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

In this sponsored post, our friends over at Ayar Labs indicate that although the industry has long recognized the potential of optical I/O as a solution for many HPC challenges, it is only in recent years that economic in-package optical solutions have become available. At last, optical I/O has emerged as the best solution to drive the next phase of Moore’s Law-like advances in post-exascale systems performance. In part this is because there have not been game-changing breakthroughs in the materials used in traditional interconnects.The post Reinventing HPC Architectures with In-Package Optical I/O appeared first on insideHPC.

The HPC-AI Advisory Council (HPCAIAC) in collaboration with the National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) Singapore today announced the teams competing in the co-organized, third annual APAC HPC-AI Competition supporting student development and mastery in high performance computing and AI disciplines. Comprised of undergraduate and graduate competitors from some of Asia Pacific’s leading academic institutions, 30 teams […]The post Record Number of Student Teams to Participate in the APAC HPC and AI Competition appeared first on insideHPC.

Xilinx has announced that Hasmukh Ranjan has joined the company as chief information officer. As CIO, Hasmukh will lead Xilinx’s information technology group and drive internal IT strategy, systems and processes in support of Xilinx’s mission to “build the adaptable, intelligent world.” Hasmukh joins Xilinx from Synopsys, where he served as the company’s CIO and […]The post Xilinx Names Hasmukh Ranjan Chief Information Officer appeared first on insideHPC.

DDN announced that its data infrastructure is used in the NVIDIA supercomputer that achieved the seventh position in the most recently announced TOP500 supercomputing list announced last week during ISC 2020 Digital conference. DDN AI400X all-flash systems complement the high-performance capabilities of the NVIDIA DGX A100 cluster, dubbed Selene, the largest industrial supercomputer in the United States. The […]The post DDN Data Storage in 7th-ranked Nvidia Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

We have a new #1 on the TOP500 list of most powerful supercomputers. Big gets bigger by a factor of 2.8x as Fujitsu’s “Supercomputer Fugaku” tops the list at 415 PFlops. There are also an additional three new entries in the top 10. We break down the top of the list in this fascinating episode […]The post RadioFreeHPC Podcast: New Top on the TOP500 appeared first on insideHPC.

As director of the Exascale Computing Project (ECP), Doug Kothe leads one of the United State’s most important strategic computing efforts, one that promises significant impacts on scientific research and national competitiveness. The position draws upon Kothe’s more than three decades of experience as a physicist and computer scientist at several of the Department of […]The post The Hyperion-insideHPC Interviews: Rich Brueckner and ECP’s Doug Kothe Talk Exascale, Containers of the Future and Multiple Machine Coordination appeared first on insideHPC.

The IBM-led OpenPOWER Foundation announced the contribution of the IBM A2I POWER processor core design and associated FPGA environment to the open source ecosystem. The release, which took place today at the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit, follows the opening of the POWER Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) last August and is intended to enable the […]The post A2I POWER Processor Core Contributed to OpenPOWER Community appeared first on insideHPC.

In this guest article, our friends at Intel discuss how accelerated computing has diversified over the past several years given advances in CPU, GPU, FPGA, and AI technologies. This innovation drives the need for an open and cross-platform language that allows developers to realize the potential of new hardware, minimizes development cost and complexity, and maximizes reuse of their software investments.The post New, Open DPC++ Extensions Complement SYCL and C++ appeared first on insideHPC.

At his annual keynote address closing out the ISC 2020 conference, Thomas Sterling, Professor of Intelligent Systems Engineering at the University of Indiana, eulogized four members of the HPC community who died over the past year. Here are excerpts from his remarks: It’s my sad duty to, but certainly a responsibility, to note some of […]The post Thomas Sterling Eulogizes Rich Brueckner, Ann Redelfs, Steve Tuecke, Lucy Nowell: 4 Leaders Lost to the HPC Community appeared first on insideHPC.

This special report sponsored by Dell Technologies, takes a look at how now more than ever, agencies from all levels of government are teaming with private Information Technology (IT) organizations to leverage AI and HPC to create and implement solutions that not only increase safety for all, but also provide a more streamlined and modern experience for citizens.The post insideHPC Special Report: Citizens Benefit from Public/Private Partnerships – Part 3 appeared first on insideHPC.

HPC industry veteran Jack Collins, long-time fixture in the scientific supercomputing community, has seen it all in HPC, from the days when his input/output device for storing integrals was nine-track tape to today’s 750-GPU monster systems. So he has a full appreciation for how far HPC has come. At the same time, he’s concerned about the power of HPC for dark purposes, such as deepfakes: “’Seeing is believing,’ is what people used to say,” he told the late Rich Brueckner. “I can hack a video and make it look like anything in an afternoon. That’s potentially societal altering. We have to be very careful with that.”The post The Hyperion-insideHPC Interviews: Rich Brueckner Talks with Jack Collins about the Emergence of ‘HPC Everywhere’ and Its Impact on Science appeared first on insideHPC.

In this episode of Let’s Talk Exascale, Mark Taylor of Sandia National Laboratories talks about using exascale supercomputers for severe weather and water resource forecasting. A sub-project within the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Exascale Computing Project (ECP) called E3SM-MMF is working to improve the ability to simulate the water cycle and the processes around precipitation. Our guest on the latest episode of ECP’s podcast, Let’s Talk Exascale, is Mark Taylor of Sandia National Laboratories, principal investigator of the E3SM-MMF project.The post Let’s Talk Exascale: Forecasting Water Resources and Severe Weather with Greater Confidence appeared first on insideHPC.

Some technologies, it’s said, are “always 10 years away” – we hear this in reference to autonomous vehicles and quantum computing. Of course, how far away we think they are has a lot to do with how they’re defined. Semi-autonomous cars are here today and becoming smarter with each new model year. As for quantum […]The post Quantum Superiority: How Far Away? appeared first on insideHPC.

Intel and the National Science Foundation (NSF), joint funders of the Machine Learning for Wireless Networking Systems (MLWiNS) program, today announced recipients of awards for research projects into ultra-dense wireless systems that deliver the throughput, latency and reliability requirements of future applications – including distributed machine learning computations over wireless edge networks. Here are the […]The post Intel, NSF Name Winners of Wireless Machine Learning Research Funding appeared first on insideHPC.

In this Sponsored Post, our friends over at Altair explain how remote access and cloud collaboration tools allow companies of all sizes to discover and innovate, anywhere and anytime, and in today’s distributed world they can make the difference between winning and falling behind.The post Collaboration Moves to the Cloud in a Work-from-home World appeared first on insideHPC.

More than 20 companies have joined an industry consortium to establish specifications for multi-wavelength integrated optics – the emerging interconnect technology whose advocates say is critical to next-generation HPC and AI. Announced today, the CW-WDM MSA (Continuous-Wave Wavelength Division Multiplexing Multi-Source Agreement) Group, wants to build an ecosystem to work on common standards and interoperability for dense laser light sources, which in turn will enable broad adoption of optical I/O.The post Never Enough Bandwidth: Optical I/O Consortium Formed to Set Interconnect Standards appeared first on insideHPC.

At ISC 2020 Digital, the Swedish e-Science Research Center (SeRC), Stockholm, has announced plans to use Intel’s oneAPI unified programming language by researchers conducting massive simulations powered by CPUs and GPUs. The center said it chose the oneAPI programming model, designed to span CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and other architectures and silicon, to accelerate compute for research using GROMACS (GROningen MAchine for Chemical Simulations) molecular dynamics software, developed by SeRC and first released in 1991The post SeRC Turns to oneAPI Multi-Chip Programming Model for Accelerated Research appeared first on insideHPC.

Students from China’s University of Science and Technology (USTC) won first place in this year’s annual Student Cluster Competition at the ISC 2020 Digital conference. This year’s competition focused on the global fight against Covid-19 by including applications that address education and applied learning towards accelerating bioscience research and discovery. The teams, totaling 80 students, were tasked to test several applications used by scientists and researchers for finding a cure for the pandemic.The post ISC 2020 Student Cluster Competition: The Winner Is…. appeared first on insideHPC.

It is well documented that the amount of data that is being produced on a daily/monthly/yearly basis is growing at astronomical rates. IDC have estimated that by 2025, 175 zettabytes of data will be created each year and will continue to grow. The data will be in both structured and unstructured forms and there will be major logistical challenges in moving this data from the devices that create the data to where the data is acted upon and decisions made.The post Empowering Edge Cloud in the 5G & IoT Hyper-Connected Era appeared first on insideHPC.

Nvidia and Mercedes-Benz today said they plan to create an in-vehicle computing system and AI infrastructure for 2024 Mercedes-Benz vehicles equipped with “upgradable automated driving functions.” The resulting cars and trucks will be capable of automated address-to-address driving of regular routes, such as commutes and repeat deliveries, according to the companies.The post Car as ‘Computing Device’: Mercedes-Benz and Nvidia Team to Build Software-defined Vehicles for 2024 appeared first on insideHPC.

Industry luminary Paul Muzio, holder of prominent positions in academia and private industry over a multi-decade career in HPC, is bullish on supercomputing – and deeply concerned. In this video, Muzio spoke with the late Rich Brueckner about the past, present and future of supercomputing. He sees a future in which compute power is […]The post The Hyperion-insideHPC Interviews: Rich Brueckner Talks with Paul Muzio about His Hopes, Concerns for HPC and AI appeared first on insideHPC.

It’s been a good week for Arm: the Fugaku supercomputer at Japan’s Riken research center was named no. 1 on the TOP500 listing of the world’s most powerful HPC systems, and today, the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Munich announced it will deploy HPE’s Cray CS500 with Fujitsu A64FX chips based on the Arm architecture – the same processor used in Fugaku (and then there’s Apple switching from x86 for new Arm chips).The post Arm Throwing Elbows: LRZ to Deploy Arm-based HPE Cray CS500 appeared first on insideHPC.

The new no. 1 system on the updated ranking of the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, released this morning, is Fugaku, a machine built at the Riken Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan. The new top system turned in a High Performance LINPACK (HPL) result of 415.5 petaflops (nearly half an exascale), outperforming Summit, the former no. 1 system housed at the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Lab, by a factor of 2.8x. Fugaku, powered by Fujitsu’s 48-core A64FX SoC, is the first ARM-based system to take the TOP500 top spot.The post ARM-based Fugaku Supercomputer on Summit of New Top500 – Surpasses Exaflops on AI Benchmark appeared first on insideHPC.

This special report sponsored by Dell Technologies, takes a look at how now more than ever, agencies from all levels of government are teaming with private Information Technology (IT) organizations to leverage AI and HPC to create and implement solutions that not only increase safety for all, but also provide a more streamlined and modern experience for citizens.The post insideHPC Special Report: Citizens Benefit from Public/Private Partnerships – Part 2 appeared first on insideHPC.

Instead of its usual mid-year HPC market update presented at the ISC conference in Frankfurt, industry analyst firm Hyperion Research has virtually released its latest findings – including estimates of COVID-19 ‘s impact on the industry, on growth of HPC in public clouds and a significant shift in the competitive standing among the leading HPC server vendors. Taking 2019 in total, Hyperion sized the HPC server market at $13.7 billion, record revenuesThe post ‘Rocky Year’ – Hyperion’s HPC Market Update: COVID-19 Hits Q1 Revenues, Cloud HPC Boom, Shift in Server Vendor Standings appeared first on insideHPC.

In this extraordinary episode of Radio Free HPC, the crew interviews the industry icon that is @HPC_Guru. This is the first time that anyone has been granted an interview with him and we’re proud to have been chosen for this honor. We posed an even dozen questions and received very thoughtful responses, which we rendered out in a machine voice in order to fit our podcast format. In the interview, HPC_Guru tells us his top five cool things in HPC today, why he remains anonymous, where he thinks HPC hardware will be in 10 years and who he thinks will be the first to reach exascale. And that’s just four of our 12 questions!The post HPC Guru Speaketh! Kind of… appeared first on insideHPC.

There are fresh episodes of Radio Free HPC out in the wild and, in case you missed them, here’s what’s new: ColdQuanta Serves Up Some Bose-Einstein Condensate May 7, 2020 The show starts with Dan, Jessi and Shahin in attendance. Henry is traveling from his old home base in Minnesota to his new command bunker […]The post Radio Free HPC Episodes ….In Case You Missed It appeared first on insideHPC.

SC20, scheduled for November 15-20 in Atlanta, is in the throes of planning for this year’s conference amidst the global COVID-19 pandemic – and conference General Chair Christine E. Cuicchi today said that in the months since the coronavirus outbreak, “the SC20 committee began planning for both in-person and virtual attendance.” Noting that open registration for the conference will begin on August 14, Cuicchi also said the conference planning committee will provide updates (here) on the event’s status as the course of the pandemic unfolds.The post SC20 General Chair: We’re Planning for In-Person and Virtual Conference appeared first on insideHPC.

Lenovo this morning launched two new ThinkSystem servers, the SR860 V2 and SR850 V2, utilizing 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors with Intel Deep Learning Boost, along with introduction of GPU support on the SR860 V2 (four double-wide 300W or eight single-wide GPUs). The servers also offer increased NVMe storage capacity for handling AI workloads, high end VDI deployments and data analytics.The post Lenovo Launches ThinkSystem Servers with GPU Support, Increased NVMe Storage appeared first on insideHPC.

PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, has issued an additional 10 awards of supercomputing resources, with a total of 227.6 million core hours for the European Union’s effort to combat COVID-19. This follows the first 10 awards recently announced by the organization. Here’s a summary of the latest PRACE awards....The post PRACE Awards Hundreds of Millions More Core Hours to Combat COVID-19 appeared first on insideHPC.

Sandia National Laboratories Vanguard program has selected SoftIron, Ltd., to provide supplemental file and object storage for Sandia’s ARM-based Stria high performance computing cluster.Stria supports the petascale Astra supercomputer – which Sandia said is the fastest ARM-based system on the TOP500 listing of the world’s most powerful computers – as a development system for preparing software releases and codes to be used on Astra.The post Sandia Selects SoftIron File and Object Storage for Stria Cluster appeared first on insideHPC.

The long march of HPC-class technologies into high end enterprise IT took another step forward today with the unveiling by HPC storage stalwart DataDirect Networks of new corporate branding and market positioning focused on the broader enterprise market.Calling itself a “premier provider of AI and data management software and hardware solutions enabling intelligent infrastructure," privately held DDN's announcement caps a series of acquisitions in recent years to address standard IT workloads, such as virtualization, databases and file sharing, in support of its expanded market mission. In 2019, DDN purchased the IntelliFlash business from Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC), as well as Nexenta, maker of software defined storage (SDS) for 5G and IoT.The post DDN Unveils New Branding, Expands Market Positioning into the Enterprise – ‘Intelligent Infrastructure’ appeared first on insideHPC.

In news disclosed via tweet, Microsoft Azure Principal Program Manager for HPC & Big Compute Evan Burness disclosed that Steve Scott, long-time industry luminary and senior manager at Cray, is leaving HPE for Microsoft to become technical fellow and corporate vice president of hardware architecture. Mostly at Cray off and on for nearly 30 years […]The post HPE (Cray) SVP, HPC Luminary Steve Scott Leaving for Microsoft appeared first on insideHPC.

A team at the University of Arkansas is using the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center’s Anton 2 system to simulate molecular systems for microseconds or longer to investigate how the Coronavirus that causes COVID-19 attaches to human cells, PSC reported. Anton 2, developed by privately held D. E. Shaw Research (DESRES) of New York, is a special-purpose, […]The post Anton 2 at PSC for Coronavirus Binding Simulation, COVID-19 Test Development appeared first on insideHPC.

This special report sponsored by Dell Technologies, takes a look at how now more than ever, agencies from all levels of government are teaming with private Information Technology (IT) organizations to leverage AI and HPC to create and implement solutions that not only increase safety for all, but also provide a more streamlined and modern experience for citizens.The post insideHPC Special Report: Citizens Benefit from Public/Private Partnerships appeared first on insideHPC.

Researchers using the Frontera supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) have uncovered the atomic makeup of the sugary shield on the coronavirus that could prove instrumental to the workings of the contagion, now spreading death, illness and economic destruction around the world. UCSD scientists have used about 2.3 million Frontera node hours for molecular dynamics simulations and modeling.The post COVID Camouflage: TACC’s Frontera Reveals Virus’s ‘Sugar Coating’ appeared first on insideHPC.

Launched last December, Amazon Web Services today announced general availability of its sixth generation of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, with three new instances powered by AWS-designed, Arm-based Graviton2 processors, that the company said delivers 40 percent better price/performance over current x86-based instances.The post AWS: GA of Arm-based Instances Boost Price/Performance 40% for HPC, Inferencing Workloads appeared first on insideHPC.

Carnegie Mellon University Assistant Professor Gerald “Jerry” Wang has been named the 2020 Frederick A. Howes Scholar in Computational Science for his work in nanoscale fluid flows. Wang, a fellow from 2014-2018, earned his mechanical engineering doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2019. His thesis focused on the structure of fluids moving through confined spaces, especially in nanotubes thousands of times thinner than a hair.The post CMU’s Jerry Wang Wins 2020 Frederick Howes Award appeared first on insideHPC.

Previously built on Hadoop, NetApp said it was also looking to modernize the service infrastructure “to reduce the complexities of deploying new AI services and the costs of running large-scale analytics. In addition, the shift was needed to enable real-time predictive AI, and to abstract deployment, allowing the technology to run on multi-cloud or on premises seamlessly.”The post NetApp Deploys Iguazio’s Data Science Platform for Optimized Storage Management appeared first on insideHPC.

In the latest in the Let’s Talk Exascale podcast series, Tzanio Kolev of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory describes the work at the Center for Efficient Exascale Discretizations (CEED), one of six co-design centers within the U.S. Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project.The post Podcast: ‘Let’s Talk Exascale’ – Update to the MFEM Element Library for Broader GPU Support appeared first on insideHPC.

Today there are more patents being approved in the Innovation Corridor per capita than in Silicon Valley, USA. In 2019, it was named as the UK’s fastest growing economic region, with businesses in the corridor reporting a turnover of around £121 billion per annum. With a growing population of around 2 million within the corridor, urbanisation is fast becoming a key trend, but there is more to draw the world’s brightest minds here than by its reputation alone. There are, for example, organisations like AstraZenca, which are changing the way medicines and therapies are developed globally, businesses that are influencing how the financial markets are evolving and incubator projects leveraging HPC and AI to drive development at the forefront of many fields of industry.The post The UK Innovation Corridor: HPC and the Bio-Technology Revolution appeared first on insideHPC.

The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center has won a $5 million award from the National Science Foundation to build Neocortex, an AI supercomputer that incorporates the Cerebras Systems Wafer Scale Engine technology introduced last year along with Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s shared memory Superdome Flex hardware. PSC, a joint research organization of Carnegie Mellon University and the University […]The post AI Supercomputer at PSC to Combine Cerebras ‘World’s Largest Chip’ and HPE Superdome Flex appeared first on insideHPC.

The biggest news story today in the world of AI is IBM CEO Arvind Krishna’s letter to Congress explaining the company’s decision to sunset its facial recognition and analysis artificial intelligence software products, a statement that also outlines IBM’s proposals to advance racial equality in the U.S., including broader education and training opportunities. The letter […]The post IBM Sunsets Facial Recognition and Analysis AI Software appeared first on insideHPC.

A possible glimpse at a future form of high performance edge computing – networks of artificial brain synapses – developed by engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is showing promise as a new memristor design for neuromorphic devices, which mimic the neural architecture in the human brain. Published today in Nature Nanotechnology, results of […]The post New Memristors at MIT: Networks of Artificial Brain Synapses for Neuromorphic Devices appeared first on insideHPC.

Another in a series of National Science Foundation supercomputing awards has been announced, this one a $10 million funding for a system to be housed at Purdue University to support HPC and AI workloads and scheduled to enter production next year. The system, dubbed Anvil, will be built in partnership with Dell and AMD and […]The post Purdue’s ‘Anvil’ to Be Driven by Dell, AMD ‘Milan’ CPUs, Nvidia A100 Tensor Core GPUs appeared first on insideHPC.

This special report sponsored by Dell Technologies, takes a deep dive into HPC and AI for life sciences in the era of genomics. The report also highlights a lineup of Ready Solutions created by Dell Technologies which are highly optimized and tuned hardware and software stacks for a variety of industries. The Ready Solutions for HPC Life Sciences have been designed to speed time to production, improve performance with purpose-built solutions, and scale easier with modular building blocks for capacity and performance.The post insideHPC Special Report: HPC and AI for the Era of Genomics – Part 3 appeared first on insideHPC.

Delta, a new supercomputer to be deployed before the end of 2021 at the National Center for Supercomputing Application’s (NCSA), has as part of its mission the expanded adoption of GPU-accelerated scientific computing. NCSA Director Bill Gropp told us that that while NCSA is not new to GPUs (some years ago, staffers there configured a […]The post NCSA’s Upcoming $10M Delta System to Expand Use of GPUs in Scientific Workloads appeared first on insideHPC.

Bright Computing, a global leader in Linux Cluster automation and management software for HPC and machine learning, announced that the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California San Diego will be using Bright Cluster Manager to manage the facility’s newest supercomputer, called ‘Expanse’. The Bright Cluster Manager software platform will enable Expanse to balance and manage resource diversity across virtually all domains of their science and engineering users, maximizing resource utilization and increasing workload efficiency for research scientists across the country and beyond.The post San Diego Supercomputer Center Leverages Bright Cluster Manager in New Expanse Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

A team of researchers are using the Frontera supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) to crack open the proton, a fundamental building block of the atomic nucleus that is used, among other ways, as a medical probe in magnetic resonance imaging. Frontera, the world’s fifth-ranked HPC system on the Top500 list and the […]The post TACC’s Frontera Supports Investigation of Subatomic Protons – ‘the Origin of the Mass of Objects’ appeared first on insideHPC.

KIOXIA America, Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.), the U.S.-based subsidiary of KIOXIA Corporation, has added thin provisioning to its KumoScale™ storage software based on NVM Express™ over Fabrics (NVMe-oF™) technology. Thin provisioning joins KumoScale software’s growing list of advanced storage functions that allow for the virtualization and management of high-performance flash at data center scale.The post KIOXIA Adds Thin Provisioning to KumoScale Software Suite, Increases Cloud Storage Efficiency appeared first on insideHPC.