insideHPC » SC12

Student Cluster Teams: Start Your Engines for SC13

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 20:32:49 +0000

Team submissions are now being accepted for the SC13 edition of the Student Cluster Competition, a spirited event featuring young supercomputing talent from around the world competing to build and operate powerful cluster computers. As the world’s largest gathering of HPC professionals, the SC13 conference will be held Nov. 17-22, 2013, in Denver.

The energy and dedication that the student teams bring to the Student Cluster Competition is inspiring, especially as they work around the clock to overcome obstacles and get their systems up and running,” said Student Cluster Competition Chair Dustin Leverman of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “Though they are competing against one another, the teams also share a camaraderie as they race to the end.”

In this video, Dan Olds from Gabriel Consulting brings us the resultes from the SC12 Student Cluster Competition.

The deadline for team submissions is Friday, April 12, 2013. Read the Full Story.

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

The post Student Cluster Teams: Start Your Engines for SC13 appeared first on insideHPC.

Video: SGI ICE X Presentation at SC12

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 17:52:29 +0000

In this video from the Mellanox booth at SC12, Paul Kinyon from SGI presents on the SGI ICE X, a fifth-generation blade-based x86 cluster. According to Kinyon, the SGI Ice X was the first platform to support FDR InfiniBand at the node level, the switch level, and the fabric level.

The post Video: SGI ICE X Presentation at SC12 appeared first on insideHPC.

Video: Virtualized Infiniband based on SR-IOV – Enabling HPC in the Cloud

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 12:30:09 +0000

In this video from the Mellanox booth at SC12, Hoot Thompson from NASA Center for Climate Simulation presents: Virtualized Infiniband based on SR-IOV – Enabling HPC in the Cloud.

So what is SR-IOV? The short answer is that SR-IOV is a specification that allows a PCIe device to appear to be multiple separate physical PCIe devices. The SR-IOV specification was created and is maintained by the PCI SIG, with the idea that a standard specification will help promote interoperability.

The post Video: Virtualized Infiniband based on SR-IOV – Enabling HPC in the Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

Video: Enabling Developers in the Cuda Ecosystem

Rich Brueckner — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 16:20:14 +0000

In this video from the Mellanox booth at SC12, Duncan Poole from Nvidia describes how the company enables third-party developers to work with GPUs.

The post Video: Enabling Developers in the Cuda Ecosystem appeared first on insideHPC.

Video: InfiniBand at TACC: From Terascale to Petascale

Rich Brueckner — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 16:30:37 +0000

In this video from the Mellanox booth at SC12, Tommy Minyard from the Texas Advanced Computing Center presents: InfiniBand at TACC: From Terascale to Petascale.

The post Video: InfiniBand at TACC: From Terascale to Petascale appeared first on insideHPC.

Cycle Computing Caps Record 2012 with IDC HPC Innovation Excellence Award

Ralph — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 19:17:12 +0000

Today Cycle Computing announced that the company capped off its record-breaking fiscal year by winning the IDC HPC Innovation Excellence Award. IDC recognized Cycle’s 50,000-core utility supercomputer run in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud for pharmaceutical companies Schrödinger and Nimbus Discovery. In an unprecedented computer run, the cluster completed 12.5 processor years of computation in less than three hours. Running at a cost of less than $4,900 per hour, the computational drug discovery job was recognized by IDC for its impressive return on investment.

In an industry that is evolving as rapidly as HPC, it’s fascinating to be a part of the creativity and innovation we’ve seen in the past year,” said Chirag Dekate, an analyst with IDC. “Cycle Computing’s impressive 50,000 run for Schrödinger and Nimbus Discovery demonstrated a strong ROI from the use of HPC, and we were pleased to recognize their accomplishment.”

Cycle Computing also reported 85 percent client growth in 2012 and has staffed up its sales and support staff. Read the Full Story or check out this interview with Cycle Computing CEO Jason Stowe from SC12.

The post Cycle Computing Caps Record 2012 with IDC HPC Innovation Excellence Award appeared first on insideHPC.

Video: The Art of Networking a Petascale System

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 16:10:15 +0000

In this video from the Mellanox event at SC12, Anke Kamrath from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) presents: The Art of Networking a Petascale System. The video includes remarkable images of networking topology from the Yellowstone supercomputer in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

The post Video: The Art of Networking a Petascale System appeared first on insideHPC.

Video: Big Compute, Big Storage, and the Cloud

Rich Brueckner — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 19:28:24 +0000

In this video from the Mellanox event at SC12, Dave Nettleton from Microsoft’s Azure Compute and Storage group presents: Big Compute, Big Storage, and the Cloud.

The post Video: Big Compute, Big Storage, and the Cloud appeared first on insideHPC.

Video: NASA’s Dan Duffy on the Intel Xeon Phi at SC12

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 12:00:44 +0000

In this video from the Intel Xeon Phi announcement at SC12, Dr. Dan Duffy at NASA Goddard describes the installation of his IBM iDataPlex M4 servers. Using the IBM Intelligent Cluster process, his team was able to complete the installation in 48 hours as well as a Linpack run that landed them at number 52 on the TOP500 supercomputer list.

The post Video: NASA’s Dan Duffy on the Intel Xeon Phi at SC12 appeared first on insideHPC.

Video: What’s New in Moab HPC Suite 7.2?

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 12:00:15 +0000

In this video from SC12, Brady Kimball from Adaptive Computing presents: What’s New in Moab HPC Suite 7.2?

These latest editions of Moab demonstrate our continued commitment to improving the user experience of Moab as well as the back-end functionality,” noted Michael Jackson, president of Adaptive Computing. “By integrating the latest technology from other industry leaders into our solutions, we are making HPC systems run more effectively, which means manufacturers and researchers can more quickly bring their discoveries to the world.”

Read the Full Story and be sure to check out our SC12 Video Gallery featuring over 50 interviews from the show floor.

The post Video: What’s New in Moab HPC Suite 7.2? appeared first on insideHPC.

Podcast: Radio Free HPC Looks at the Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 17:04:39 +0000

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team is still talking about the recently concluded SC12 conference in Salt Lake City. The conversation starts with a short review of Thanksgiving dinner (including disgusting eating noises added in at no additional charge) before moving on to more weighty topics such as Intel’s formal introduction of their Xeon Phi coprocessor, including some performance and price information.

Rich and Henry think that Intel has a strong hand with Phi, but Dan isn’t so sure…

Download the MP3 * Download the video * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

The post Podcast: Radio Free HPC Looks at the Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor appeared first on insideHPC.

Podcast: Radio Free HPC Reviews the SC12 Student Cluster Competition

Rich Brueckner — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 12:00:38 +0000

In this wrap-up review of SC12, the Radio Free HPC team discusses the Student Cluster Competition, covering the teams, results, and a discussion of how the competition has evolved over the years and where it should go in the future.

Download the MP3 * Download the video * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

The post Podcast: Radio Free HPC Reviews the SC12 Student Cluster Competition appeared first on insideHPC.

Podcast: Radio Free HPC Looks at the Chink in TOP500 Armor

Rich Brueckner — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 13:30:35 +0000

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team quits griping about the horrible WiFi at SC12 and moves on to a truly big issue: Are LINPACK and HPCC benchmarks useful? Should they be constantly re-evaluated? And shouldn’t you really test machines on the kinds of workloads they’re designed to run?

The catalyst for this discussion is the Blue Waters system, for which no LINPACK numbers have been submitted. Yes, it’s behind schedule, and sure, they’re busy doing the science… but is it also a shot across the bow? Are they rebelling against industry philosophy? If they are, that’s a good thing, according to Henry – because a system is about what you plan to do with it, not how many flops you can get out of it. Rich agrees: if you get a giant LINPACK number on a system that has reliability issues, and you can’t output real science because all your time and money is invested in brute computation, what good is it? And the industry sectors doing meaningful work – where are their systems on the Top500? They’re not playing this game.

Spoiler alert: Henry agrees with Dan on something. Really. It’s at the 10:00 mark, if you’ve got to see it to believe it. We hardly believed it ourselves.

Download the MP3 * Download the video * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

The post Podcast: Radio Free HPC Looks at the Chink in TOP500 Armor appeared first on insideHPC.

Video: Overview of Warewulf Node Health Check Software

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 13:30:28 +0000

In this video, Michael Jennings and Jackie Scoggins from LBNL describe Warewulf Node Health Check software.

TORQUE, SLURM, and other schedulers/resource managers provide for a periodic “node health check” script to be executed on each compute node to verify that the node is working properly. Nodes which are determined to be “unhealthy” can be marked as down or offline so as to prevent jobs from being scheduled or run on them. This helps increase the reliability and throughput of a cluster by reducing preventable job failures due to misconfiguration, hardware failures, etc. Though many sites have created their own scripts to serve this function, the vast majority are one-off efforts with little attention paid to extensibility, flexibility, reliability, speed, or reuse. The Warewulf developers hope to change that with their Node Health Check project.”

Recorded at the Adaptive Computing booth at SC12 in Salt Lake City.

The post Video: Overview of Warewulf Node Health Check Software appeared first on insideHPC.

Video: The Effect of HPC on Everyday Lives

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 12:00:07 +0000

In this video from SC12, Addison Snell from Intersect360 Research presents: The Effect of HPC on Everyday Lives.

View the Notes from this presentation (PDF).

The post Video: The Effect of HPC on Everyday Lives appeared first on insideHPC.

Video: IDC HPC Market Update from SC12

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 12:00:30 +0000

Did you know that 3Q2012 was the biggest quarter of revenue in the history of HPC? In this video from SC12, Earl Joseph from IDC presents an HPC Market Update. Topics include: Top Trends in HPC, Vendor Revenue, and HPC Forecasts as well as an overview of a new IDC Study on Creating an Economic Model for HPC and ROI. View the slides (PDF) or check out the Full Story at The Register.

In related news, IDC will host the HPC User Forum in Tucson, April 29 – May 1, 2013. For more information, check out our insideHPC Featured Events.

The post Video: IDC HPC Market Update from SC12 appeared first on insideHPC.

Video: Interview on Energy & HPC with Jack Dongarra and Dona Crawford

Rich Brueckner — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 14:51:01 +0000

In this video, Dan Olds from Gabriel Consulting sits down with Jack Dongarra (ORNL/University of Tennessee and Dona Crawford (Assoc Director LLNL) at SC12 to discuss the challenges facing HPC on the road to exascale. Along the way, they describe their TOP500-list-topping systems: Titan and Sequoia.

The post Video: Interview on Energy & HPC with Jack Dongarra and Dona Crawford appeared first on insideHPC.

Moab HPC Suite – Remote Visualization Edition at SC12

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 17:56:33 +0000

In this video from the Adaptive Computing booth at SC12, company president Michael Jackson presents: Moab HPC Suite – Remote Visualization Edition.

With Moab HPC Suite — Remote Visualization Edition, you can improve the productivity, collaboration and security of the design and research process by only transferring pixels instead of data to users to do their simulations and analysis. This enables a wider range of users to collaborate and be more productive at any time, on the same data, from anywhere without any data transfer time lags or security issues. Users also have improved immediate access to specialty applications and resources‒like GPUs‒ they might need for a project so they are no longer limited by personal workstation constraints or to a single working location.”

Download the whitepaper on Technical Visualization Workload Optimization (PDF).

The post Moab HPC Suite – Remote Visualization Edition at SC12 appeared first on insideHPC.

Ceph Filesystem Ready to Take Off with Linux Distributions

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 12:30:08 +0000

Over at The Register, Matt Asay writes that the Inktank startup is in a great position to grow now that the Ceph client has been accepted into the Linux kernel.

Ceph is well-positioned to capture greenfield distributed storage opportunities through its so-called object storage approach. In my experience, it’s this greenfield characteristic that should be a great catalyst for Inktank, as it gives Inktank the chance to grow under the radar of the big, incumbent vendors. Since Ceph will be stealing greenfield sales opportunities that never actually hit the radar of the proprietary vendors’ respective sales teams, they won’t know they’re bleeding until Ceph’s momentum is difficult to impossible to stop.

Read the Full Story or check out our interview below with Neil Levine from Inktank at SC12.

The post Ceph Filesystem Ready to Take Off with Linux Distributions appeared first on insideHPC.

Video: Moab/TORQUE Support for Intel Xeon Phi

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 15:44:44 +0000

In this video from SC12, Gary Brown from Adaptive Computing presents: Moab/TORQUE Support for Intel Xeon Phi.

The latest version of Moab was designed to recognize and work with the new Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, based on the Intel Many Integrated Cores (MIC) technology. This ability to automatically detect Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors– and determine their location and availability — improves processor utilization to more intelligently schedule jobs and removes the need for extensive reprogramming to integrate Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors into existing systems. It also allows for policy-based scheduling, optimizing the choice of accelerators and coprocessors. As Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors are introduced into existing systems, this keeps costs and management efforts at a minimum, while maximizing utilization to ensure the most efficient job processing — by utilizing metrics including the number of cores and hardware threads, physical and memory available (total and free), max frequency, architect and load.”

Read the Full Story.

The post Video: Moab/TORQUE Support for Intel Xeon Phi appeared first on insideHPC.