity that HPC technology has come to handle and, looking to the future, his anticipation […]The post The Hyperion-insideHPC Interviews: Rich Brueckner and Doug Ball Talk CFD, Autonomous Mobility and Driving Down HPC Package Sizing appeared first on insideHPC.

....we discuss some recent government news. First is that the US House is looking to devote an additional $1.25 billion over the next five years. But even bigger is the proposal to expand the US National Science Foundation by $100 beeelion – which is more than 4x the size of the existing organization. We discuss the implications of this and how this might change the game in terms of base research. There is also a bill to significantly dial up funding for Quantum Information Science. All good and the team s excited to see these moves and hopes they’ll proceed swimmingly!The post RadioFreeHPC Podcast: NSF, QIS Funding, But First… appeared first on insideHPC.

Three companies – Samsung, IBM and Tencent – dominate the global AI patent race over the past 10 years, while fierce competition between the U.S, and China overshadows other countries and regions, including the EU. These are the key findings of OxFirst, a specialist in IP law and economics (and spin out of Oxford University), […]The post Samsung, IBM, Tencent Lead AI Patent Race, Europe Lags appeared first on insideHPC.

Frédéric Hannoyer (48, Ecole Polytechnique Paris, Ecole des Ponts Paris, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) has been appointed chief operating officer of SiPearl, the microprocessor designer for the European exascale supercomputer. In April, SiPearl signed a technological licensing agreement with Arm, the global semiconductor IP provider, granting the organization access to the Arm Neoverse platform, codenamed […]The post Frédéric Hannoyer Appointed COO of SiPearl, Designer of Europe’s Exascale Chip appeared first on insideHPC.