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

The Deep Learning on Supercomputers workshop has issued its Call for Papers. The event takes place June 25 as part of ISC 2020 in Frankfurt, Germany. "The workshop provides a forum for practitioners working on any and all aspects of DL for scientific research in the High Performance Computing context to present their latest research results and development, deployment, and application experiences. The general theme of this workshop series is the intersection of DL and HPC, while the theme of this particular workshop is centered around the applications of deep learning methods in scientific research: novel uses of deep learning methods, e.g., convolutional neural networks (CNN), recurrent neural networks (RNN), generative adversarial network (GAN), and reinforcement learning (RL), for both natural and social science research, and innovative applications of deep learning in traditional numerical simulation."The post Call for Papers: Deep Learning on Supercomputers workshop appeared first on insideHPC.

Today semiconductor company Tachyum announced today that its Prodigy Processor AI/HPC Reference Design will be used in a supercomputer at an unnamed customer site in 2021. According to the company, the Prodigy processor slated for 2021 delivery "handily outperforms the fastest processors while consuming one-tenth the electrical power, and it is one-third the cost and outperforms GPUs and TPUs on neural net training and inference workloads."The post Tachyum Processor to power 2021 AI/HPC Supercomputer appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Fujitsu announced that it has received an order for an Arm-based supercomputer system from Nagoya University's Information Technology Center. "For the first time in the world, this system will adopt 2,304 nodes of the Fujitsu Supercomputer PRIMEHPC FX1000, which utilizes the technology of the supercomputer Fugaku developed jointly with RIKEN. The sum of the theoretical computational performance of the entire system is 15.88 petaflops, making it one of the highest performing systems in Japan."The post Fujitsu to Deploy Arm-based Supercomputer at Nagoya University appeared first on insideHPC.

In this Let’s Talk Exascale podcast, researchers from the NWChemEx project team describe how they are readying the popular code for Exascale. The NWChemEx team’s most significant success so far has been to scale coupled-cluster calculations to a much larger number of processors. “In NWChem we had the global arrays as a toolkit to be able to build parallel applications.”The post Podcast: Rewriting NWChem for Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.

Researchers at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility achieved a scientific first this month when they used machine learning calculations to automatically prevent fusion plasma disruptions in real time, while simultaneously optimizing the plasma for peak performance. The new experiments are the first of what they expect to be a wave of research in which machine learning–augmented controls could broaden the understanding of fusion plasmas. The work may also help deliver reliable, peak performance operation of future fusion reactors.The post DIII-D Researchers Use Machine Learning to Steer Fusion Plasmas appeared first on insideHPC.

Frank McQuillan from Pivotal gave this talk at FOSDEM 2020. "In this session we will present an efficient way to train many deep learning model configurations at the same time with Greenplum, a free and open source massively parallel database based on PostgreSQL. The implementation involves distributing data to the workers that have GPUs available and hopping model state between those workers, without sacrificing reproducibility or accuracy."The post Efficient Model Selection for Deep Neural Networks on Massively Parallel Processing Databases appeared first on insideHPC.

A new AI reference architecture from vScaler describes how to simplify the configuration and management of software and storage in a cost-effective and easy to use environment. "vScaler – an optimized cloud platform built with AI and Deep Learning workloads in mind – provides you with a production ready environment with integrated Deep Learning application stacks, RDMA accelerated fabric and optimized NVMe storage, eliminating the administrative burden of setting up these complex AI environments manually."The post vScaler Launches AI Reference Architecture appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Molly Presley from the Active Archive Alliance reflects on how the unstructured data storage industry has evolved and the implications for active archives. "We now have software that allows us to extract data from the archive for things like analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, so it adds more value and usability to archived data. And, many of the applications and processes can now be automated through APIs and CLIs to make it easy to automate common tasks and integrate with upstream applications."The post Reflecting on 10 Years of Active Archive appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Altair announced that the 2020 Altair Enlighten Awards is now open for submissions. Presented jointly with the Center for Automotive Research (CAR), the 8th Annual Enlighten Awards were created to acknowledge the world’s best initiatives to reduce vehicle weight and meet emissions targets, inspiring breakthrough innovations to push the industry towards a more sustainable future. "At Altair, when we contemplate the perils of global warming and climate change, we think ‘what can we do to help?’ We believe passionately that our solutions help customers fundamentally rethink and redesign vehicles to reduce weight without reducing performance,” said James Scapa, Altair’s chief executive officer and founder.The post Call for Submissions: 8th Annual Altair Enlighten Awards appeared first on insideHPC.

Tohoku University Medical Megabank Organisation (ToMMo) has demonstrated the world’s first quantum cryptography transmission of whole-genome sequence data in collaboration with Toshiba. The transmission exceeded several hundred gigabytes demonstrating that quantum encryption technology is now capable of large-capacity data transmission, opening up practical applications in genomic medicine and research.The post Researchers transmit genome sequence using quantum cryptography appeared first on insideHPC.

The International Advanced Research Workshop on HPC will return to Cetraro, Italy this summer with a focus on state of the art, emerging disruptive innovations and future scenarios. "The main aim of this workshop is to present and debate advanced topics, open questions, current and future developments, and challenging applications related to advanced high-performance distributed computing and data systems, encompassing implementations ranging from traditional clusters to warehouse-scale data centers, and with architectures including hybrid, multicore, distributed, cloud models, and systems targeted for AI applications."The post International Advanced Research Workshop on HPC Returns to Cetraro June 29 – July 3 appeared first on insideHPC.

A researcher from Queen’s University Belfast has developed an innovative new algorithm that will help make artificial intelligence (AI) fairer and less biased when processing data. "Employing AI techniques directly on raw data results in biased insights, which influence public policy and this could amplify existing disparities. The uptake of fairer AI methods is critical, especially in the public sector, when it comes to such scenarios.”The post New Algorithm to make AI less biased appeared first on insideHPC.

Huihuo Zheng from Argonne National Laboratory gave this talk at ATPESC 2019. "The Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing (ATPESC) provides intensive, two weeks of training on the key skills, approaches, and tools to design, implement, and execute computational science and engineering applications on current high-end computing systems and the leadership-class computing systems of the future."The post Video: Data Parallel Deep Learning appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, Anshu Dubey of Argonne National Laboratory describes the Earth and Space Science application portfolio in the Exascale Computing Project (ECP). “By and large, these applications are solving partial differential equations, and so there is that generality,” Dubey said. “Most times, the range of scales is so huge that you cannot resolve every scale, so then you have to do something called subgrid models, which can be very boutique.”The post Podcast: Earth and Space Science for Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.

The Technical University of Denmark (DTU) is seeking a in our PhD scholarship in GPU processing for Super Resolution Ultrasound Imaging in our Job of the Week. "This PhD projects develops real time processing of the acquired data using GPUs. The research is conducted in a truly multi-disciplinary environment consisting of the four academic partners specializing in advanced ultrasound imaging, silicon CMUT probes, animal experiments, and clinical investigations, and the main purpose is to translate the SURE method from a research idea to the clinic."The post Job of the Week: PhD scholarship in GPU processing for Super Resolution Ultrasound Imaging appeared first on insideHPC.

Computer scientists at the University of Waterloo have found a novel approach that significantly improves the storage efficiency and output speed of computer systems. “Since the invention of computers, networks that connect storage servers in any system were rigid and inflexible. FLAIR leverages a new cutting-edge networking technology to build a smart network layer that can find the fastest way to fulfil information retrieval requests. Our evaluation shows that this approach can fulfil requests up to 2.5 times faster, compared to classical designs.”The post New FLAIR Protocol to Speed Computer Networks appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, David Fellinger from the iRODS Consortium writes that the secure federation capabilities of iRODS has changed the way that we think of data locality. "Data discovery is one of the primary features of iRODS. A researcher can specify search terms retained in an index that allows other researchers to discover that research work."The post Building a Federated Research Collaborative appeared first on insideHPC.

Today WekaIO announced it closed its 2019 fiscal year with record velocity in revenues. The company grew revenue by 600% compared to 2018 with growth fueled by increasing adoption of NVMe-native storage systems to enable I/O-intensive applications in Artificial Intelligence (AI), life sciences, and financial analysis. “We are the only tier-1, enterprise-grade storage solution capable of delivering epic performance at any scale on premises and on the public cloud, and we will continue to fuel our momentum by hiring for key positions and identifying strategic partnerships.”The post WekaIO picks up steam in the HPC Market appeared first on insideHPC.

Hugh Blemings from the OpenPOWER Foundation gave this talk at the Linux.Conf.au conference. "This session will explain the importance of open hardware and software at all levels of the compute environment - embedded/IoT to desktop to hyperscale systems. From here a brief introduction to OpenPOWER and the OpenPOWER Foundation as well as an update on the ecosystem, the status of the hardware and software stacks in question as well as an overview of some of the OpenPOWER hardware out there."The post Video: Open and High Performance Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

The Exascale Computing Project has published a new report to foster and advance software productivity and sustainability for extreme-scale computational science. The report introduces work by the IDEAS-ECP project, explaining its approach, outcomes, and impact of work in partnership with the ECP and broader computational science community. The DOE Exascale Computing Project (ECP) provides a […]The post ECP Report: Advancing Scientific Productivity through Better Scientific Software appeared first on insideHPC.

Today HPE announced that ALCF will deploy the new Cray ClusterStor E1000 as its parallel storage solution. The new collaboration supports ALCF’s scientific research in areas such as earthquake seismic activity, aerospace turbulence and shock-waves, physical genomics and more. "Our recent introduction of the Cray ClusterStor E1000 is delivering ALCF unmatched scalability and performance to meet next-generation HPC storage needs to support emerging, data-intensive workloads."The post Argonne to Deploy Cray ClusterStor E1000 Storage System for Exascale appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Quantum Computing Inc. announced its Mukai quantum application development platform. Focused on developing novel quantum applications, the Company is leveraging their collective expertise in finance, computing, security, mathematics, and physics to develop commercial applications for the financial, security, and government sectors. "Mukai enables developers to create and deploy practical applications that solve very hard problems today,” said Mike Booth, QCI’s Chief Technology Officer. “We believe this will bring immediate value to potential clients, while also providing a clear path to emerging quantum hardware. As Mukai provides an abstraction layer to the actual computing hardware, a client’s investment in application development today should pay off in two ways, without having to take the hardware platform into consideration.”The post Quantum Computing Inc. Releases Mukai Quantum Development Platform appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team discuss whether ZFS is ever going to meet its potential. "Henry weighs in on the evolution of ZFS and how his opinion of ZFS has changed over the last decade or so. Both Shahin and Henry feel ZFS is unique and highly useful and that maybe Linus isn’t up on current ZFS capabilities."The post Podcast: The Trouble with ZFS appeared first on insideHPC.

Chelsea Harris from the University of Michigan gave this talk at the CSGF 2019. "I am developing a FLASH hydrodynamics module, SparkJoy, to perform these simulations at high order. These projects are part of a DOE INCITE project to explore progenitor effects on CC SNe and of the DOE SciDAC program "Towards Exascale Astrophysics of Mergers and Supernovae."The post Video: Making Supernovae with Jets appeared first on insideHPC.

Indiana University has launched a Quantum Science and Engineering Center. The new center will investigate possibilities created by the strange properties of quantum theory, particularly the phenomenon known as quantum entanglement. Within the past two decades or so, scientists have realized that entanglement can revolutionize technologies in fields such as cryptography, computing, and the creation of new materials and sensors. These recent developments hold such promise that some refer to them as the start of the "second quantum revolution."The post Indiana University Launches Quantum Science and Engineering Center appeared first on insideHPC.

The HPC Saudi Conference has issued its Call for Papers. Taking place March 17-19 in Riyadh, HPC Saudi enables participants from academia, industry, and government come together to share ideas and experiences, and discuss cooperation and collaboration, to advance the cutting edge in HPC, nationally and beyond. "This is the 10th HPC Saudi event and this year it will focus on the themes related to the convergence of HPC with big data, artificial intelligence (AI), and IoT. A particular focus is to explore the future HPC technologies in the era of ubiquitous smart computing, such as big data analytics leveraging edge, fog, cloud, and distributed computing for low-latency smart sensing and actor applications."The post Call for Papers: HPC Saudi Conference appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Qumulo announced its 2020 data storage predictions. Qumulo’s predictions are guided by the enterprise’s realization that legacy scale-out and scale-up NAS storage solutions were not designed to handle today’s unstructured data volumes, distributed geographies and diverse file types. In 2020, enterprise organizations will focus on their data-driven businesses, rather than on managing their storage.The post Top Data Storage Predictions for 2020 appeared first on insideHPC.

Today Univa announced the general availability of Navops Launch 2.0, its flagship cloud-automation platform, designed to help enterprises simplify the migration of HPC and AI workloads to their choice of cloud. "With 9 out of 10 enterprises transitioning HPC workloads to the cloud, customers need proven solutions that simplify the migration of on-premise workloads to their choice of cloud," said Rob Lalonde, Vice President and General Manager, Cloud, Univa."The post Univa Releases Navops Launch 2.0 for Migrating HPC & AI Workloads to the Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

David Keyes from KAUST gave this talk at ATPESC 2019. "Analytics can provide to machine learning feature vectors for training. Machine learning, in turn, can impute missing data and provide detection and classification. The scientific opportunities are potentially enormous enough to overcome the inertia of the specialized communities that have gathered around each of paradigms and spur convergence."The post Video: The Convergence of Big Data and Large-scale Simulation appeared first on insideHPC.

Today the ISC 2020 conference announced improvements to its Invited Program. The conference takes place June 21-25 in Frankfurt, Germany. "ISC High Performance 2020 will showcase the latest advancements in HPC, encompassing all the key developments happening in system design, applications, programming models, machine learning, and emerging technologies. Come join over 3,700 attendees, 400 speakers and 160 exhibitors, consisting of vendors and leading research organizations, from June 21 to 25, in Frankfurt, Germany, and find out how high performance computing is shaping tomorrow."The post ISC 2020 Revamps Invited Program appeared first on insideHPC.

Today, Bright Computing announced that Simula Research Laboratory has chosen Bright Cluster Manager to manage its multi-architecture, multi-OS HPC environment. "After a careful evaluation, Simula chose Bright Cluster Manager to provide comprehensive management of eX³, enabling the organization to administer its HPC platform as a single entity; provisioning the hardware, operating systems, and workload managers from a unified interface. Further, the intuitive Bright management console will allow Simula to see and respond to what’s happening in their cluster anywhere, at any time."The post Simula Research Lab to Manage Heterogeneous HPC Platform with Bright Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

Just over a year after Los Alamos National Laboratory launched the Efficient Mission Centric Computing Consortium (EMC3), 15 companies, universities and federal organizations are now working together to explore new ways to make extreme-scale computers more efficient. "In the first year of EMC3 we have already seen efficiency improvements to HPC in a number of areas, including the world's first NVMe-based hardware-accelerated compressed parallel filesystem, in-situ analysis enabled on network adapters for a real simulation code, identifying issues with file system metadata performance in the Linux Kernel, record-setting in situ simulation output indexing, demonstrating file-system metadata indexing, and more."The post LANL’s EMC3 Consortium enjoys rapid growth in its first year appeared first on insideHPC.

Today IBM announced a new AI Inference POWER9 Server. The new IBM Power System IC922 is a purpose-built inference server designed to put your AI models to work and help you unlock business insights. "The IBM Power IC922 supports up to six NVIDIA T4 GPUs and IBM intends to support up to eight NVIDIA T4 GPUs and additional accelerator options. This allows clients to leverage the inference accelerator that best suit their needs with flexibility. Power IC922 uses optimized hardware and AI software to deliver the necessary components for AI inference whether in a central data center or in a distributed data center closer to the sources of data."The post IBM Announces New AI Inference POWER9 Server appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, Prof. Ramin Yahayapour from the University of Göttingen describes how the Lise supercomputer at ZIB is powering research and discovery. With 5.355 Petaflops of performance on the Linpack benchmark, the Atos system ranks #40 on the TOP500. "By entering into the second phase of our efforts with Atos and Intel, our users will benefit right away from the more powerful system without needing to change their code. The HLRN-IV supercomputer provides true performance portability."The post Intel Powers HLRN-IV Supercomputer at ZIB in Germany appeared first on insideHPC.

Candace Culhane, a program/project director in Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Directorate for Simulation and Computation, has been selected as the general chair for the 2022 SC Conference (SC22). "We are thrilled to announce that Candy Culhane is the SC22 General Chair. She brings to the conference her deep knowledge and practical experience in working with the high-performance computing industry sector, national laboratories, and supercomputer centers,” said Michela Taufer, the Jack Dongarra Professor at the University of Tennessee Knoxville and SC Steering Committee chair.The post Candace Culhane from LANL to Chair SC22 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Dan Olds from OrionX.net writes that university researchers had an opportunity to showcase their work at the third annual University AI Challenge at SC19. "Winning researchers were rewarded with an all-expense paid trip to SC19 in Denver, along with the opportunity to present their research and findings at the Lenovo show floor theater. Eight researchers from universities in Europe, Asia, and North America were selected to win this award and all presented their research in the Lenovo theater during the exhibition."The post Video Showcase: Lenovo Hosts AI Researchers at SC19 appeared first on insideHPC.

The Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing (ATPESC) has issued its Call for Applications. The event will take place from July 26–August 7 in the Chicago area. "ATPESC provides intensive, two-week training on the key skills, approaches, and tools needed to carry out scientific computing research on the world's most powerful supercomputers."The post Call for Applications: ATPESC 2020 Extreme-Scale Computing Training Program appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Altair CTO Sam Mahalingam predicts that HPC and AI will continue to move forward in interesting ways in 2020. "As the decade has closed, we are now at a point when HPC and cloud work together to power solutions that lead companies to innovate better products and unearth new discoveries. HPC in the cloud is an increasingly viable option for organizations of all sizes and will only become stronger as technologies continue to converge and mature."The post Top Three Predictions for HPC, AI, and the Cloud 2020 appeared first on insideHPC.

In this Let’s Talk Exascale podcast, Kathy Yelick and Lenny Oliker from LBNL describe how the ExaBiome project is developing computational tools to analyze microbial species—bacteria or viruses that typically live in communities of hundreds of different species. "Pushing past the traditional shared-memory-system approach, the ExaBiome team has developed efficient distributed memory implementations and analyzed some of the largest datasets in the metagenomics community."The post Podcast: Supercomputing the Human Microbiome appeared first on insideHPC.

The IEEE International Scalable Computing Challenge (SCALE 2020) has issued its Call for Papers. "Are you doing real-world problem-solving using computing that scales? Want to win $1000 or $500? Submit a whitepaper to 13th IEEE International Scalable Computing Challenge (SCALE 2020) by Feb 5, 2020. Finalists must register, present & demo at CCGrid 2020."The post Call for Papers: SCALE 2020 Scalable Computing Challenge for Cash Prizes appeared first on insideHPC.

Adam Riesselman from Insitro gave this talk at DOE CSGF 2019. "Biology is quickly becoming a data-driven discipline, in which thousands of biological hypotheses can be answered in a single test tube. I will first highlight the technologies that have enabled this revolution. I will then discuss these advances in the context of understanding natural genetic variation with computational models and their application in predicting the effects of mutations and designing new sets of sequences with desirable properties."The post Video: Reasoning About Biology With Data-Driven Approaches appeared first on insideHPC.

NREL is seeking an HPC User Support Technician in our Job of the Week. "Your job will be front-line support for the High Performance Computing user community which includes scientists, researchers, and students at many levels of education and experience."The post Job of the Week: HPC User Support Technician at NREL appeared first on insideHPC.

Jack Dongarra from UT Knoxville gave this talk at ATPESC 2019. "Success in large-scale scientific computations often depends on algorithm design. Even the fastest machine may prove to be inadequate if insufficient attention is paid to the way in which the computation is organized. We have used several problems from computational physics to illustrate the importance of good algorithms, and we offer some very general principles for designing algorithms."The post Jack Dongarra presents: Adaptive Linear Solvers and Eigensolvers appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Paul Grun from the OpenFabrics Alliance provides a preview of the upcoming OFA Workshop. "We are especially excited about how this year’s program is coming together. At the OFA Workshop 2019, we introduced a hands-on tutorial allowing participants to install an RDMA-enabled cluster directly on their laptop. In response to the overwhelmingly positive feedback, we are thrilled to be building on last year’s success by expanding the tutorials being offered this year."The post OpenFabrics Alliance to Expand Hands-On Tutorial Offerings at Its 2020 Workshop appeared first on insideHPC.

ANSYS is lowering the barrier of adoption for simulation software through its growing academic program. Free student software — a key component of the program — recently surpassed more than one million downloads since its launch in late 2015, empowering students to develop skillsets they need to compete in the job market, stay ahead of the latest technology trends and make an immediate impact after graduation.The post ANSYS Student Software Surpasses One Million Downloads appeared first on insideHPC.

UMass Dartmouth’s powerful new cluster from Microway affords the university five times the compute performance its researchers enjoyed previously, with over 85% more total memory and over four times the aggregate memory bandwidth. "The UMass Dartmouth cluster reflects a hybrid design to appeal to a wide array of the campus’ workloads. "Over 50 nodes include Intel Xeon Scalable Processors, DDR4 memory, SSDs and Mellanox ConnectX-5 EDR 100Gb InfiniBand. A subset of systems also feature NVIDIA V100 GPU accelerators. Equally important are a second subset of POWER9 with 2nd Generation NVLink- based- IBM Power Systems AC922 Compute nodes."The post UMass Dartmouth Speeds Research with Hybrid Supercomputer from Microway appeared first on insideHPC.

In this special guest feature, Bob Fletcher from Verne Global reflects on how liquid cooling technologies on display at SC19 represent more than just a wave. "My intuition suggests that the larger established water-cooling users will mostly stick with their familiar high-pressure solution, but the newer green field deployments will be fertile ground for the new vacuum CDUs. In particular, the AI community as their compute accelerators become increasingly water-cooled, while maintaining their short 2-year product life."The post Liquid Cooling Trends in HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

A new research centre with the potential to revolutionize computing, communication, sensing and imaging technologies is set to be launched by the University of Sheffield this week. The Sheffield Quantum Centre, which will be officially opened by Lord Jim O’Neill, Chair of Chatham House and University of Sheffield alumnus, is bringing together more than 70 of the University’s leading scientists and engineers to develop new quantum technologies. "Research into quantum technologies is a high priority for the UK and many countries around the world. The UK government has invested heavily in quantum research as part of a national program and has committed £1 billion in funding over 10 years."The post University of Sheffield Launches Quantum Centre appeared first on insideHPC.

In this video, technicians install the Big Red 200 supercomputer at Indiana University. IU is the first university to deploy a Cray Shasta system, the Cray Slingshot interconnect and Cray Urika AI Suite for Shasta, providing its engineers, researchers and scientists powerful resources for the next era of computing. The new supercomputer will be instrumental in the University’s exploration and advancement of AI in education, cybersecurity, medicine, environmental science and more.The post Time-lapse Video of Big Red 200 Cray Supercomputer at Indiana University appeared first on insideHPC.

In this AI Podcast, Serkan Piantino from Spell describes how his company is making machine learning easier. "We want to empower and transform the global workforce by making deep learning and artificial intelligence accessible to everyone. We believe that as organizations and individuals can harness the power of machine learning, our world will change quickly. Our mission is to make sure the technology driving this change is not mysterious and locked away but open and available for everyone."The post Podcast: Spell startup looks to bring AI to the people appeared first on insideHPC.