ISC’12 Ramps up to 175 Exhibitors

Posted in Events, HPC, ISC12
 

The good folks at ISC’12 are out with their latest newsletter and it looks like this year’s exhibition will be a record breaker with a total of 175 companies and research organizations from around the world. The conference runs June 17-21 in Hamburg, Germany.

Hot Topics at ISC’12:

  • Energy Efficient HPC Centers
  • Future Heterogeneous Architectures
  • Supercomputer Architectures for Data Intensive Applications
  • Alternative Processors, Architectures and Multidisciplinary Applications
  • Best Practices of Large-Scale Applications across Industries
  • Petascale Systems in the World and their Applications
  • Application Performance: Lessons learnt from Petascale Computing
  • Critical Aspects of High Performance Networking
  • The Realities and Challenges of HPC in the Cloud
  • Exascale Computing: Where we are?
  • Networking/Interconnect within HPC-Systems
  • Parallel File Systems
  • Computational Chemistry
  • HPC for Small and Medium Sized Enterprises

At insideHPC, we are proud to join the ranks of 54 first-time exhibitors at ISC’12. Look for the Red Hat and be sure to stop by and say hello.

Comment on this story by Rich Brueckner on May 23

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Warewulf Cluster Manager is “Howlingly Great”

Posted in HPC, HPC Software, System Management, Tools
 

Over at HPC Admin, Dell’s Jeff Layton has posted an in-depth look into the open source Warewulf Cluster Manager.

In this article, I want to discuss the one I have been using for a long time: Warewulf. It pioneered many of the stateless methods that other tools use today and is considered the standard stateless open source toolkit for clustering. It is primarily a stateless cluster provisioning and management tool that can also be installed as a stateful tool (i.e., installed onto disks in the compute nodes). It is simple, automates the process, and is very scalable. In this four-part series on using Warewulf in production clusters, I’ll start by discussing how to install Warewulf on a master node and statelessly boot compute nodes.

Read the Full Story.

Comment on this story by Rich Brueckner on May 23

ARCHIE Boosts Research at Scottish Universities

Posted in Compute, HPC, HPC Hardware, New Installations
 

A high-performance computer that can tackle complex calculations to solve major challenges in science and engineering, including drug development, energy systems and space technologies research, has been installed at the University of Strathclyde, UK.

The computer is at the core of a new £1.6 million regional Supercomputing Centre, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), which will help academics further their research and support business and industry through the next generation of product design and development.

Professor David Littlejohn, associate deputy principal at the University of Strathclyde, said: ‘The new centre will make a step-change in high-performance computing provision for Scotland, helping researchers to work with industrial colleagues from around the world to develop and test innovative new products and technologies.

‘Our plans for the centre have received overwhelming support from industry, and we are delighted that the EPSRC has chosen to invest in our infrastructure and the work of our internationally leading scientists and engineers.’

The advanced computer is known as ARCHIE (Academic and Research Computer Hosting Industry and Enterprise), and was the result of a successful funding bid submitted by scientists Professor Littlejohn, Professor Maxim Federov and Dr Richard Martin, and engineers Professor Jason Reese and Dr Paul Mulheran.

The funding will enable multidisciplinary researchers at the Universities of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Glasgow Caledonian, Stirling and the University of the West of Scotland to access the Supercomputing Centre and link up with other supercomputing centres around the world.

They will work with public and private sector partners in a wide range of research areas, including the purification of seawater, renewable energy, the next generation of mobile communications and improved air transport systems.

This story originally appeared on HPC Projects. It appears here as part of a cross-publishing agreement with Scientific Computing World.

Comment on this story by Rich Brueckner on May 23

Video: Programming Heterogeneous Many-cores Using Directives

Posted in Events, GTC - GPU Technology Conference, HPC, HPC Software, Video
 

In this Part 1 of this video, Francois Bodin from CAPS presents: Programming Heterogeneous Many-cores Using Directives.

Directive-based programming is a very promising technology to deal with Many-Core. In this context, HPC users can rely on emerging standards such as OpenACC and OpenHMPP. CAPS will introduce OpenACC and HMPP directive-based programming models with companion tools (e.g. for tracing, tuning, debugging): HMPP Wizard, CULA, ArrayFire, Vampir, Paraver, DDT, CodeletFinder, etc. The speakers will provide insights on how GPU / CPU can be exploited in a unified manner and how code tuning issues can be minimized. The discussion will also cover the use of libraries which is essential when addressing Many-Core Programming. Pathscale will present its product supporting OpenHMPP programming model.

Recorded at GTC 2012 in San Jose. Download the slides (PDF).

In Part 2 of this video (starting at the 30 minute mark) Christopher Bergstrom from Pathscale presents: Pathscale Enzo. ENZO is a complete GPGPU and multi-core solution, which tightly couples the best programming models with highly optimizing code generation for Nvidia Tesla. Download the slides (PDF).

Comment on this story by Rich Brueckner on May 23

May 24 Webinar: How Do You Make Grid Engine Faster?

Posted in Events, HPC, HPC Software, Podcast
 

In HPC, speed is everything. Join Univa’s Bill Bryce, VP Products for an all new webinar about how to make Grid Engine faster. You’ll learn about Univa Grid Engine 8.1 and the new features that translate into speed and productivity — and how they affect your business.

Each webinar will be less than 30 minutes, so you can get the practical information you need quickly.

Webinar Times :

  • Thursday, May 24: 13:00 – 13:30 (EDT / UTC/GMT -5 hours)
  • Thursday, June 15: 10:00- 10:30 (CEST/ UTC / GMT +1 hour)

Register now.

Comment on this story by Rich Brueckner on May 22

Interview: IBM’s David Ungar on End-to-End Non-Determinism

Posted in HPC, HPC People
 

In this interview, cloud consultant Miha Ahronovitz discusses parallel programming with Dr. David Ungar from IBM Research. Ungar is author of the popular article Many Core processors: Everything You Know (about Parallel Programming) Is Wrong!

Miha Ahronovitz: In parallel distributed computing, using a product like Grid Engine we got different results if the round robin servers were processing some sequential jobs mixed with parallel, or if we dedicated the servers to parallel MPI processing exclusively. We didn’t know why at the time. How can you explain this?

David Ungar: I think the problem you described, is that you have different results if you configure the servers differently. One of the principles in our project is what we call “end-to-end non-determinism”. The idea is if you go into these parallel systems to get performance – this holds for multi-core, many-core, distributed, then you need to take an approximate route.

Read the Full Story.

Comment on this story by Rich Brueckner on May 22

Bull Enters €28 Million Joint Venture to Mainstream HPC

Posted in Collaborations, HPC
 

Bull has announced a €28 million joint venture with a French investment company, aimed at accelerating the widespread adoption of high-performance computing (HPC).

The new joint company will focus on delivering secured HPC services, as a Cloud computing service provider. The other investor, CDC (Caisse des Dépots), is a public group serving France’s general interest and economic development. CDC will contribute nearly €10m in equity to the project.

The ‘NumInnov’ project aims to create an independent service provider specialising in HPC applications, which will operate at a European level.

I am delighted at the launch of this project, which will have a tangible impact on the industry and the digital economy in both France and in Europe,’ said Philippe Vannier, chairman and chief executive officer of Bull. “The project will be a very powerful driver to accelerate the adoption of HPC technologies, and will trigger the development of new applications and services by large enterprises as well as SMEs. As a specialist company in critical digital systems, Bull is the only European player capable of delivering expertise in on-demand HPC within the security constraints that are critical to this project.”

This story originally appeared on HPC Projects. It appears here as part of a cross-publishing agreement with Scientific Computing World.

Comment on this story by Staff on May 22

Podcast: Spectra to Deliver 380 Petabytes of Tape Storage to Blue Waters

Posted in HPC, HPC Hardware, New Installations, Podcast, Storage
 

In this podcast, Michelle Butler from NCSA and Molly Rector from Spectra Logic discuss the massive tape storage system that is being deployed for the 10 Petaflop Blue Waters supercomputer. As announced this week, the Blue Waters system will be one of the world’s largest active file repositories stored on tape media and will scale to a capacity of 380 raw petabytes within the first two years of operation.

NCSA designed Blue Waters to be one of the largest, most powerful supercomputing ecosystems in the world,” said Bill Kramer deputy director of the Blue Waters project at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “The Spectra Logic T-Finity met our rigorous requirements with its high enterprise-level performance, ready data accessibility and massively scalable capacity. We are confident it will provide our user community with fast, reliable access to the massive volumes of critical data stored within Blue Waters’ Petascale near-line file repository.”

Spectra T-Finity tape libraries will provide the Blue Waters project with the ability to keep all near-line data accessible in an active repository, perform automated data integrity verification for the data store, and deliver high performance read/write rates of up to 2.2 PBs per hour utilizing enterprise TS1140 Technology tape drives.

Read the Full Story *  Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * If Dropbox is blocked, download from this Google page.

Comment on this story by Rich Brueckner on May 22

Video: GTC 2012 Full Keynote

Posted in Events, GPUs, GTC - GPU Technology Conference, HPC, HPC Hardware, Video
 

Last week, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang rolled out the new Kepler GPUs at his GTC 2012 keynote. And while this video is available elsewhere in pieces, we thought it would be worthwhile to stitch it together as one streaming movie for our readers.

Note: Many of the GTC 2012 talks are now available as streaming video, and we plan to highlight some of our favorites in the coming days.

Comment on this story by Rich Brueckner on May 22

Podcast: DDN WOS Software on OCP Storage Hardware to Enable Hyperscale Storage Clouds

Posted in Collaborations, HPC, HPC Hardware, HPC Software, Podcast, Storage
 

In this podcast, Jeff Denworth from DDN provides details on the company’s recent announcement that their Web Object Scaler (WOS) will support Open Compute server and storage platforms in cooperation with the Open Compute Project.

Historically, there has not been an industry movement around standardizing and driving the adoption of mass-market hyperscale hardware technology,” said Jean-Luc Chatelain, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Technology, DDN. “With the new OCP storage hardware specification, DDN is able to focus its cloud storage efforts and investments on the software intelligence that drives today’s business and social connection. The Open Compute movement allows us to harness the power of crowd-sourced hardware design and a highly optimized supply chain to drive the best value for our customers.”

Read the Full Story *  Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * If Dropbox is blocked, download from this Google page.

Comment on this story by Rich Brueckner on May 22

Video: GPUs Accelerate Risk Analysis for Financial Services

Posted in Events, GPUs, GTC - GPU Technology Conference, HPC, HPC Hardware, Video
 

In this video, Pierre Spatz from Murex and Alastair Houston from Nvidia discuss how GPUs are being successfully used to run financial risk analysis at higher speeds and for less cost. Recorded at GTC 2012 in San Jose.

Comment on this story by Rich Brueckner on May 21

July HPC User Forums in London and Stuttgart

Posted in Events, HPC, HPC User Forum
 

At insideHPC, we are pleased to announce that we will co-sponsor two HPC User Forum meetings in Europe in July. The first meeting is at Imperial College London on July 5-6 and the second meeting is at the HLRS/University of Stuttgart on July 9-10. Registration is free and refreshments will be served.

The HPC User Forum was established in 1999 to promote the health of the global HPC industry and address issues of common concern to users. The organization has grown to 150 members. It is directed by a volunteer Steering Committee of HPC users from government, industry and academia, and is operated for the users by market analyst firm IDC.

The meetings will include presentations on Big Data, Blue Waters, regional supercomputing, and more. Read the Full Story.

Comment on this story by Rich Brueckner on May 21

Kepler K10 Single-Precision GPU Speeds Oil & Gas

Posted in GPUs, HPC, HPC Hardware
 

Nvidia has announced the launch of an accelerator designed to meet what it describes as the two most difficult challenges in high-performance computing.

The Tesla K10 is aimed at seismic data processing in oil and gas exploration, as well as signal and image processing in the defence industry. The company claims it is based on the fastest, most efficient and highest-performance computing architecture ever built.

The Kepler architecture enables two high-performance Tesla K10 GPUs to be placed on a single accelerator board. It delivers an aggregate performance of 4.58 teraflops of single-precision floating point and 320 gigabytes per second memory bandwidth.

Seismic processing uses large data centers to crunch through petabytes of information about the Earth’s subsurface area, generated from reflected seismic waves. Geophysicists analyse the resulting 2D and 3D images to discover oil and gas deposits, and to determine the best and safest locations to drill.

In addition, the Tesla K10 can help agencies increase national security by improving the quality, and speeding the delivery of, actionable video analytics and image forensics to security and law-enforcement officials.

GPUs speed up by as much as 100 times the process of analysing thousands of video feeds generated by security cameras and drones, enabling analysts to better identify events and individuals of interest.

This story originally appeared on HPC Projects. It appears here as part of a cross-publishing agreement with Scientific Computing World.

Comment on this story by Staff on May 21

Slidecast: Allinea Software – Meeting the Quest to Run Applications Faster

Posted in HPC, HPC Software, Podcast, Tools, Video
 

In this slidecast, Patrick Wohlschlegel from Allinea Software describes the company’s advanced parallel debugging capabilities.

Our mission is to make it easier for software developers and scientists to make their software scale up to take full advantage of current and emerging parallel computer systems. We do this by developing innovative tools that ensure correctness and optimization of parallel codes, and we are recognized as a leader and innovator in our market. We created the world’s first petascale debugger - allowing users for the first time to debug at any scale. We also developed the first hybrid GPU debugger - enabling simultaneous debugging across multiple architectures in the same tool.”

As announced recently, the Allinea DDT software is being used by the NCSA Blue Waters team fix their bugs at full scale and exploit the maximum computational power.

Read the Full Story *  Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * If Dropbox is blocked, download from this Google page.

Comment on this story by Rich Brueckner on May 21

Load Testing with the Cloud – This Week on inside* Publications

Posted in inside* News Highlights
 

GPUs were all the rage this week, but there was also a lot more going on in the news. In case you missed them, here are some recent highlights our inside* publications:

 

 

 

  • Slidecast: SOASTA CloudTest Overview. By leveraging the cloud, tests can be distributed globally, executed at any scale, and run affordably. And real-time analytics provide immediate, actionable intelligence — a requirement for testing live production environments.
  • Interview: Toyota Relies on ZL Unified Archive. Toyota’s primary reason for bringing ZL in-house as their primary archiving system was to ensure defensible preservation of data for litigation, including search, retention and storage management.

 

 

 

  • Video: Fireside Chat from Emerging Companies Summit. Jen-Hsun Huang and Tim Bajarin from Creative Strategies discuss trends in mobile, visual and parallel computing, and the transformational changes ahead for the industry.
  • Feature: Turning Entrepreneurship into a Science. Max Marmeer from the Startup Genome writes that we are missing a common language and framework to describe and measure entrepreneurship and innovation.

Comment on this story by Rich Brueckner on May 20

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