insideHPC » Business of HPC

Video: Driving Industrial Innovation on the Road to Exascale

Rich Brueckner — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:21:32 +0000

In this video from ISC’13, Raj Hazra from Intel presents: Driving Industrial Innovation on the Road to Exascale.

Join Intel for a look at the state of the HPC industry from two perspectives. First, we’ll look at how innovations in HPC are driving innovation in manufacturing industries with energy and automotive industry leaders providing examples. Next, we’ll give our perspective on the race to Exascale and discuss how Intel is collaborating with the HPC industry to address the challenges.”

During the presentation, Hazra announced five new Intel Xeon Phi products tailor-made for HPC. Download the slides (PDF).

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Altair Chosen for JAIST Research Center in Japan

Ralph — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 07:05:01 +0000

Altair’s workload management product, PBS Professional, has been selected to manage workload for the Cray XC30 supercomputer recently put into production by the Japan Advanced Institute for Science and Technology (JAIST).

One of Japan’s premier academic research centres, JAIST is using the new Cray XC30 supercomputer for research into massively parallel programming and a variety of scientific pursuits.

The two-cabinet Cray XC30 supercomputer at JAIST has a peak performance of more than 118 teraflops with 5760 CPU cores and is the institute’s main system for its high-performance computing facility.

At JAIST, it is imperative to provide our world-class scientists with the best available technology resources to support their computational research,’ said Mineo Kaneko, director of the JAIST Research Center for Advanced Computing Infrastructure. “The pioneering Cray XC30 supercomputer with PBS Professional will allow our users to expand the scope of their research efforts with a proven, well-integrated solution they can rely on.”

This story appears here as part of a cross-publishing agreement with Scientific Computing World.

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Adaptive Computing to Manage HPC Workloads at Baden-Württemberg

Ralph — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 07:03:42 +0000

This week at ISC’13, Adaptive Computing announced that the Baden-Württemberg High Performance Computing Competence Centers (bwHPC) will use the company’s Moab software to manage supercomputing workloads in its distributed supercomputing system. The system will have an estimated 6,500 processors socket in five clusters upon completion.

Moab will help this undertaking realize its full potential,” said Achim Streit, Ph.D., professor and director at the Steinbuch Centre for Computing at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), where at first the bwUniCluster will be installed. “In addition to helping us achieve maximum resource efficiency, Moab also enables us to ensure a uniform interface for the user base of the five clusters and tailor these individual systems to the needs of our specific communities.”

Adaptive Computing will be demonstrating its Moab HPC Suite during ISC’13 booth #500. Read the Full Story.

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Podcast: Radio Free HPC Interviews Jack Dongarra on the New TOP500

Rich Brueckner — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 18:21:59 +0000

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team discusses the June 2013 TOP500 list with Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee. How did the Chinese manage to trump the world once again with the #1 supercomputer on the planet? Listen in to find out.

Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

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Excitement at ISC13: Getting to the MilkyWay 2

johnH — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 08:40:51 +0000

In this special guest feature, Intel’s John Hengeveld describes the effort that went into building the fastest supercomputer on Earth.

Milky Way 2 is amazing.. and whats more amazing is… you can build a similar system for your needs.

So by now you have all heard about the MilkyWay 2 system in China that has surprised the world and achieved the #1 spot on the TOP500 list. The Intel team has been working on many fronts in the past year. The upcoming Intel Xeon Processors E5-2600 V2, a major expansion to the Intel Xeon Phi products family, expanding our industry leading software development toolkits. We’re in like 98% of the new systems on the TOP500 list.. so seriously.. we need a rest.

All of these things are coming together at ISC13. The outgrowth of much of this work is shows up in the MilkyWay 2 system, but what’s more important is that this technology is very soon available from a broad range of suppliers to be turned on a wide range of industrial and scientific technical computing applications.

The Processor and Coprocessor components Intel proposed and shipped in production for MilkyWay2 are being announced and demonstrated by Intel for the first time at ISC today. The first demonstration of the as yet unlaunched Intel Xeon Processor E5-2600 V2 product family will be shown in the Intel Booth in a live 52 node cluster showing high fidelity visualizations of an Audi RS5 vehicle design.

During ISC’13, Raj Hazra announced the general availability of 5 new Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor products including the 3100 family that is featured in the MilkyWay 2 system. You can watch the video right here on insideHPC.

I want to tell a short story about the MilkyWay 2 system that you probably haven’t heard, and show why being at Intel is the coolest thing ever.

About a year ago, the NUDT folks, led by Professor Liao, had a really good idea of how he wanted to build the worlds biggest super computer, using the next step in their proprietary fabric and trying to use intel’s latest processors to achieve its objectives in power efficiency and performance.

They gave Intel and others programmability, node power and node performance goals with very tight constraints. Then they dropped the heavy challenge… “and it all has to work and be #1 in the world by June 2013”. Intel proposed a solution that not only met all their time and performance requirements but also their programmability requirements.

What they wanted they later described as a “Neo-Heterogeneous Architecture”. This type of system has two tiers of hardware heterogeneity, but driven off a consistent programming model and parallelism abstraction. This allows very much faster development of applications that scale to a very high level.

What the use of Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessors offered is hardware with the performance and energy efficiency required, but removed the need for an alternate programming model for the second tier thus enabling their neo-heterogeneous architectural vision.

The plan to build out the system as audacious as well. The customer developed the system based on Intel Xeon Processor E5-2600 based products and built test cluster that would itself be on the top500 list. After debugging that system and the code that ran on it, NUDT planned to get the next generation product (the future Intel Xeon Processor E5-2600 V2 family) and basically drop it in. This enabled them to go from first delivery of a blade to a completed system in about 4 weeks. The Linpack run came about a week later. By the time Jack Dongarra and others saw it at the end of May, it was running real applications.

For Intel’s part, what Intel’s factory and engineering teams did was validate two new products and put them into high volume production on schedule to within a week of our schedule predicted a year before.

I have been getting asked why Intel got chosen for this amazing system. The short answer is.. because we deliver. We delivered.

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It’s Official: China Once Again Leads the TOP500

Rich Brueckner — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 08:39:18 +0000

The June 2013 TOP500 was released today at ISC’13 with an all-new Chinese supercomputer leading the list with 33.86 Petaflops on the Linpack benchmark.

Tianhe-2, or Milky Way-2, will be deployed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzho, China, by the end of the year. The surprise appearance of Tianhe-2, two years ahead of the expected deployment, marks China’s first return to the No. 1 position since November 2010, when Tianhe-1A was the top system. Tianhe-2 has 16,000 nodes, each with two Intel Xeon IvyBridge processors and three Xeon Phi processors for a combined total of 3,120,000 computing cores.

Formerly number one on the list, the Titan Cray XK7 at Oak Ridge is now ranked No. 2 with 17.59 Petaflops and Sequoia, an IBM BlueGene/Q system installed at LLNL falls to number 3 on the list with 17.17 petaflops.

Other highlights from the June 2013 TOP500 list include:

There are 26 systems with performance greater than a Petaflop, up from 23 six months ago.
The new No. 1 system, Tianhe-2, and the No. 6 system, Stampede, are using Intel Xeon Phi processors to speed up their computational rate. The No. 2 system, Titan, and the No. 10 system, Tianhe-1A, are using NVIDIA GPUs to accelerate computation.
A total of 54 systems on the list are using accelerator/co-processor technology, down from 62 in November 2012. Thirty-nine of these use NVIDIA chips, three use ATI Radeon, and eleven systems use Intel MIC technology (Xeon Phi).
The number of systems installed in China has now stabilized at 66, with 72 and 68 on the last two lists. As a nation, China now holds the No. 2 position as a user of HPC, ahead of Japan, UK, France, and Germany. Due to Tianhe-2, China has also taken the No. 2 position in the performance share, ahead of Japan.
Intel continues to provide the processors for the largest share (80.4 percent) of TOP500 systems.

Read the Full Story.

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Video: High Performance Computing Trends for 2013

Rich Brueckner — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 13:36:56 +0000

In this video from the HPC Advisory Council European Conference 2013, Addison Snell from Intersect360 Research presents: High Performance Computing Trends for 2013.

This presentation is an overview of the current important trends in HPC, based on the latest end-user research studies and market forecasts. Topics include accelerator adoption, the role of HPC in Big Data, and the ratio of spending between hardware, software, staffing, and facilities.”

Download the slides (PDF).

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TACC to Deploy 20 Petabyte Global File System from DDN

Ralph — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 10:47:22 +0000

This week TACC announced it will deploy 20 Petabyte, scalable global file system (GFS) from DDN that will be accessible to all of TACC’s computing and visualization systems.

The rate of data growth during the last decade has been exponential,” said Tommy Minyard, TACC’s director of Advanced Computing Systems. “This new global file system will offer a very large storage pool for thousands of researchers to store persistent data and make it easier for them to perform their scientific research. They will be able to access data from any production system at TACC and use it for later analysis, further processing, or to continue to run their applications.”

The new GFS will provide more than 20 petabytes of storage capacity for scientific data, and will allow scientists to access their data rapidly through its aggregate bandwidth of greater than 100 gigabytes per second. By providing a massive storage capability with high-performance access from all of TACC’s production systems, the system will further diversify the resources available to researchers and eliminate the need for researchers to manage data across multiple systems. This will balance the storage available to all TACC systems and make migration between systems and upgrades to new ones more transparent.

Read the Full Story.

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Cray Rolls Out Hadoop Cluster Solution

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 14:54:33 +0000

Today Cray announced a new Hadoop solution that combines supercomputing technologies with an “enterprise-strength” approach to Big Data analytics. Available later this month, Cray cluster supercomputers for Hadoop will pair Cray CS300 systems with the Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop.

More and more organizations are expanding their usage of Hadoop software beyond just basic storage and reporting. But while they’re developing increasingly complex algorithms and becoming more dependent on getting value out of Hadoop systems, they are also pushing the limits of their architectures,” said Bill Blake, senior vice president and CTO of Cray. “We are combining the supercomputing technologies of the Cray CS300 series with the performance and security of the Intel Distribution to provide customers with a turnkey, reliable Hadoop solution that is purpose-built for high-value Hadoop environments. Organizations can now focus on scaling their use of platform-independent Hadoop software, while gaining the benefits of important underlying architectural advantages from Cray and Intel.”

As you may recall, Cray acquired the CS300 cluster technology from Appro last year. This gives the company a more affordable cluster offering for markets that don’t require Cray’s low latency interconnect technology. Read the Full Story.

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Chinese Chart-Topping Supercomputer is Just the Beginning

Rich Brueckner — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 17:39:10 +0000

Over at The Register, Timothy Prickett Morgan looks at the details of the new Tianhe-2 Chinese supercomputer that is poised to lead the TOP500. And while some might dismiss this system as a stunt machine for bragging rights, Morgan contends that the Chinese are just getting warmed up.

The Tianhe-1A and Tianhe-2 machines built by China are really about designing and testing the homegrown “Arch” interconnect and getting experience in massively parallel applications on the way to building a completely indigenous machine. As long as China has the cash, it can buy development time for its fledgling chip industry by using processors and coprocessors from American suppliers. It can take as much time as it needs to, but the big fear in the U S of A is that China will create a complete supercomputing stack and want to sell it here and in Europe. How do you say no to a country that you owe $2 trillion to?

Read the Full Story.

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Video: Panel Discussion on Transforming Your Business with HPC

Rich Brueckner — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:00:53 +0000

In this video from the OCE Discovery Conference, a panel of experts looks at how business can benefit from HPC.

What if your company could use data mining to discover new information, identify new trends and correlations, and create new knowledge? What if you could safely simulate multi-million dollar physical assets and processes to accelerate your product development while preserving resources and reducing costs? What if we could analyze the human brain to develop preventative treatments for disorders and our physical environment to avert disasters? High Performance Computing (HPC) can equip your company with these kinds of competitive advantages.

Moderators:

Ron Van Holst, Director, Research Development, High Performance Computing, Ontario Centres of Excellence
Chris Pratt, BUE Strategic Initiatives Executive, IBM Canada

Panelists:

J. Wayne Gudbranson, President & CEO, Branham Group Inc.
Dan Sinai, Associate Vice President, Research, Western University
Abe Heifets, CEO, Chematria
Dr. Jennifer Flexman, Director of Research Development and Commercialization, Sargent Laboratory, University of Toronto
Ted Mao, Vice President, Research, Trojan UV

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Fujitsu to Resell Altair Workload Management Software

Staff — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 15:41:14 +0000

Altair, a provider of simulation technology and engineering services, has announced that Fujitsu will resell Altair’s workload management software product, PBS Professional, as a component of Fujitsu’s recently announced HPC cluster software stack.

A leader in worldwide information and communication technology, Fujitsu is now an Altair global authorised reseller and will offer PBS Professional on all Fujitsu Primenergy HPC computing systems. Fujitsu has also selected PBS Professional as the default workload manager for its Fujitsu Software HPC Cluster Suite (HCS) Advanced Edition, which includes such extended features as large cluster support and high availability, as well as support for multiple clusters at a single site.

By providing our HPC users with first-rate workload management products like PBS Professional, Fujitsu is maintaining its leadership in simplified, reliable HPC computing solutions,” said Uwe Neumeier, vice president for global server business at Fujitsu. “Altair is a leader in HPC software and services, and PBS Professional is the default product for commercial-grade workload management. We are happy to be partnering with Altair to provide the highest quality HPC solutions for our customers.”

Bill Nitzberg, chief technology officer for PBS works at Altair, added: “With Fujitsu as an authorised PBS Professional reseller, Altair is ensuring our users have access to a broader range of HPC computing options. We are proud that Fujitsu chose PBS Professional for its top-level HPC Cluster Suite solution, which of course needs to offer the best available workload management for HPC users.”

The HPC Cluster Suite is a comprehensive, purpose-built software stack that includes a set of fully validated HPC software components for x86 HPC clusters. The stack combines the best-of-breed open source and proprietary software products and tools that ensure optimal usage of the Fujitsu Primergy x86 hardware platforms, along with ease of management and use.

This story appears here as part of a cross-publishing agreement with Scientific Computing World.

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Video: WSJ Looks at Why China Wants to be Number 1 in Supercomputing

Rich Brueckner — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 11:00:06 +0000

In this video, Bob Davis from the the Wall Street Journal tells Mariko Sanchanta why China believes it’s so important to be number one in supercomputing. The story stems from recent reports that the Tianhe-2 supercomputer will soon be crowned as the fast machine on earth in the next TOP500 list, which comes out sometime on June 17.

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Podcast: Interview with DDN’s New President, Joe Cowan

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 14:00:18 +0000

In this podcast, Jeff Denworth from DataDirect Networks introduces the company’s new President, Joe Cowan. As a former member of the DDN board, Cowan brings a wealth of experience in the enterprise, a space where DataDirect Networks hopes to grow with its Big Data solutions.

Read the Full Story * Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * Subscribe to RSS

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Dongarra Report Confirms Details on 54 Petaflop Chinese Supercomputer

Rich Brueckner — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 18:47:01 +0000

Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee has posted a detailed report on the new 54 Petaflop Tianhe-2 supercomputer in China. In what will most certainly land the system at #1 on the upcoming TOP500 list, the hybrid system scored a remarkable 30.65 Petaflops on LINPACK.

As first-reported by a Chinese paper called M.I.C Gadget back in December, the hybrid system is powered by Intel Xeon and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. And while conflicting details of the machine began to appear last week on Twitter, Dongarra’s report is based on a May 28 briefing in Changsha by a Chinese official from the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT).

The TH-2 was developed by NUDT and Inspur. Inspur is a Chinese multinational information technology company headquartered in Jinan, Shandong, China. Inspur’s business activities include server manufacturing and software development. Inspur contributed to the manufacturing of the printed circuit boards and is also contributing to the system installation and testing. The TH-2 is undergoing assembly and testing at NUDT and will be moved to its permanent home at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou (NSCC-GZ) by the end of the year. The complete system has a theoretical peak performance of 54.9 Pflop/s. It is based on Intel’s Ivy Bridge and Xeon Phi components and a custom interconnect network. There are 32,000 Intel Ivy Bridge Xeon sockets and 48,000 Xeon Phi boards for a total of 3,120,000 cores. This represents the world’s largest (public) installation of Intel Ivy Bridge and Xeon Phi’s processors. The system will be located in Southwest China.

Download the report (PDF).

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Penguin Computing Rolls Out P3 Partner Program

Ralph — Wed, 29 May 2013 14:35:10 +0000

Today Penguin Computing announced its new Partner Program P3 with two types of partners, VAR/Resellers and Alliance/Technology. According to the company, the P3 program puts the customer first and central, ensuring that all customers receive the same level of support and equal access to resources.

Typically the business model of established tier one vendors results in an inherent conflict between direct and partner sales,” said David Ingersoll, VP Sales Penguin Computing. “At Penguin, we regard our partners as an extension of our organization and our main focus is to grow our and our Partners’ business by creating a win-win relationship.” The P3 program enables partners to offer the complete line of Penguin solutions in the areas of high performance, cloud computing, Big Data and virtualization. Through these solutions Penguin partners will be able to leverage Penguin’s expertise and name recognition helping them to increase top line revenue as well as their bottom-line profitability. Through P3, Partners can also provide customer access to Penguin’s public cloud Penguin Computing on Demand (POD).”

Read the Full Story.

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Bright Computing Bundles Rogue Wave’s TotalView at No Additional Cost

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 29 May 2013 11:00:54 +0000

Today Rogue Wave Software announced that Bright Computing will bundle the company’s TotalView advanced debugger with its Bright Cluster Manager. In what is described as a move to help increase productivity and shorten development lifecycles, Bright Computing’s new and existing customers will now have free access to a scalable, multi-core debugger, with both reverse and memory debugging functions.

Rogue Wave is pioneering the concept of pairing a commercial debugger with a leading cluster management solution,” stated Scott Lasica, Vice President of Product Management & Marketing at Rogue Wave. “Through this strategic agreement, both Bright Computing and Rogue Wave are strengthening their abilities to effectively serve organizations around the world. Most importantly, Bright Computing’s customers will now have a world-class debugger included with their cluster management solution.”

Current Bright Computing customers are encouraged to register to receive Totalview. Read the Full Story.

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BlueM Super to Focus on Energy Research at School of Mines

Ralph — Fri, 17 May 2013 11:30:07 +0000

The Colorado School of Mines has announced plans to install a new 155 teraflop hybrid IBM supercomputer dubbed “BlueM” to run large simulations in support of energy research. The new machine will be housed at NCAR’s Mesa Lab in Boulder and operate on the Mines’ computing network.

As the first supercomputer of its kind, BlueM features a dual architecture system combining the IBM BlueGene Q and IBM iDataplex platforms – the first instance of this configuration being installed together.

BlueM’s predecessor, RA, has been hugely successful but Mines has outgrown its 23 teraflops. BlueM will provide a greater number of flops dedicated to Mines faculty and students than are available at most other institutions with high performance machines. Researchers will be able to run higher fidelity simulations than in the past, get more time on the machine and break new ground in terms of algorithm development.

Read the Full Story.

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Germany’s HLRS to Install 4 Petaflop Hornet Supercomputer

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 16 May 2013 14:53:59 +0000

The HLRS High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart has signed up for a 4 Petaflop Cray XC30 supercomputer. Scheduled for full deployment in 2014, the Hornet supercomputer will boast 100,000 compute cores, 500 TB of Main Memory, and about 6 PB of storage.

The Cray ‘Hermit’ supercomputer has proven to be a highly valuable HPC resource for the broad HLRS user community as well as for scientists and researchers across Europe through the PRACE initiative, and we are excited that the Cray XC30 system will be a powerful successor,” says Dr. Ulla Thiel, Vice President Cray Europe. “The Hornet system will be one of the largest Cray XC30 supercomputers in the world, providing HLRS’ users, including engineers in the automotive and aerospace industries, with our most advanced supercomputing system. We have enjoyed a successful, long-term relationship with HLRS and we are very excited that our joint collaboration will continue.”

As with Hermit, the system expansion at HLRS is funded through project PetaGCS with support of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Arts Baden-Württemberg. Read the Full Story.

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NICE EnginFrame 2013 Enables Remote Visualization Sessions in the Technical Cloud

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 15 May 2013 21:29:20 +0000

Today Italian HPC solution provider NICE announced the release of the EnginFrame 2013.0 software. Designed for technical computing users in a broad range of markets, EnginFrame simplifies engineering and scientific workflows, increasing productivity and streamlining data and resource management.

With EnginFrame 2013.0 we have further strengthened our technology leadership in the HPC Portal market” , said Giuseppe Ugolotti, CEO of NICE. “NICE EnginFrame is a critical component for anyone who wants to create a technical Cloud that can run at the same time both HPC and interactive workload.”

As an HPC Portal, EnginFrame 2013.0 now offers built-in management of 3D and 2D remote visualization sessions, improved data transfer capabilities and a great number of new features and enhancements addressing both end users’ and system administrators’ needs. Leveraging all the major HPC job schedulers and remote visualization technologies, EnginFrame translates user clicks into the appropriate actions to submit HPC jobs, create remote visualization sessions, and monitor workloads on distributed resources.

Read the Full Story.

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