Podcast: Is the D-Wave Machine Really a Quantum Computer?

Posted in Computing Research, HPC, Podcast
 

In this NPR Podcast, Geoff Brumfiel takes a look at D-Wave quantum computer. Some skeptics are saying that the machine does not really work with the quantum effects that D-Wave claims it does.

It’s not exactly science, what they’re doing,” says Christopher Monroe, a physicist with the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland. “It’s high-level engineering, and I think it’s high-level salesmanship, too.” But Monroe remains skeptical. He believes that the D-Wave team has never demonstrated that entanglement is happening on the chips in its machine. He believes that D-Wave’s supposedly quantum bits are actually working instead as tiny electromagnets. Those magnets, Monroe believes, could be interacting in ways to solve a certain problem very quickly without quantum mechanics. “There’s no evidence that what they’re doing has anything to do with quantum mechanics,” he says. If he’s right, then D-Wave’s machine may be far more narrow in its abilities than the company believes.

Read the Full Story * Download the MP3 * Download the transcript



Comment on this story by Rich Brueckner on May 22

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OpenFabrics Alliance to Host RDMA Training Courses in New Hampshire

Posted in HPC, HPC Education and Training, HPC Software, Open Fabrics
 

Today the OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) announced it will host two training classes at the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Lab. The two-day courses, instructed by Dr. Robert D. Russell and Rupert Dance, will provide attendees with hands-on training for managing InfiniBand Fabric in addition to coding applications directly to the VERBS API using OpenFabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) and related software tools.

  • InfiniBand Fabric Administration
    • Date: June 5-6, 2013 from 8 a.m. – 6 p.m.
    • Who Should Attend: System Administrators, System Architects, Planners and Technologists. A background in IP-based or Ethernet-based management is helpful and familiarity with the target operating system is assumed. This course does not assume RDMA specific knowledge and programming for RDMA is not a prerequisite.
    • Register now.

Both events will be held at the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Lab in Durham, NH. Read the Full Story.



Comment on this story by Rich Brueckner on May 22

IBM Helps Bolster Supercomputing in the Philippines

Posted in HPC, New Installations
 

This week IBM announced that the Philippine government has chosen an IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer to support R&D projects focused on reducing poverty, improving government processes, and enabling smarter weather management.

The IBM Blue Gene supercomputer will be most applicable to DOST’s major programs such as NOAH and Smart Agriculture, “said DOST Secretary Mario G. Montejo. “First we will work toward Blue Gene’s integration to Project NOAH to provide more advanced seven-day local weather forecasts. We can also use it to run various weather models and validate the accuracy of results almost real-time.”

Read the Full Story.



Comment on this story by Ralph on May 22

Video: SSD Higher Speed Devices – Architectural Interconnect Impact

Posted in Events, HPC, HPC Hardware, Open Fabrics Workshop, SSD, Storage, Video
 

In this video from the 2013 Open Fabrics Developer Workshop, Johann George from SanDisk presents: SSD Higher Speed Devices Architectural Interconnect Impact.

You can check out more OFA videos in our Open Fabrics Worshop Video Gallery.



Comment on this story by Rich Brueckner on May 22

New Whitepaper: Intel True Scale Fabric Architecture for Enhanced HPC Performance

Posted in HPC, HPC Hardware, InfiniBand
 

A new whitepaper from Intel looks at Truescale InfiniBand performance for HPC applications.

There are two types of InfiniBand architectures available today in the marketplace, the first being the traditional InfiniBand design, created as a channel interconnect for the data center. The latest InfiniBand architecture was built with HPC in mind. This enhanced HPC fabric offering is optimized for key interconnect performance factors, featuring MPI message rating, end-to-end latency and collective performance, resulting in increased HPC application performance. ‡enhanced intel True Scale Fabric Architecture – Offers 3x to 17x the MPI (Message Passing Interface) message throughput of the other InfiniBand architecture. For many MPI applications, small message rate throughput is an important factor that contributes to overall performance and scalability.

Intel tested a number of MPI applications and found that they performed up to 11 percent better on the cluster based Intel True Scale Fabric QDR-40 (dual-channel) than the traditional InfiniBand-based architecture running at FDR (56 Gbps). Download the whitepaper (PDF).



Comment on this story by Rich Brueckner on May 22

Video: Notur II Norwegian HPC Infrastructure

Posted in Events, HPC, HPC User Forum, New Installations, Video
 

In this video from the 2013 HPC User Forum, Jørn Amundsen presents: Notur II Norwegian HPC Infrastructure.

The Notur project fulfills a pronounced and sustainable vision for a Norwegian infrastructure for High Performance Computing (HPC) and computational science. The vision of the project is to provide a modern, national HPC infrastructure in an international and competitive setting, and stimulate computational science as the third scientific path. The project serves the Norwegian computational science community by providing the infrastructure to individuals or groups involved in education and research at Norwegian universities and colleges, and research and engineering at research institutes and industry who contribute to the funding of Notur.

Download the slides (PDF) or check out more presentations at the HPC User Forum Video Gallery.



Comment on this story by Rich Brueckner on May 21

European Teams to Face Off in ISC’13 Klusterkampf

Posted in Events, HPC, ISC13
 

Over at the Student Cluster Competition Blog, Dan Olds writes that the first Battle of Liepzig in 1813 can’t really compare to what’s coming in June: The Second Battle of Leipzig, aka the ISC’13 Klusterkampf. Now in its second year, the ISC Student Cluster competition will feature nine teams of university undergrad students in a quest to build the fastest supercomputer on the show floor.

Chemnitz University of Technology is only 51 miles from Leipzig and thus the hometown favorite. The school, founded in 1836, was a fast starter in terms of science and technology. During one pre-1900 period, Chemnitz generated more patent registrations than any other institution in the world. Currently, the university is ranked near the top of German technical schools, a reputation they’ll be putting on the line at the student cluster challenge. Judging by their entry application, Chemnitz (or TUC, which stands for Technische Universitat Chemnitz) has a deep HPC curriculum, including courses and research on FPGA and GPU application acceleration. Team TUC has partnered with German hardware vendor MEGWARE GmbH to build “TurboTUC,” the schlachtkreuzer they hope to ride to victory.

Read the Full Story.



Comment on this story by Rich Brueckner on May 21

Video: Dr. Michio Kaku on the Importance of Supercomputing for Scientific Discovery

Posted in Computing Research, Events, HPC, SC13, Video
 

In this video, famed physicist, Dr. Michio Kaku discusses the impact of high performance computing on scientific discovery as part of the SC Conference Video Series.



Comment on this story by Rich Brueckner on May 21

IDC Breakfast Briefing Returns to ISC’13 June 18

Posted in Events, HPC, ISC13
 

IDC will once again sponsor its annual HPC Breakfast Briefing at ISC’13 on June 18 in Hall 4 of the Leipzig Congress Center. The event will feature the latest HPC revenue numbers, market forecast and trends; international competition and initiatives, and exascale plans as well as awards for ROI in high performance computing.

Attendance and full breakfast are complimentary, so be sure to Register Now.



Comment on this story by Rich Brueckner on May 21

Video: The HPC Experiment – Paving the way to HPC as a Service

Posted in Cloud HPC, Events, HPC, HPC User Forum, Video
 

In this video from the 2013 HPC User Forum, Burak Yenier presents: The HPC Experiment – Paving the way to HPC as a Service.

For the 2nd Round of the HPC experiment, we will apply the cloud computing service model to workloads on remote Cluster Computing resources in the areas of HPC, Computer Aided Engineering, and the Life Sciences.

In related news, the HPC Experiment site has just added an online exhibit area as one-stop interactive service directory for Cloud users and service providers with focus on High Performance Computing, Big Data, Digital Manufacturing, and Computational Life Sciences.

Download the slides (PDF) or check out more presentations at the HPC User Forum Video Gallery.



Comment on this story by Rich Brueckner on May 20

Revealing Hidden Latency Patterns with Heat Maps

Posted in DTrace, HPC, HPC Software, Tools
 

Over at Brendan’s Blog, Brendan Gregg writes that response time – or latency – is crucial to understand in detail, but many of the common presentations of this data hide important details and patterns.

When I/O latency is presented as a visual heat map, some intriguing and beautiful patterns can emerge. These patterns provide insight into how a system is actually performing and what kinds of latency end-user applications experience. Many characteristics seen in these patterns are still not understood, but so far their analysis is revealing systemic behaviors that were previously unknown.

Read the Full Story.



Comment on this story by Ralph on May 20

Video: IBM-DOME Microserver Demonstrator

Posted in Computing Research, Events, HPC, HPC Hardware, HPC User Forum, Video
 

While we may not get to Exascale by 2020, ground-breaking compute technologies for the SKA telescope are already under development (without involvement of the U.S. Government, by the way). In this video from the 2013 HPC User Forum, Ronald P. Luijten from IBM Research presents: The IBM-DOME Microserver Demonstrator.

The computational and storage demands for the future Square Kilometer Array (SKA) radio telescope are significant. Building on the experience gained with the collaboration between ASTRON and IBM with the Blue Gene based LOFAR correlator, ASTRON and IBM have now embarked on a public-private exascale computing research project aimed at solving the SKA computing challenges. This project, called DOME, investigates novel approaches to exascale computing, with a focus on energy efficient, streaming data processing, exascale storage, and nano-photonics. DOME will not only benefit the SKA, but will also make the knowledge gained available to interested third parties via a Users Platform. The intention of the DOME project is to evolve into the global center of excellence for transporting, processing, storing and analyzing large amounts of data for minimal energy cost.”

Download the slides * Download the paper * View the HPC User Forum Video Gallery



Comment on this story by Rich Brueckner on May 20

Wagering Against Exascale

Posted in Exascale, HPC
 

Over at ExtremeTech, Joel Hruska writes that the daunting challenges of achieving exascale compute levels by the end of the decade were brought home recently in a presentation by Horst Simon, the Deputy Director at NERSC. In fact, Simon has wagered $2000 of his own money that we wont get there by 2020.

But here’s the thing: What if the focus on “exascale” is actually the wrong way to look at the problem?

FLOPS has persisted as a metric in supercomputing even as core counts and system density has risen, but the peak performance of a supercomputer may be a poor measure of its usefulness. The ability to efficiently utilize a subset of the system’s total performance capability is extremely important. In the long term, FLOPS are easier than moving data across nodes. Taking advantage of parallelism becomes even more important. Keeping data local is a better way to save power than spreading the workload across nodes, because as node counts rise, concurrency consumes an increasing percentage of total system power.

Read the Full Story or Download the slides



Comment on this story by Ralph on May 20

Video: RDMA in Wide Area Networks

Posted in HPC
 

In this video from the 2013 Open Fabrics Developer Workshop, Linden Mercer from ARL/PSU presents: RDMA in Wide Area Networks.

Download the slides (PDF) check out more OFA videos at our Open Fabrics Workshop Video Gallery.



Comment on this story by Rich Brueckner on May 19

Job of the Week: Services Department Head at NERSC

Posted in HPC, Jobs
 

NERSC is seeking a new Services Department Head in our Job of the Week.

The Services Department Head (Computer Systems Manager II) will have the opportunity to lead an organization with a world-wide reputation for excellence and innovation. The Services Department serves as the primary point of contact for NERSCs scientific users and is responsible for enhancing their scientific productivity. Key activities include supporting users through the transition to exascale-class architectures; providing services to optimize application performance; providing services to store, analyze, manage, and share data; understanding HPC architecture trends; benchmarking; user communication; user training; and requirements gathering.

Are you paying too much for your job ads? Not only do we offer ads for a fraction of what the other guys charge, our insideHPC Job Board is powered by SimplyHIred, the world’s largest job search engine.

As a reminder, we are offering FREE job listings for .EDU and .GOV domains, so email us at: info @ insideHPC.com for a special discount code.



Comment on this story by Staff on May 19

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