Archives for September 2014

ISC High Performance Conference Issues Call for Participation

The ISC High Performance Conference (formerly known as the International Supercomputing Conference) has issued its Call for Participation. The event takes place July 12-16 in Frankfurt, Germany.

Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Program to Acquire $26 Million Cray XC Supercomputer

Today Cray announced that the Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) has awarded Cray a $26 million supercomputer contract for a next-generation Cray XC supercomputer and a Cray Sonexion storage system.

Video: Adventures in Parallel Filesystems

In this video from the 2014 HPC Advisory Council Spain Conference, James Coomer from DDN presents: Adventures in Parallel Filesystems. “IT is currently in the middle of a rapid evolution in both hardware (flash-technolo- gies) and software (object-storage approaches). With respect to parallel filesystems these advances can potentially both speed up IO and better cope with the volume of data – all at lower cost. We report the results of a number of technology evaluations around parallel filesystems and provide some insights into how flash and object-stores will impact HPC in the coming years.”

The Past, Present and Future of Engineering Simulation

“Whereas previous generations of engineers could take some comfort in the ‘safety net’ of extensive physical testing to rescue them from the occasional poor prediction, CAE is increasingly the victim of its own success as simulation continues to displace hardware testing as industry’s verification method of choice. Although this increased confidence in simulation is well-deserved (and has been hard-earned through many years of successful prediction), it brings with it a great deal of pressure to ‘get the answer right’ every time.”

HPC Resources & Training in the BSC, the RES, and PRACE

“The BSC (Barcelona Supercomputing Center) is the national supercomputing center in Spain. The presentation will outline the most important services that the BSC, the RES (Spanish Supercomputing Network) and PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) provides for scientific and industrial research, as well of some of the results already obtained.”

Memory-Driven Near-Data Acceleration and its Application to DOME/SKA

In this video from the 2014 HPC User Forum in Seattle, Jan van Lunteren from IBM Research Labs in Zurich presents: Memory-Driven Near-Data Acceleration.

Podcast: The Return of the Intel Parallel Universe Computing Challenge

In this Chip Chat podcast, Mike Bernhardt, Community Evangelist for HPC and Technical Computing at Intel, discusses the importance of code modernization as we move into multi- and many-core systems in the HPC field. According Bernhardt, markets as diverse as oil and gas, financial services, and health and life sciences can see a dramatic performance improvement in their code through parallelization.

10 Ways IBM Platform Computing Can Save You Money

IBM Platform Computing products can save an organizations money by reducing a variety of direct costs associated with grid and cluster computing. Your organization can slow the rate of infrastructure growth and reduce the costs of management, support, personnel and training—while also avoiding hidden or unexpected costs.

Benchmarking Intel Haswell vs. Xeon Phi on the Libor Finance Code

Over at the Xcelerit Blog, Jörg Lotze benchmarks Intel’s new Haswell (Xeon E5 v3 series) against the company’s flagship Xeon Phi coprocessor using a popular computational finance code. As the test application, he use a Monte-Carlo simulation used to price a portfolio of LIBOR swaptions. “The Xeon Phi accelerator wins the race clearly for double precision, reaching around 1.8x speedup vs. the Haswell CPU. However, this drops to 1.2x in single precision. The main reason is that the single precision version requires only half the memory and hence makes better use of the cache.”

Informatics Hub to Accelerate Cancer Research and Discovery

The National Cancer Informatics Program at NIH is building a virtual cancer informatics research community. Built on the HUBzero platform, NCIPHub.org is a ready-made open source cyberinfrastructure for research and education developed at Purdue, which, among other things, simplifies access to HPC systems and HPC workflows.