Chemnitz University of Technology is only 51 miles from Leipzig and thus the hometown favorite. The school, founded in 1836, was a fast starter in terms of science and technology. During one pre-1900 period, Chemnitz generated more patent registrations than any other institution in the world. Currently, the university is ranked near the top of German technical schools, a reputation they’ll be putting on the line at the student cluster challenge. Judging by their entry application, Chemnitz (or TUC, which stands for Technische Universitat Chemnitz) has a deep HPC curriculum, including courses and research on FPGA and GPU application acceleration. Team TUC has partnered with German hardware vendor MEGWARE GmbH to build “TurboTUC,” the schlachtkreuzer they hope to ride to victory.

Read the Full Story.

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The post European Teams to Face Off in ISC’13 Klusterkampf appeared first on insideHPC.

Attendance and full breakfast are complimentary, so be sure to Register Now.

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The post IDC Breakfast Briefing Returns to ISC’13 June 18 appeared first on insideHPC.

• The PRACE Scientific Conference will be held on Sunday, June 16 at the Congress Center Leipzig, Hall 4. Top European scientists present results and advances in large scale simulations obtained with support of PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe.

• The HPC Advisory Council 2013 European Conference takes place on Sunday, June 16th, at the Congress Center Leipzig, Hall 5. The workshop will focus on HPC productivity, and advanced HPC topics and futures, and will bring together system managers, researchers, developers, computational scientists and industry affiliates to discuss recent developments and future advancements in High-Performance Computing.

• HP-CAST 20 will take place in Leipzig, Germany on June 14-15 at the Westin Leipzig Hotel. HP-CAST is an organization of HP customers and partners who provide input to HP to increase the capabilities of HP solutions for large-scale, scientific and technical computing.

• 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.

If your organization is planning a meeting in Leipzig, please let us know and we will list it here.

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The post Ancillary Events Line up for ISC’13 in Leipzig appeared first on insideHPC.

The Human Brain Project, recently awarded a 10 year grant by the EU Commission, will pull together all our existing knowledge about the human brain and to reconstruct the brain, piece by piece, in supercomputer-based models and simulations. Federating more than 80 European and international research institutions, the Human Brain Project is estimated to cost 1.19 billion euros. It will be coordinated at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, by neuroscientist Henry Markram with co-directors Karlheinz Meier of Heidelberg University, Germany, and Richard Frackowiak of Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois and the University of Lausanne. The project will also associate some important North American and Japanese partners.

Read the Full Story.

The ISC’13 conference takes place June 16-20 in Leipzig, Germany and discounted Early Registration ends May 15.

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The post Special ISC’13 Session to Probe the Thinking behind Europe’s Human Brain Project appeared first on insideHPC.

The biggest impediment to innovation is legacy software. Many innovations are held back by the need for backward compatibility — or by the excessive focus on yesterday’s software at the expense of tomorrow’s software. To address this challenge, at the same time we develop new architectures and software techniques, we work to develop a path for legacy software to migrate to the new architecture.

Read the Full Story.

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The post Nvidia’s Bill Dally on Future Challenges of Large-Scale Computing appeared first on insideHPC.

Mr. Uwe Albrecht, Deputy Mayor of Leipzig

This year the ISC’13 International Supercomputing Conference moves on to a new location in the the city of Leipzig, Germany. To learn more about what this historic city has to offer, insideHPC caught up with Uwe Albrecht, the Deputy Mayor of Leipzig.

I think that Congress Center Leipzig is a great choice for the International Supercomputing Conference ISC’13,” said Uwe Albrecht. “In 2012, the CCL Congress Center Leipzig was voted ‘Best Congress and Convention Centre’ by readers of British trade magazine Business Destinations and corporate travel centre directors of the world’s top 500 companies. And last year it hosted over 100 congresses and conferences attended by more than 100,000 participants. As the Deputy Mayor of Economic Affairs and Employment, I’m of course proud and thrilled that the main supercomputing conference will be held in Leipzig and that 2,500 system managers, researchers from higher education and business as well as developers from 50 countries will be meeting up to talk shop in keynote speeches, panel discussions and workshops. I see this as a show of confidence in Leipzig.

Read the Full Story.

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The post Interview: Leipzig Gears up for ISC’13 appeared first on insideHPC.

Teams will compete for top benchmark scores on three HPC workloads including the LINPACK benchmark and the Gromacs molecular dynamics package. The third applications, BSDE option pricing (a Monte Carlo calculation), requires students to use Intel’s Phi accelerator to compute results. This competition, which is the first in the student cluster competition triple crown, is jointly sponsored by the Asian Student Supercomputer Challenge (ASC), the HPC Advisory Council, Inspur and Intel. Forty-two universities from far and wide submitted highly detailed competition proposals. The ASC selected the ten best submissions and invited those teams to the final in Shanghai.

ASCC winners will receive cash prizes and a chance to compete at the ISC’13 Student Cluster Competition.

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The post Asian Students Prep for Cluster Competition Smackdown appeared first on insideHPC.

insideHPC: In your blog and various talks I’ve seen, it is obvious that you are very passionate about the topics of hardware and software in the HPC space. What are the issues that resonate with you in these areas?

Andrew Jones: Yes, as anyone who has encountered me at conferences or read my blogs (hpcnotes.com and blog.nag.com) will know, I am a passionate advocate of HPC as a tool for science and economic impact – and equally passionate about ensuring that HPC is seen as a complete ecosystem of hardware, software, people, processes, etc. and not merely the hardware that is often the default focus of HPC. Clearly the hardware matters – a supercomputer offers the promise of a big performance increase over smaller computers. But the supercomputer on its own is just a device for converting money into waste heat (via some floating point units and an oversized electricity bill). The hardware needs software (applications) to turn the potential performance into a real science tool or engineering capability etc. And in turn, those applications need supporting infrastructure (middleware) to efficiently use the resources. Underpinning all of this software and hardware is the requirement for people – to design, deliver, program, etc. this complex ecosystem which can be such a powerful tool. All parts of this ecosystem need attention (and investment) in order to achieve the maximum rewards of HPC. I am lucky that I am not merely evangelizing this “software & people deliver performance” message based on faith. At NAG we have built up a significant evidence of success stories (from over 50 projects) that demonstrate that HPC expertise applied to application innovation really does deliver increased science/engineering output – much more so than investing the same effort/money in more hardware.

insideHPC: You attend many of the same HPC events around the world as I do. The other day, you mentioned at dinner that any HPC event is really not about the technical program so much but everything else around it, such as the networking opportunities, the exhibition, etc. Can you elaborate on that?

Andrew Jones: I believe the greatest potential value for most attendees is informally meeting a diverse range of fellow HPC professionals and users. Perhaps I could illustrate this by looking at the extreme – much of the obvious content of the technical program could be acquired through reading published papers or watching recordings of the conference talks, etc. However, attending the conference itself allows the possibility of a conversation with the author, or perhaps one of the other audience members inspired by the paper, etc. To me, it is that discussion inspired by the talks that is the real opportunity of HPC events. In smaller events the technical program is critical because that is where most of the attendees will spend most of their time and thus it sparks opportunities for networking. In the bigger events (e.g., SC or ISC) only a small proportion of the attendees will spend significant time in the main technical program, the rest being spent in the exhibition or surrounding side-meetings. Indeed, it is difficult to create a program of quality in every topic required to attract the breadth of attendees at such large events. At these events, the knowledge on offer comes also from a comprehensive exhibition (an often undervalued aspect of the bigger HPC events) which allows a much broader set of ideas, products and research to be offered to catch people’s attention than a technical program could do in a sensible timeframe. In my experience, catching up with existing contacts, discussing experiences with industry practitioners and experts, and creating new relationships are the key activities at HPC events that are likely to lead to beneficial collaborations.

insideHPC: We’re well into the year 2013. How well are your those HPC predictions you blogged about coming into fruition?

Andrew Jones: I said Big Data will gradually be overtaken as the buzzword of choice for the HPC community. No sign of that yet! I predicted that some new buzz-themes (needing catchy buzzwords) would emerge, specifically energy-efficient computing and ease-of-use in HPC. There are some tentative signs of this happening, especially energy-efficient computing, but I think there is still more to come this year.

I said there would be continuing discussion of GPU vs. Phi as the accelerator of choice – especially at ISC’13. I think this one is pretty much true so far, but let’s see in Leipzig!

I also predicted that the HPC community would see a strong focus on industrial HPC this year, especially engagement between centers of HPC expertise and industry users. [Note that I say “centers of HPC expertise” – it is critical that this does not mean only supercomputer centers – there is a lot of real expertise in HPC outside of the supercomputer centers – e.g., within the main HPC vendors, or specialist HPC expertise providers such as NAG, or in some cases within the industrial end users themselves.] I think this prediction has already come true, with more on the way. I hear companies increasingly seeing the potential of HPC within their business; those who have previously invested are increasing and broadening their investments; and companies are seeking interactions with centers of HPC expertise to get a step ahead of their competitors. At least in the UK, politicians are very keen to get industry using HPC and that investments are increasingly being predicated on that.

insideHPC: What will NAG be showcasing at their ISC’13 exhibit?

Andrew Jones: As always, NAG will send several staff to ISC’13. We will be available to discuss how our team of HPC software engineers can enhance customer application codes to implement better scalability, new algorithms or other innovations to get more performance and solve more complex problems. We can also help with advice on HPC strategy and procurement, and planning application development to exploit future hardware technologies.

As well as the HPC services and consulting side of our business, NAG will be showcasing the latest in our libraries products. In particular, this year we have a new release of the NAG Library (Mark 24) including new routines in optimization, FFTs, wavelets and data fitting – well over 1,000 routines in total including the existing NAG chapters. We’ll also display the NAG routines on the Intel Xeon Phi co-processor and other parallel computer technologies.

insideHPC: What is the NAG Library for SMP & Multicore?

Andrew Jones: The NAG Library for SMP & Multicore is a full implementation of the NAG Library in which a large number of the routines have been enhanced for parallel processing using OpenMP. This means they can run significantly faster on multi-socket and multicore systems, processing larger amounts of data, etc. This offers customers an easy way to achieve the performance advantage of multicore processors – simply link to the multicore version of the NAG Library instead of the serial version.

insideHPC: Why do you continue to attend and exhibit at ISC year after year? What makes this event special?

Andrew Jones: It is a HPC event that combines the best of everything. It has scale – over a thousand attendees – while somehow managing to retain the engaging small conference atmosphere of its origins. It has one of the better technical programs of the larger conferences due to the hard work by the organizers to balance well-chosen invited talks, discussion panels and peer-reviewed papers. Most importantly, the agenda, the exhibition, and the surrounding social events are all planned with excellent opportunities for networking.

At a local level, Germany is an important market for us both in both commercial and academic sectors (e.g., we have a number of large academic site licenses for our libraries), so ISC is a good opportunity to meet some of our end users.

Overall, for NAG, ISC’13 is a great place to meeting new people, to learn from them and to understand how NAG can help them with their HPC and numerical computing.

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The post Interview: NAG’s Andrew Jones on the HPC Opportunities Coming to ISC’13 appeared first on insideHPC.

In his talk on Monday, June 17, Dally will discuss how high performance computing and data analytics share challenges of power, programmability, and scalability to realize their potential, with energy efficiency playing a greater role in determining system performance. At the same time, the large-scale parallelism and storage hierarchy of future machines pose programming challenges. Dally will discuss both these challenges and some of the technologies being developed to address them.

Now in its 28th year, ISC’13 is expected to draw 2,500 attendees from academia, research institutions and industry around the world to the Congress Center Leipzig. Read the Full Story.

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The post Bill Dally from Nvidia to Deliver ISC’13 Opening Keynote appeared first on insideHPC.

As a number of recent studies make clear, technology trends over the next decade — broadly speaking, increases of 1000X in capability over today’s most massive computing systems, in multiple dimensions, as well as increases of similar scale in data volumes — will force a disruptive change in the form, function and interoperability of future software infrastructure components (I’ll call this the X-stack) and the system architectures incorporating them.

Dongarra has several talks on Exascale topics coming up at the ISC’13 conference, which takes place June 16-20 in Leipzig, Germany. Read the Full Story.

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The post Jack Dongarra on the Pending Disruptive Changes of the X-stack appeared first on insideHPC.

Powerful hardware (fast car) gives a big head start in achieving return on investment (it is harder to deliver performance step change without it). But the hardware alone is not enough for the best performance and sustained impact. Attention must be paid (and investment delivered) to the software innovation, the supporting business processes (e.g. ease of use/access), infrastructure, etc. – and, critically, to the people that make all of those possible.

Read the Full Story.

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Dr. Franz-Josef Pfreundt

At ITWM, I founded departments that focus on image analysis, flow in complex media, and high-performance computing (HPC), which aid the development of simulation software. At the university in the late 1980s, we were developing software for the re-entry simulations for the European space shuttle and, as you can imagine, this was a very time -consuming process. We were looking for faster systems at a time when the first parallel machines were beginning to emerge, and I do believe that we were the first group in Germany to purchase an nCube parallel machine. Using parallel machines for very compute-intensive simulations is where my interest in HPC began.

My involvement with ISC started in the early 1990s, and I will be chairing the session on oil and gas at this year’s event. ITWM works closely with many oil and gas companies to develop seismic imaging software that aims, among other things, to improve the understanding of sub-surface structures. Oil and gas is one of the fields today where huge compute capacities are needed and increasingly being sought. If you look around the industry, you see that companies like Total are investing in HPC systems – such as Pangea, the petaflop system it recently purchased – because the problems they face are so large and compute-intensive, they would be impossible to tackle without such resources.

The session at ISC will focus on the question of what the oil and gas industry is doing with HPC, with secondary topics that look at the algorithmic challenges and HPC challenges behind that. The fact that algorithms need to be tailored to certain machines has prompted accelerator discussions in the industry, revolving around FPGAs, GPUs, Intel Mic, etc. We now have to question what the right CPU for the right algorithm is, and vice versa. As machines become faster, we also have the opportunity to address whether methods that were too challenging for previous systems can now be applied.

The development of software costs a considerable amount of money and can easily take years before developers have anything productive. Then there is the architecture to consider – so the first step is to look for mainstream architecture to make the code work, and then determine what new technologies to invest in, depending on the algorithm. One of the main workhorses in seismic imaging today is the Revers Time Migration. The oil and gas industry is using both CPUs and GPUs to solve this problem. In the isotropic case, GPUs have no advantage but in stronger anisotropic cases GPUs are faster. GPUs’ architectures are changing and so has the code, so from a software developers’ point of view it is not an easy choice.

Opinions on accelerators can differ greatly – which is why I will be stimulating the discussion during my session at ISC. The views and investments in the oil and gas industry are important not only for scientists and vendors involved in that sector, but for HPC in general. ISC provides a good forum for discussion as there is always enough time to meet people and follow up on discussions that have been sparked by the sessions or presentations.

The combination of conferences and exhibitions works well for me as an attendee and ISC’13 will be offering an increased parallel research track, with many scientific papers being presented. I think this is an important development for ISC because it is assimilating elements of scientific conferences while maintaining its focus on academia and application. It’s this exploration of what we as an industry can do with the theoretical that makes trade shows like this so valuable.

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

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The post ISC’13 Preview: The Role of HPC in Oil and Gas appeared first on insideHPC.

insideHPC: What is the EXTOLL interconnect and who is the target user of this technology?

Mondrian Nuessle: The EXTOLL interconnect technology was specifically developed for High Performance Computing. It aims at minimizing the communication overhead between nodes by optimizing the whole communication stack from the physical layer all the way up to the application interfaces like MPI.

insideHPC: How does EXTOLL differ from commodity technologies currently available out there?

Mondrian Nuessle: EXTOLL technology tops commodity technologies by virtually all metrics relevant for HPC including latency, message rate, and bandwidth. Users’ benefit depends on the particular application, but typically a speed up by a factor of 2 will be experienced. This is achieved by an ultra low latency of 600ns, a message rate of more than 100 million messages per second and a bandwidth of 120 Gb/s per link. Each host adapter features 6 bi-directional links of 120Gb/s each, as well as an integrated low-latency message router.

To form an EXTOLL network, EXTOLL adapters are plugged directly together forming for example a 3D torus topology. Thus, the EXTOLL interconnect technology is designed to be a direct network rendering external switches obsolete. This alone will allow customers to realize significant OPEX and CAPEX savings. The EXTOLL interconnect also implements a lot of different technologies to optimally support HPC work loads. Amongst them are low-latency messaging services, high-bandwidth bulk transfers, hardware implemented barriers and multicast, deterministic and adaptive routing, a large amount of reliability features and many more. In summary, the EXTOLL technology is optimized for HPC from the start with no trade-offs! This enables customers to close the gap between commodity clusters and dedicated MPP HPC systems. So in one sentence one can say, by using EXTOLL technology users will get the features, performance and benefits of MPPs for the price tag of commodity clusters.

insideHPC: Does your software stack support MPI? Will your software be open source?

Mondrian Nuessle: Yes, of course. The EXTOLL software stack supports MPI as a “premiere citizen”. From an OS perspective, EXTOLL will focus on Linux first. Linux kernel drivers as well as the low-level API libraries and the MPI integration will be released as open-source. One of the first MPI distributions that will be supported is OpenMPI.

But the EXTOLL software is not uniquely focused on MPI. Support for other communication middlewares and runtimes is under development. An example is GASNET. TCP/IP transport service will be available, too.

insideHPC: Are you still in the prototype stage or is the technology currently available?

Mondrian Nuessle: The EXTOLL ASIC is just in the tape-out stage. First silicon will be available around mid of 2013. Prototypes are based on FPGAs and are fully functional. These prototypes including the beta software stack are out in the field and show performance that is comparable to leading commodity products in many regards, although the raw punch of the FPGA is at least a factor of 4 less than the targeted ASIC technology.

insideHPC: What will you be showcasing at your booth during ISC’13?

Mondrian Nuessle: First of all we will be demonstrating the EXTOLL interconnect with industry standard servers in cooperation with Thomas Krenn AG and NVIDIA. One other thing we will be showing is EXTOLL’s direct GPU-to-GPU communication. One GPU directly communicates with and accesses the memory of a second GPU via the EXTOLL network without involving the host CPUs. This dramatically improves Inter-GPU communication, with savings in energy and time. This new technique is in particular useful with recent Nvidia features like Dynamic Parallelism and GPUDirect RDMA. It addresses the increasing use of accelerators in HPC.

We will also be presenting our 12x active optical cables (AOC). This cable features an electrical connector that can be plugged directly into any electrical connector of EXTOLL cards. Depending on the length of links, users can choose to use EXTOLL AOC or electrical cabling. Moreover, EXTOLL is used within the EU funded FP7 Project DEEP for the BOOSTER interconnect and first BOOSTER node hardware will be presented in cooperation with Eurotech at the Eurotech booth and at the booth of the Jülich Supercomputing Center (JSC).

insideHPC: Why is ISC’13 an important event for you as you commercialize this company?

Mondrian Nuessle: The best way to commercialize a new product or even a company is to be at the right place at the right time. ISC is definitely among the “hot” places for HPC. There is a perfect opportunity to meet trade partners, get their personal feedback, initialize/continue negotiations and become aware of upcoming developments. While SC is the premier venue for the US market, ISC is inevitable to talk to European custmers and partners. And for EXTOLL as a German company, we are especially happy to be able to attend this event in Germany.

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The post Interview: EXTOLL to Demo Ultra-Low-Latency Interconnect at ISC’13 appeared first on insideHPC.

At the risk of appearing self-serving, I am really excited about what I perceive as this period of transition between the paradigm of the past and the execution model of the future. This viewpoint is not widely held but I am convinced this it is what we are seeing. We don’t really have a choice. Technology demands it as it has many times in our short history. Indeed, for practical reasons of markets, road maps, and legacy codes we have deferred this too long. Each time this has happened, we find new ways to address in synergy the fundamental problems that have always faced parallel computing: starvation, latency, overhead, and the waiting due to contention for shared resources. Now we need to find ways to exploit the exponential growth of numbers of cores and the heterogeneous mix of their internal structures and external organization. It is likely that we will tap the largely unused runtime information combined with adaptive methods to significantly improve local efficiencies and vastly expand global scalability. After the brilliantly successful Pax-MPI era of the preceding two decades, we may be reformulating the interrelationships across the system layers in a transformative approach embracing dynamic adaptive cooperation and control. Such periods of change in our field are rare and it is inspiring to be a part of it.

Read the Full Story.

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The post Interview: Thomas Sterling on HPC Achievement and Impact in 2013 appeared first on insideHPC.

insideHPC: Who is EUDAT and who do you help?

EUDAT Team: EUDAT is a new pan-European data initiative bringing together a unique consortium of 25 partners, including research communities, national data and HPC centers, technology providers, and funding agencies from 13 countries. EUDAT aims to build a sustainable cross-disciplinary and cross-national data infrastructure providing a set of shared services to access and preserve research data.

The services being designed in EUDAT are thus of interest to a broad range of research communities and researchers that lack robust data infrastructures, or that are simply looking for additional storage and/or computing capacities to better access, use, re-use, and preserve their data. Five large research communities have initially joined the project as partners and are contributing to the design of the infrastructure and its services. These communities come from linguistics (CLARIN), solid earth sciences (EPOS), climate sciences (ENES), environmental sciences (LIFEWATCH), and biological and medical sciences (VPH). Other communities have expressed strong interest in EUDAT, and are being associated to the work by sharing their requirements, providing feedback on the services being designed and in some cases by participating to service pilots. These communities come from a large diversity of fields: environmental sciences (ICOS, EMSO, EURO-VO, ENVRI), biomedical sciences (DIXA, ECRIN, BBMRI, INCF), physical sciences (PANDATA, EISCAT), and social sciences and humanities (DARIAH, CESSDA).

Altogether, EUDAT has established contact with 20 major European research communities which are actively involved in the service design process and the shaping of the future infrastructure.

insideHPC: You are a first-time exhibitor at ISC. What will you be showing in your booth this year?

EUDAT Team: This year, EUDAT will be showcasing on its booth the Collaborative Data Infrastructure (CDI) it is developing to support researchers from all fields of science in (1) temporarily storing and sharing data, (2) long-term archiving and curating scientific data and (3) transporting data to computing centers for complex processing. Visitors at the booth will thus be provided with dissemination materials, goodies and detailed information on how to join EUDAT.

insideHPC: EUDAT aims to help users with a “Collaborative Data Infrastructure.” What do you mean by that?

EUDAT Team: The concept of Collaborative Data Infrastructure (CDI) emerged from the work of the High Level Expert Group on Scientific Data (HLEG) and was presented in the Riding the Wave as a possible collaboration framework whereby centers offering community-specific support services to their users could rely on a set of common data services shared between different research communities. Although research communities from different disciplines have different ambitions and approaches – particularly with respect to data organization and content – they also share many basic service requirements. This commonality makes it possible for EUDAT to establish common data services, designed to support multiple research communities, as part of this CDI.

The benefits associated with creating such a collaborative framework are many and will result in better exploitation of synergies: (1) By providing generic services to existing scientific communities, EUDAT will enable these communities to focus a greater part of their effort and investment on services that are discipline-specific; (2) It will also provide individual researchers, smaller communities, and projects lacking tailored data management solutions with access to sophisticated shared services, thus removing the need for large-scale capital investment in infrastructure development.(3) Lastly, the EUDAT research infrastructure will facilitate interoperability between the existing infrastructures, enable multiple users, projects, disciplines, and regions to share data and support data-intensive research collaborations.

insideHPC: EUDAT will conduct two training courses this year. What skills with students learn and how does one register?

EUDAT Team: EUDAT plans to run several training courses this year including training at community events, technical workshops on the EUDAT infrastructure, and a series of online webinars each on different subjects related to EUDAT’s work. We’ll look at things such as sharing data, moving data, making data more useful through the use of metadata and identifiers, and also consider topics such as data-intensive computation and data-centric workflows. In particular we’ll look at these from the point of view of large-scale data infrastructure and the services that are being put together by the EUDAT project.

Our aim – as far as training in the project is concerned – is to be driven by the needs of the end-user communities. For this reason, we plan to run several community-focused training events over the next two years which we will co–locate with existing conferences and workshops. In general these community courses will be aimed at a fairly broad audience and will cover various aspects of the wide area of data. We are already working to tailor training for those communities who have been involved in EUDAT from the outset (CLARIN, ENES, EPOS, Lifewatch and VPH) but we’re also very keen to work with other communities as they join up with EUDAT.

In addition to the community training courses, we will run cross-community training which will be targeted at data centre managers and people who are involved in managing other people’s data. These will be focused more on the details of interacting with the EUDAT infrastructure, and the technologies used. We’ll be advertising all of these courses on the EUDAT website and there will be links here to allow interested people to sign up when the times and locations for these courses are fixed. The community events will also be advertised through the communities’ normal communication channels.

A good opportunity to catch up on our training activities will be the 2nd EUDAT Conference which will be held in Rome on 28-30 October and during which we plan to hold a full day training session.

insideHPC: You have 25 European partners. Are you looking to expand?

EUDAT Team: EUDAT is interested to engage with additional stakeholders, in particular research communities interested in using and developing the services we are offering, but also with everybody willing to contribute to the development of the CDI. Interested organisations and institutions can already join the Consortium as Observers or Associate Partners which are two efficient ways of following and contributing to the work in progress. As a pan-European initiative, EUDAT must have broad coverage – not only in geographical terms but also in terms of scientific representation – and this will be taken into account for future expansion plans.

insideHPC: ISC brings in scientists and engineers from around the globe. Is this what attracted you to participate in the conference?

EUDAT Team: There are a number of things that make ISC compelling. EUDAT’s booth will this year place the focus on industry. Indeed, our aim at ISC is to organize and support networking activities and thus welcome industry representatives from innovative sectors such as Cloud computing, Big Data and Data Analytics. At the booth, visitors will be given a tour of EUDAT services and facilities, and discussions on public-private partnerships as well as long-term collaborations will be encouraged. Given the fairly significant attendance of industry that ISC witnesses every year, it is a very interesting opportunity for EUDAT’s outreach.

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• Video: StackIQ Big Data Infrastructure Management at SC11

The post Interview: EUDAT to Bring Collaborative Data Infrastructure to ISC’13 appeared first on insideHPC.

 
Registration opened today for ISC’13. The International Supecomputing Conference takes place in Leipzig, Germany June 16-20. Besides a change of venue, the conference agenda has added parallel sessions, new topics, and a two-day industry track. To learn more, I caught up with Martin Meuer, Executive Director of ISC Events.

insideHPC: ISC’13 will be the first conference in your long history with two session tracks. What prompted you to add the new Industry Track?

Martin Meuer: We introduced the Industry Track with the goal to help attendees from the industry make informed decisions about acquiring and operating high-performance computing systems. So, this track will specifically focus on engineering and manufacturing, to help the industry improve product design and time-to-market through the use of HPC.

All the talks in this track are aimed at spurring a dialogue between users, technology companies, hardware vendors, software vendors and service providers. We anticipate a bigger audience from small and medium enterprises (SMEs) at ISC’13.

insideHPC: Did the ISC conference series need to grow to a certain number of attendees to make dual-tracks a viable option?

Martin Meuer: The growing number of attendees naturally influences the volume of the technical program…we see it increasing year after year, leading to many sessions taking place in parallel.

When we decided to introduce industry-based topics, it was clear to us that we needed to revamp the current structure. I would like to point out that ISC’13 will offer even more value to our expected 2,500 attendees as all the sessions in the Industry Track will run as a series of single sessions starting Tuesday June 18 to Wednesday June 19. We are quite confident that this add on and some other new program elements like the Distinguished Speakers Series, will offer our attendees the most comprehensive four-day technical program in the 28 years of conference history.

insideHPC: What will be the highlights of the Industry Track?

Martin Meuer: Here’s the list of topics that we would like to draw your readers attention to:

• HPC provisioning concepts for the industrial sector
• Independent software vendors (ISVs) and their HPC products for industry
• Cloud HPC for SMEs
• An invited talk about the common needs of engineering and scientific research in regard to HPC: HPC-Accelerated Innovation for Industry
• An overview of the SME market
• Many case studies, which will run on both days to give the audience an overview of HPC use in industry

insideHPC: This week you also announced that ISC that it will be giving the Human Brain project a permanent platform at ISC to share their latest research findings for the next 10 years. What can attendees look forward to for their session this year?

Martin Meuer: First of all, we’re glad to mention that ISC is the only scientific computing conference in Europe of a substantial size that attracts scientists, researchers and business leaders from around the globe, thus we are always happy to provide research projects, especially European projects a platform at our conference. When HBP was selected as the European flagship project for 2013, we approached its project manager, Felix Schuermann and the team accepted the offer to share their human brain simulation challenges and progress with our audience.

The HBP team has designed a two hour session entitled “Supercomputing and HBP – Following Brain Research and ICT on 10-year Quest”, and invited a number of speakers, including institutions that supply them with supercomputing infrastructure, for example, the Jülich Research Centre.

This session will focus on the development of ICT (Information and Computing Technology) platforms for neuroinformatics, brain simulation and supercomputing, which is about facilitating
researchers to collect neuroscience data from all over the world and integrating the data in unifying models and simulation of the brain and to check the model against data from biology before releasing it to the global scientific community.

insideHPC: You recently announced an all-new ISC Big Data conference for September 2013. How did that come about?

Martin Meuer: We have been addressing data intensive computing at the ISC Conference for the last few years, and had an intensive BoF discussion on the challenges involved in building successful big data environments at the last ISC Cloud conference. And at this year’s ISC’13, there’ll be two sessions fully dedicated to big data. So, to answer your question, the ISC Big Data is basically a spin-off of our continuous effort to address topics that are highly affecting the current high-performance and high-throughput computing environments.

The first big data conference will be held from September 25 – 26 in Heidelberg, Germany, right after the ISC Cloud’13 conference. This year’s theme is “ISC Big Data – Where Enterprise and HPC Meet“, and it will be chaired by Sverre Jarp, the CTO of CERN openlab. So, building on the existing experience from large HPC installations and data-intensive enterprises, we’ll ensure that the best-of-breed practices and use cases as well as the latest trends get reviewed and shared amongst the 200 international attendees we are expecting at this new conference.

If people are wondering what makes the ISC Big Data so special, here are some insights:

• Our goal is to encourage an active cross-fertilization between enterprise and HPC/HTC, and
• We want to establish active links to sites with long traditions in huge data volumes.

For the full description of topics, please visit http://www.isc-events.com/bigdata13.

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• Interview: Martin Meuer on Continuing Success at ISC
• Early Registration Opens for 2013 Tapia Diversity in Computing Conference
• Diversity in Computing: Tapia Conference Registration Opens

The post Interview: As Registration Opens for ISC’13, Conference Sets a Parallel Course for the Future appeared first on insideHPC.

In this podcast, Happy Sithole from CHPC and Gilad Shainer from Mellanox discuss the first-ever Student Cluster Competition in South Africa, which wrapped up in December. The winning team will be traveling to compete in the ISC’13 Student Cluster Competition in Leipzig this June.

Download the MP3 or Subscribe on iTunes.

In related news, you can now follow all the major worldwide Student Cluster Competitions at their new home site.

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The post Podcast: Student Cluster Competition Comes to South Africa, Winners off to ISC’13 appeared first on insideHPC.

The five-hour session aims to share information on the latest HPC systems and applications from leading supercomputing countries in Asia – China, India, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan – as well as presenting related HPC activities and research in those nations.

Abstracts are due May 4. Read the Full Story for poster submission details.

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The post ISC’13 HPC in Asia Issues Call for Posters appeared first on insideHPC.

Young people need to understand that supercomputing is not just a single specific field. They need to be interested in various aspects of the business, for example, the hardware, software layers, the application codes, numerical methods and finally the problem itself. This sounds complicated and exhaustive, but this is also a lot of fun and kind of ensures that working with supercomputers will never be boring. It also leads you to a career that allows you to meet many people, often from completely different backgrounds – which I personally find very exciting still today.

Read the Full Story.

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The post Interview: Gerhard Wellein Looks Forward to ISC’13 Keynote appeared first on insideHPC.

IDC is seeking nominations for the next round of the HPC Innovation Excellence Awards. The program seeks to increase awareness of benefits of adopting HPC and justifying HPC investments across the user community, including emerging SMEs / SMBs.

We are interested in ROI examples from today or dating back as far as 10 years. We encourage you to complete and submit a separate application form for each ROI / Innovation success story. Your organization likely has 100′s or even 1,000′s of examples, and it would be great if you could provide 3 to 5 today. For example, many of the job runs on your HPC system support a specific product or product improvement or research project, and we are looking for just a few data points on each one. Examples include the creation of a single movie, the design of a new car engine or the design of a new water pump.”

Award winners will be announced at the ISC’13 Conference in June. Read the Full Story.

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The post IDC Seeking Nominees for HPC Innovation Excellence Awards appeared first on insideHPC.