insideHPC » Events

rCUDA: A Ready-to-use Remote GPU Virtualization Framework

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 09:33:17 +0000

In this video from the HPC Advisory Council European Conference 2013, Rafael Mayo Gual from the Universitat Jaume presents: rCUDA – A Ready-to-use Remote GPU Virtualization Framework.

Download the slides (PDF) and check out more videos at the HPC Advisory Council European Conference Video Gallery.

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InfiniBand Rocks the TOP500 with 16 Petascale Supercomputers

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 07:35:24 +0000

The latest TOP500 once again shows that InfiniBand is the interconnect of choice for the world’s most powerful supercomputers, powering 80 percent of clustered systems and a record 16 Petascale systems on the list.

The increase in InfiniBand-connected Petascale systems demonstrates that InfiniBand provides the highest performance for clustered computing,” said Jim Ryan, co-chair of the IBTA Marketing Working Group. “Furthermore, the significant adoption rate of FDR InfiniBand technology among the TOP500 shows that institutions are relying on the newest generation of InfiniBand technology to power their mission critical systems. InfiniBand continues to help drive the TOP500 performance curve.”

According to the InfiniBand Trade Association, the latest generation FDR InfiniBand technology grew 3.3X year-over-year from 20 systems in June, 2012 to 67 in June 2013, and connects the four fastest InfiniBand-connected supercomputers. Read the Full Story.

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Allinea Unified Debugging/Profiling Tools Give Users an Edge

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 07:01:29 +0000

Here at ISC’13 in Leipzig, Germany. It is easy to see that Unification is a good thing. This week Allinea announced a unification of its own with smart 4.1 Release that lets developers and scientists debug and profile interchangeably.

We’ve noticed fluidity in the workflow. A developer uses Allinea DDT to get the code right, then Allinea MAP to understand its performance, and then flicks back into Allinea DDT to uncover a performance issue’s root cause,” says Mark O’Connor, Allinea’s VP of Product Management. “We wanted to support that.”

Working between Allinea DDT and Allinea MAP is of particular interest to organizations like Cenaero, an applied research center that develops simulation methods and software tools. Last year, it was appointed by the Wallonian Minister of Research to operate a Tier-1 supercomputer, which will extend its current cluster of 3,000 cores to more than 10,000 cores.

With a much larger community of users, particularly academic researchers seeking to further parallelize their codes, we expect the Allinea tools will help us get this new infrastructure to deliver efficient results,” says Serge Bogaerts, HPC and Infrastructure Manager at Cenaero. Bogaerts says Cenaero developers have been very impressed by Allinea DDT. “The time we’ve saved this year has already justified our need for the tool.”

Bogaerts expects the unified interface to help researchers use Allinea MAP as much as they use Allinea DDT. Read the Full Story.

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New Cray Cluster Connect Puts the Super in Big Data

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 07:15:27 +0000

This week at ISC’13, we learned about the new Cray Cluster Connect. Described as a complete Lustre storage solution for x86 Linux clusters, Cray Cluster Connect is an “hardware agnostic” solution for customers who need flexibility in their storage configurations. In other words, you no longer need to buy a Cray supercomputer in order to get access to Cray’s Big Data and fast I/O expertise.

Cray has a long, rich history in the HPC storage space, and we have built some of the largest and fastest Lustre file systems in the world,” said Barry Bolding, Cray’s vice president of storage and data management. “With Cray Cluster Connect, we are applying our Lustre expertise and innovation, and taking all that we have learned, developed and invested in parallel storage solutions to an expanded customer base. We can now deliver end-to-end, Lustre storage solutions for customers’ existing x86 Linux environments. With the launch of Cray Cluster Connect, our storage and data management solutions are no longer limited to Cray supercomputer customers.”

Available now, Cray Cluster Connect offers a wide range of storage options including block storage components from Cray Sonexion (Xyratex), DataDirect Networks, or NetApp plus a full set of management and storage connectivity tools for data movement, archiving and management. Read the Full Story.

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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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Researchers Deploy GPUs To Build World’s Largest Artificial Neural Network

Ralph — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 07:27:19 +0000

Today at ISC’13, Nvidia announced a collaboration with Stanford University to create the world’s largest artificial neural network built to model how the human brain learns. At 6.5 times bigger than the previous record-setting network developed by Google in 2012, the neural net will be capable of “learning” how to model the behavior of the brain — including recognizing objects, characters, voices and audio in the same way that humans do.

Creating large-scale neural networks is extremely computationally expensive. For example, Google used approximately 1,000 CPU-based servers, or 16,000 CPU cores, to develop its neural network, which taught itself to recognize cats in a series of YouTube videos. The network included 1.7 billion parameters, the virtual representation of connections between neurons. In contrast, the Stanford team, led by Andrew Ng, director of the university’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, created an equally large network with only three servers using Nvidia GPUs to accelerate the processing of the big data generated by the network. With 16 NVIDIA GPU-accelerated servers, the team then created an 11.2 billion-parameter neural network.

Delivering significantly higher levels of computational performance than CPUs, GPU accelerators bring large-scale neural network modeling to the masses,” said Sumit Gupta, general manager of the Tesla Accelerated Computing Business Unit at NVIDIA. “Any researcher or company can now use machine learning to solve all kinds of real-life problems with just a few GPU-accelerated servers.”

Read the Full Story.

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Do We Underestimate the Real Challenge of Exascale?

Rich Brueckner — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 07:06:22 +0000

Over at the ISC Blog, Mark Parsons from the EPCC supercomputing centre writes that scalable software is the real Grand Challenge of Exascale.

I believe that the problems that we’ve seen at the Petascale with regard to the scaling of many codes are insurmountable if we take the incremental change approach at the Exascale. Looking at the CRESTA codes, it is highly unlikely any of them will scale to the Exascale, even allowing for weak scaling (through increased resolution of the model under study) using incremental improvements. This means we need to think about disruptive changes to codes in order to meet the challenge.

Parsons leads the CRESTA FP7 project, which is focussing its work on a small set of six HPC applications that are widely used today and represent the sort of codes that will have to run on Exascale systems. He says that over the past 20 years, the community has managed to cope with each new generation of hardware through incrementally improving our codes. But today, simply changing a solver or some other disruptive change to an existing code will not be enough.

We simply do not understand how to compute using one billion parallel threads (except perhaps in trivial cases). It requires us to completely rethink how we simulate our physical world using this much parallelism. The problem goes to the foundations of modern modelling and simulation – we need to think beyond the tools we have today and invent new methods to express the mathematical descriptions of the physical world around us, on these and even larger systems in the future. Only by doing this will we move modelling and simulation forward for the next 20 years. This is the real challenge we face at the Exascale.

Read the Full Story.

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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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C-DAC Initiatives in HPC for Scientific & Engineering Research

Rich Brueckner — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 15:11:13 +0000

In this video from the HPC Advisory Council European Conference 2013, Abishek Das from C-DAC presents: C-DAC Initiatives in HPC for Scientific & Engineering Research.

Exploitation of parallel processing technologies for Scientific & Engineering Research will accelerate research of applications in various engineering disciplines that employ HPC techniques and facilitates research about HPC technologies contributing to capacity-building of the country.”

Download the slides (PDF) and check out more videos at the HPC Advisory Council European Conference Video Gallery.

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Video: Xyratex Update – ClusterStor

Rich Brueckner — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 14:11:32 +0000

In this video from the HPC Advisory Council European Conference 2013, Torben Kling-Petersen from Xyrtex presents: Xyratex Update – ClusterStor.

Download the slides (PDF) and check out more videos at the HPC Advisory Council European Conference Video Gallery.

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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) and check out more talks at the HPC Advisory Council European Conference Video Gallery.

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Video: Efficient and Cost-Effective HPC Interconnection Networks

Rich Brueckner — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 10:48:58 +0000

In this video from the HPC Advisory Council European Conference 2013, Jesús Escudero, from the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha presents: Efficient and Cost-Effective HPC Interconnection Networks.

This keynote address analyzes the most prominent challenges for designing and cost-effective interconnection networks for Exascale systems, such as topology scalability, power consumption, fault tolerance, and/or congestion control. Besides, some solutions are proposed and their implementation complexity in commercial products are estimated.”

Check out more presentations at the HPC Advisory Council European Conference Video Gallery.

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Video: Scalable MPI Futures

Rich Brueckner — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 10:41:19 +0000

In this video from the HPC Advisory Council European Conference 2013, Richard Graham from the MPI Forum presents: Scalable MPI Futures.

Download the slides (PDF) and check out more talks at the HPC Advisory Council European Conference Video Gallery.

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MEGWARE Sponsors Local Team at ISC’13 Student Cluster Challenge

Rich Brueckner — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 11:30:20 +0000

When it comes to Student Cluster Competitions, is there such a thing as a home team advantage? A team of six Chemnitz students will battle it out with eight other teams in the ISC’13 Student Cluster Challenge. The team calls themselves “TurboTUC” and their roster includes some students with pure science backgrounds in areas such as chemistry and theoretical physics to go along with their computer-related smarts.

The challenge for us is firstly to create high-performance hardware and then use the right components,” says team member Sebastian Siegert. “In addition, we will only find out about part of the applications at the fair itself – then the task will be to discover whether – and how well – we can adapt these with our supercomputer in order to solve the problem as quickly and with the greatest energy efficiency as possible,” adds Henrik Kretzschmar.

Read the Full Story or check out more Team profiles at the Student Cluster Competition Blog.

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DDN Hosts User Group Meeting at ISC’13 June 17

Rich Brueckner — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 15:31:29 +0000

The annual DDN User Group meeting will be held on Monday, June 17 in conjunction with ISC’13.

DDN European User Group

Date: June 17, 2013
Time: 8:30am – 11:00am
Place: Congress Center Leipzig, Room M05

Speakers:

University College of London: Ms. Clare Gryce (Head of Research Computing) and Dr. Daniel Hanlon (Research Data Storage Architect)
CSC Finland: Pietari Hyvarinen (System Specialist)
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology – KIT: Jos van Wezel (Storage Group Leader)
DataDirect Networks: Mr. Dave Fellinger (Chief Scientist), Dr. James Coomer (Sr. Technical Advisor), and Mr. Jeff Denworth (VP of Marketing)

In related news, be sure to check out our feature story on the full spectrum of ISC’13 Ancillary Events.

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OpenSFS to Sponsor Lustre Events at ISC’13

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 14:38:08 +0000

OpenSFS is sponsoring a number of Lustre community events as well as a booth at ISC’13 in Leipzig, Germany.

Lustre Birds of a Feather Session (Tuesday, June 18 from 3:30-5:30pm)
- Room M05 at the Messhaus, located next door to the Congress Center
- Agenda:
  - Community introduction: Galen Shipman, OpenSFS, and Hugo Falter, EOFS
  - Fastforward project, Eric Barton, Intel
  - Lustre Marketing Asset Acquisition and Update, Michael K. Connolly, Xyratex
  - Lustre Releases and Feature Panel: Peter Jones, Intel (moderator)
  - Lustre Industry Panel: Torben Kling Peterson, Xyratex (moderator)

Lustre Breakfast Panel (Wednesday, June 19 from 7:15-8:45am)
- Hall C4 CCL Congress Center Leipzig
- Participants:
  - Moderated by Frank Baetke, HP
  - Panelists include Aurélien Degrémont, CEA; Barry Bolding, Cray; Jeff Denworth, DDN; Klaus Wolkersdorfer, FZJ; Mark Seager, Intel; Bronis de Supinski, LLNL; Galen Shipman, OpenSFS / ORNL; Tommy Minyard, OpenSFS / TACC; Torben Kling-Peterson, Xyratex

OpenSFS and EOFS booth party (Wednesday, June 19, from 4-6pm)
- Stop by to join us for a drink and meet others in the community!

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New Mobile App Taps You into ISC’13

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 11:00:57 +0000

Are you headed to ISC’13? To help you get around, the conference is trying something new this year with a new Conference4Me mobile app for Android and IOS.

Accessing conference information using a browser on a smart phone can be a real pain. Now you can plan your itinerary, locate conference sessions, and find exhibitor booth numbers, all without having to re-authenticate every single time you wake up your phone up on their curiously-strong conference WiFi.

Features:

Access to up-to-date agenda
Barcode scanning (more and more exhibits use this technology as an easy way to get you to their event-specific web sites)
Easy access to conference’s key information including venue and accommodations.
Built in conference’s venue maps, plans
Offline functionality. Application does not required active Internet connection for browsing conference related information
Conference content (sessions, events, abstracts, links to presentations, etc.)
Conference news

Download the Conference4Me mobile app today or search for “Conference4Me” on your phone’s App Store.

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NAG Library Updates for Intel Xeon Phi

Ralph — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 17:47:25 +0000

This week the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) rolled out a new library of software with 1700 numerical routines tuned to optimize performance of the Xeon Phi.

The Numerical Algorithms Group has long provided value to the Intel Xeon processor with high quality optimized numerical libraries,” said Joe Curley, Director of Marketing for Technical Computing Group at Intel Corporation. “In an extension of this partnership, NAG collaborated to provide input that helped in the definition and development of Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor technology. Tailoring the NAG Library to support Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors should benefit our mutual customers’ highly-parallel, development efforts.”

To learn more, check out the NAG Library ISC’13 booth #650. Also, Dr Ian Reid from NAG will present “Accelerators: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” at the Intel booth #350 on Tuesday June 18 at 14:00.

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Adaptive Computing Launches Workload Optimization Pack for Cluster Platforms

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 16:31:19 +0000

Today Adaptive Computing announced its new Workload Optimization Pack for HPC Cluster Platforms. By bundling Moab HPC Suite Enterprise Edition, Intel MPI Library 4.1, and the HP Insight Cluster Management Utility Connector for Moab HPC Suite, the workload optimization pack is designed to help customers run their supercomputing jobs more efficiently.

The Adaptive Workload Optimization Pack addresses all of the key challenges that can limit HPC potential,” said Rob Clyde, CEO of Adaptive Computing. “Moab helps organizations excel and compete by accelerating productivity, automating uptime and consistently meeting business priorities for HPC systems. We have tightly integrated our capabilities with HP Insight Cluster Management Utility to further simplify and streamline the management of HPC systems as well.”

You can check out a demonstration of the new software package at ISC’13 Booth# 500, in Leipzig, Germany.

In related news, Moabcon 2013 Europe will be held on June 15-16th at the Westin Leipzig Hotel. As the annual European user group meeting for Adaptive Computing, Moabcon offers in-depth technical sessions on Moab and Torque software.

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