insideHPC » Events

Whamcloud’s Gorda: Lustre has Great Momentum

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 11:43:31 +0000

Whamcloud’s Brent Gorda writes that the Lustre parallel distributed file system has great momentum coming into 2012.

This year will see major new systems coming online at unprecedented scale and performance. Due to personal involvement over the years, I am especially excited to see Sequoia come online. It’s a 20 petaFLOPS (peak) system based on IBM BlueGene/Q technology at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). At Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), they are upgrading Jaguar with GPGPUs to 9x its current performance to the same 20 petaFLOPS (peak). And Blue Waters at the University of Illinois, in the news due to the switch from IBM to Cray, will come online with a performance of over 11 petaFLOPS (peak).

Guess what core file system technology provides the foundation for these massive systems? In all three cases, it’s Lustre.

Read the Full Story. In related news, the Lustre community will gather in Austin for LUG 2012 on April 23-25.

How Xoreax Grid Engine Accelerates Applications Through Distributed Processing

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 14:18:39 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEtfB5J-mp8

In this video, Xoreax Co-Founder and Chairman Uri Mishol describes how the company’s XGE Grid Engine technology accelerates applications through distributed processing in Windows environments. Recorded at the Israel Supercomputer Conference on Feb. 7, 2012.

Trusted by over 2000 companies and organizations worldwide, XGE combines unique Virtualization technology with robust and flexible distributed computing algorithms to offer a powerful Grid Computing solution for the Windows platform that’s exceptionally simple to deploy and integrate.

Video: ORNL – Advancing Research and Science through Supercomputing

Rich Brueckner — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:41:02 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDpRDlwXwlQ

In this video, Richard Graham from Oak Ridge National Laboratory presents: Advancing Research and Science through Supercomputing. Recorded at the HPC Advisory Council Israel Supercomputing Conference on Feb 7, 2012 in Tel Aviv.

Presentations will soon be available from the conference site.

Video: Opening Session – Israel Supercomputing Conference 2012

Rich Brueckner — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 08:30:44 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWAjehtv6D4

In this video, Gilad Shainer, Chairman of the HPC Advisory Council, and Yan Benhammou from Tel Aviv University open the Israel Supercomputing Conference 2012. Recorded Feb 7, 2012 in Tel Aviv.

Presentations will soon be available from the conference site.

Are You an HPC Industry Insider?

Ralph — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:39:55 +0000

Be sure to join your colleagues at the 26th annual High Performance Computing and Communications conference March 26-28, 2012 in Newport, Rhode Island.

New for 2012: The NHPCC Annual Conference Goes Global

The National High Performance Computing and Communications Conference (NHPCC) will highlight several exciting changes this year.

Also known as the ‘Newport Conference,’ the elite gathering that started 26 years ago as a one-day event to bring vendors together with government agency personnel has expanded its focus this year to include a more global perspective.

The new global focus features a roster of world-class speakers:

Aleksei Komkov, Chief Products and Technology Officer for T-Platforms, the leading developer of HPC systems in Russia, who will discuss “Supercomputing in Russia”
Andrew Jones, Vice-President High Performance Computing (HPC) Business for the NAG Group and a well-known HPC columnist and blogger, who will discuss “Supercomputing in the UK/Europe”
Sharan Kalwani, an HPC Platform Strategist at Intel Corporation and formerly with King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, who will discuss “HPC in the Middle East.”

Another significant change this year is the emphasis on manufacturing and competitiveness.

Emphasis on Manufacturing

Bringing HPC to manufacturing is an important initiative, in the U.S. and the rest of the world. Competitiveness is an elusive goal that requires continual refinement and adoption of new technologies. HPCC 2012 will highlight this critical area with discussions on the application of HPC to modern manufacturing to address what many refer to as the ‘missing middle’ – referring to the thousands of small and mid-size businesses not currently taking advantage of high performance computing in areas such as design, manufacturing, logistics, transportation, etc.

Speakers in this area will include:

Emily DeRocco, President of The Manufacturing Institute who will discuss “HPC in Manufacturing and Competitiveness”
Dawn White of Accio Energy addressing, “Wind Energy from a Revolutionary Concept”
Suzy Tichenor from Oak Ridge National Laboratories who will discuss the ORNL Industrial Partnership Program

Another session of note will be moderated by Bob Feldman, President of HPC Marketing. Bob will host a Thought Leader panel discussion on “Supercomputing: Can America Compete Globally?” See the full program for a list of all invited speakers.

HPCC Registration is now open. Early bird registration fees are available up through February 24.

And be sure to see the insideHPC travel article on Newport posted earlier this month by Robert Murphy.

Video: Energy Secretary Steven Chu Speaks at Ground Breaking for New LBNL Facility

Rich Brueckner — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:06:16 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwxxyQauSr0

In this video, Energy Secretary Steven Chu and others speak at the ground-breaking ceremony for the new LBNL Computational Research and Theory (CRT) facility. The CRT will be at the forefront of high-performance supercomputing research and be DOE’s most efficient facility of its kind. Joining Secretary Chu as speakers were Lab Director Paul Alivisatos, UC President Mark Yudof, Office of Science Director Bill Brinkman, and UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau. The festivities were emceed by Associate Lab Director for Computing Sciences, Kathy Yelick.

According to Yelick, the new CRT facility will be one of the most energy efficient supercomputer centers on the planet.

Inaugural XSEDE12 Conference Issues Call for Participation

Ralph — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:28:50 +0000

Clipped from: www.xsede.org (share this clip)

The XSEDE12 conference has issued its Call for Participation. The event will take place July 16-20 in Chicago.

The inaugural XSEDE12 conference will carry forward many of the successful elements of the TeraGrid conference series, while adding new features. XSEDE will showcase the discoveries, innovations, and achievements of those who use XSEDE resources and those who help build and support them. XSEDE12 also will create a forum for discussion of current needs and future plans among researchers, students, XSEDE staff, and NSF representatives.

Tutorial and Panel proposals are due April 13 and Paper and Poster submissions are due April 25.

Podcast: Opscode Users to Gather for First-Ever #ChefConf Event

Rich Brueckner — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 18:28:59 +0000

In this podcast, Jesse Robbins from OpsCode talks about the new #ChefConf event coming up May 15-17, 2012 in San Francisco. The event will bring together hundreds of users of Chef, an open-source systems integration framework built specifically for automating the cloud.

Tens of thousands of people and thousands of companies use Opscode Chef to automate, manage and scale their infrastructure,” said Jesse Robbins, co-chair of #ChefConf, and co-founder and chief community officer of Opscode. “This ability is now a critical skill for every software developer, systems engineer and IT professional who must manage ever-increasing scale and complexity.”

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

ISC Launches Weekly Blog with Top 3 Insights from HPC User Survey

Rich Brueckner — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:01:29 +0000

Clipped from: www.isc-events.com (share this clip)

The International Supercomputing Conference folks have revamped their ISC’12 website with some nice functional changes and the addition of a new weekly blog by HPC thought leaders. This week, Addison Snell from Intersect360 Research kicks things off with his Top 3 insights for ISC:

The new challenge for Lustre will be to expand its footprint beyond high-end research labs into commercial markets. Enterprise RAS (reliability, availability, serviceability) features and first-line support from more storage vendors will help. pNFS still looms as a potential alternative in the possibly near future, and as 2011 closed multiple vendors had productized pNFS clients, with pNFS servers on the roadmap for 2012. These file system dynamics will continue to be important, with storage demand continuing to grow faster than any other product segment.2 Additionally, recent consolidation among storage vendors will intensify the competition in this space.

Read the Full Story.

Travel Feature looks at HPCC Conference – Destination Newport March 26-28

Robert Murphy — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 22:14:50 +0000

By Robert Murphy

The National High Performance Computing and Communications conference, scheduled this year for March 26-28 in Newport, Rhode Island, will bring together an elite gathering of industry insiders for its 26th annual conference.

New this year is the focus on a global perspective of supercomputing along with emphasis on manufacturing and competitiveness.
With these changes, we can expect to see a number of new faces traveling to Newport for the first time.

For those first time visitors, and for those of you who have frequently dropped in for a conference and had to leave before getting to know the island, I offer this brief history and overview of Newport, and encourage you to take the extra time to explore the area if you are planning on attending the annual Newport HPCC conference.

Read the Full Feature on Newport (PDF). If your IT Crowd blocks Dropbox, you can download from this Google page.

Agenda Published for Israel Supercomputing Conference

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 21:22:22 +0000

Clipped from: hpcadvisorycouncil.com (share this clip)

The HPC Advisory Council has published the agenda for the Israel Supercomputing Conference coming up on February 7 in Tel Aviv. Featuring speakers from AMD, Intel, IBM, NetOptics, Mellanox, ORNL, ScaleMP, and Tel Aviv University, the one-day event will cover advanced HPC topics from around the world.

I’m looking forward to attending this event. The HPC Advisory Council recently reached a milestone of over 300 institutional members.

Thanks to its long history of high-tech breakthroughs by innovative small companies, Israel is often referred to as “Startup Nation.” What better place could there be to launch the 2012 HPC Event Season?

Video: Jack Dongarra on What Makes ISC Special

Rich Brueckner — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 10:01:42 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6j_uTUiqx0Q

In this video, Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee talks about how the annual ISC conference in Germany brings the HPC community together from around the globe.

Video: Panasas Hosts Panel Discussion on The Road to Exascale

Rich Brueckner — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:00:05 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=03-5hwAt5J8

In this video, Panasas hosts a panel discussion: The Road to Exascale. The panelists: Panasas founder and CTO, Garth Gibson; Deputy Division Leader, HPC Division at LANL, Gary Grider; Chief Executive Officer and CTO of Instrumental, Inc., Henry Newman; and Addison Snell, Chief Executive Officer of Intersect360 Research. Recorded at SC11 in Seattle.

ICERM Workshop Focuses on Power for Future Supers

Ralph — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 17:31:17 +0000

Jeremy Hsu from MSNBC writes that even if we could build an Exascale computer today, powering the thing would require the output of the Hoover Dam. To discuss these challenges, researchers gathered at a workshop held by the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM) at Brown University recently.

We’ve reached the point where existing technology has taken us about as far as we can go with present models,” said Jill Pipher, director of ICERM. “We’ve been increasing computing power by 1,000 fold every few years for a while now, but now we’ve reached the limits.”

The article goes on to discuss hybrid architectures with Nvidia’s Steve Scott, who describes how $100K Petaflop machines could be made available to researchers in the near future.

HPC User Forum Posts Agenda for 45th Meeting in Richmond, April 16-18

Rich Brueckner — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:17:56 +0000

The HPC User Forum has published its agenda for the 45th meeting coming up in Richmond, VA on April 16-18, 2012.

The theme of the meeting will be Advances and Potential Disruptions in HPC with presentations on Big Data, TACC Stampede, and Data-intensive Computing. Register now.

There looks to be a record number of events coming up this year for high performance computing, so check out our Featured Events page.

Interview: LexisNexis Goes Open Source for Big Data with HPCC

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 13:15:56 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcOZvpY8qPk

In this video, Charles Kaminski, Jr. from LexisNexis describes how the open source HPCC software environment takes on Big Data analytics in an enterprise ready way that takes much less effort to program than traditional Hadoop solutions.

This video was recorded at the HPC Advisory Council Stanford Workshop in December, 2011.

As mentioned in the video, you can download the HPCC VM and get started using the software and participate in the developer community.

Podcast: Interview with Dr. Bernd Mohr on the ISC’s Popular Crash Course on HPC

Rich Brueckner — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 13:37:52 +0000

In this podcast, I interview Dr. Bernd Mohr from the Jülich Supercomputer Center. Every year at the ISC International Supercomputing Conference in Germany, Dr. Mohr conducts a popular half-day Crash Course on High Performance Computing to help familiarize conference attendees with all the terminology we bat around here in supercomputing circles.

Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * Subscribe on other podcast players

If your IT crowd blocks Dropbox, you can also Download the MP3 from The Google.

Video: Visualizing the Los Alamos Asteroid Killer

Rich Brueckner — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 13:08:49 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOcNbAV6SiI

How do you mitigate an meteor? Our Video Sunday feature continues with this feature describing how LANL scientists used a Cray supercomputer to model effects of nuclear energy source on an Earth-threatening asteriod.

The newest supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Cielo, is currently working on classified nuclear weapons physics problems. However, it is sometimes used to do fascinating unclassified science when a computer model is so large that it can’t be run on a smaller platform. One of the unclassified models that ran recently on Cielo — a 1.35 petaflop/s machine built by Cray — was a model by Robert Weaver of Theoretical Design Applications Physics that looked at how 1 megaton nuclear energy source might effect the granular asteriod Itokawa as a way to prevent a potential asteriod impact with Earth.

The video was originally shown at SC11 in Seattle.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCJeR0UebR8

Just for fun, you might remember this scene from the Sci-Fi movie Armageddon. Yeah, they’re actually working on that. Now, what could be cooler than HPC?

Featured Sessions from GPU Technology Conference in Beijing

Rich Brueckner — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 17:13:34 +0000

Clipped from: www.gputechconf.com (share this clip)

Nvidia has posted videos and slides from the recent GPU Technology Conference in Beijing. You can see the full listing here, but we’ve gone ahead an highlighted some of the featured talks in the the HPC track.

Weather & Climate Modeling

GPU-based Operational Weather Model with Horizontal 500m Resolution. Takayuki Aoki - Tokyo Institute of Technology. MP4 * MP4 CN * PDF
Unified Modeling System for Seamless Weather and Climate Predictions of Monsoons. Subodh Kumar - IIT Delhi, New Delhi, India. MP4 * MP4 CN
GPU Considerations for Next Generation Weather and Climate Simulations. Thomas Schulthess - Swiss National Supercomputing Center, ETH Zurich. MP4 * MP4 CN * PDF
GPU Computing in Numerical Space Weather Modeling. Xueshang Feng - State Key Lab of Space Weather, Chinese Academy of Sciences. MP4 * MP4 CN

Digital Manufacturing

Using GPUs to Power Abaqus Finite Element Analysis to Enhance Speed. Jack Huang - Dassault Syst. MP4 * MP4 CN * PDF

Using GPU Acceleration in SAIC Motor. Yang Weng - SAIC Motor. MP4 * MP4 CN

From the Dynamics of Sand to the Dynamics of Tanks: Using GPU Computing to Advance the Pace of Innovation and Improve Designs in Mechanical Engineering. Dan Negrut - Simulation-Based Engineering Lab Wisconsin Applied Computing Center University of Wisconsin. MP4 * MP4 CN * PDF

GPUs in HPC

A Fast, Scalable High Order Compressible Flow Solver for Unstructured Grids. Patrice Castonguay - Stanford University. MP4 * MP4 CN * PDF

State-of-the-Art Analysis and Perspectives of China HPC Development: A View from 2011 HPC TOP100. Yunquan Zhang - Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Science. PDF

Tsubame 2.0: Running a 4,000 GPU Supercomputer in Full Production. Satoshi Matsuoka - Tokyo Institute of Technology, Global Scientific Information and Computing Center. MP4 * MP4 CN * PDF
The Critical Role of Software Infrastructure in Future Exascale Systems. Jeff Vetter - Oak Ridge National Laboratory & Georgia Institute of Technology. MP4 * MP4 CN
Why Hybrid Systems Work So Well for Simulation Based Sciences. Thomas Schulthess - Swiss National Supercomputing Center, ETH Zurich.
GPUs are Revolutionizing Supercomputing. Wen-mei Hwu - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. MP4 * MP4 CN * PDF
Opportunities and Challenges Posed by Exascale Computing: ORNL’s Plans and Perspectives. Jeff Nichols - Oak Ridge National Laboratory. MP4 * MP4 CN
Petaflop Biofluidics Simulations on the TSUBAME 2.0 Supercomputer. Simone Melchionna - National Research Council Italy. MP4 * MP4 CN
Opening Keynote with Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA. Jen-Hsun Huang - NVIDIA. WMV * MP4

National HPCC Conference Kicks Off March 26-28 in Newport

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:47:00 +0000

Clipped from: hpcc-usa.org (share this clip)

The National HPCC Conference has released their meeting agenda for their event coming up March 26-28 in Newport, RI. The theme for the 2012 conference is “Supercomputing: A Global Perspective.”

The National High Performance Computing and Communications Council is a professional society dedicated to exchanging information, discussing technical issues and transferring technology within the HPCC community.We emphasize communication between manufacturers and users, as well as academics and the government agencies which establish policy and regulate the use of advanced technologies. When you review the agenda and visit the exhibits, I think you’ll agree that this year’s lineup of prominent speakers fulfills our mission.

Early Bird Registration rates end on February 25, 2012.