While we’re always on the lookout for HPC news, not everything makes it to the front page. Here are some notable items from this week.
- Banning Baidu. A group of scientists from Chinese search engine giant Baidu have apologized amid claims they cheated on a complex image-recognition test, which led to their being banned from similar events by the organizer for a year. Update: Baidu has since fired Ren Wu, a distinguished scientist at the company’s Institute of Deep Learning. Wu presented this talk on Deep Learning at Scale during the recent GPU Technology Conference.
- HPC Programming Course. Charles Sturt University is offering a free master class on programing supercomputers. Starting June 17, this unique master class will be held over five weeks and will teach experienced C programmers how to program and maintain supercomputers. With help from Cloudcroft and SGI, the course has garnered enormous interest internationally.
- India’s Latest Supercomputer. Housed in the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecast (NCMRWF) near Delhi, the new Bhaskara supercomputer will enhance prediction capabilities such as tropical cyclones, heavy rainfall events, cloud burst events and monsoon, using very high resolution regional models.
- Mapping Andromeda. Researchers are using TACC supercomputers to map the Andromeda galaxy. The combination of the HST observations of Andromeda and modeling on Stampede allowed the team to solve a decades old problem about whether stars more massive than the sun form the same way everywhere in the universe.
- Memristors too far out? We’ve been told that Memristors are just around the corner for years now, but this week they were nowhere in sight during HP’s update this week on The Machine architecture. HP’s CTO Martin Fink described the Machine as a memory-driven computer architecture focused on data storage rather than processing power.
- MPI 3.1 is official! Jeff Squyres writes that the MPI Forum unanimously approved the MPI-3.1 specification, which he describes as mainly a bug-fix release. Download MPI 3.1.
- PRACE Vendors Selected. Today the European PRACE initiative announced that Bull SAS, E4 Computer Engineering, and Maxeler Technologies have been awarded the Second Phase of its Pre-commercial Procurement. The PCP is a is a multi-country and multi-partner joint effort, implemented by a consortium composed of several partners of PRACE.
- Supercomputing.IO Goes Live. During the recent Parallella Technical Conference, Adaptiva ran the first official live test of Supercomputer.io with close to 2,500 CPU cores running an FFT code for image search. As reported here, the folks at resin.io have developed a containerized application deployment platform for low-cost Parallella boards enabling easy workload scheduling for a fleet of thousands of Parallella computers across the globe.
- TOP500 Breathing Room. Extended due to ISC 2015 moving to mid-July, the submission deadline for the next TOP500 List is June 12. All systems reported have to be installed by June 26th. The last date for submitting linkpack updates is also June 26th.
