insideHPC » HPC

Video: Titan Supercomputer Session Showcases Science on GPUs

Rich Brueckner — Fri, 25 May 2012 16:13:57 +0000

In this video from GTC 2012, Jack Wells, Director of Science at ORNL introduces a series of talks on the research that will be accelerated by the hybrid Titan supercomputer.

The whole system is an upgrade,” said Jack Wells in describing how Oak Ridge’s current Jaguar supercomputer is being transformed into Titan. ORNL is transitioning from Cray’s XT5 compute blades to their XK6 compute blades, which use hybrid chipsets comprised of AMD Opteron CPUs and NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. Application benchmarks conducted thus far have demonstrated that the XK6 is yielding performance improvements ranging from 50 percent to 230 percent compared with the XT5.

The following talks comprised the rest of the session:

Xoreax Software Finds Diamonds in the Cloud

Rich Brueckner — Fri, 25 May 2012 15:34:40 +0000

Xoreax Software announced recently that diamond-producer Sarin Technologies has has adopted the company’s IncrediBuild-XGE acceleration software. Sarin is using IncrediBuild-XGE to accelerate the performance of Sarin Advisor, a specialized diamond analysis application that maximizes the value of raw diamonds. The software calculates millions of potential diamond cutting options and identifies optimal cutting patterns based on stone attributes including size, weight, and internal flaws.

Our adoption of IncrediBuild-XGE is really a win for our customers,” explained Uzi Levami, Chief Executive Officer of Sarin. “With IncrediBuild-XGE, we not only maximize diamond value for clients involved in gemstone production and extraction, but also enable them to save significant time and resources.”

Using traditional sequential processing, full optimization analyses for complex projects used to take as long as 40-60 hours. By applying IncrediBuild-XGE software acceleration technology, Sarin was able to slash processing time to 1 or 2 hours. In other cases, simpler 1 to 2 hour analysis processes now finish within 10-15 minutes. Workflows that once took several days have been reduced to a single night’s run.

Read the Full Story.

Slidecast: ScaleMP Update on Server Aggregation

Rich Brueckner — Fri, 25 May 2012 11:30:28 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkc19eExSRc

In this slidecast, Shai Fultheim from ScaleMP provides an update on the company’s virtualization software solutions for HPC. The company is preparing a big announcement at ISC’12. You can hear some of the details here or check out their booth #303 in Hamburg.

The innovative Versatile SMP (vSMP) architecture aggregates multiple x86 systems into a single virtual x86 system, delivering an industry-standard, high-end symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) computer. Using software to replace expensive custom hardware and components, ScaleMP offers a new, revolutionary computing paradigm.

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

Drug Discovery through Molecular Matchmaking at TACC

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 24 May 2012 18:28:50 +0000

Researchers are using TACC supercomputers to target a small group of molecules for therapeutic use, saving significant time and money. As described in the February 2012 edition of the Journal of Structural Biology, the process uses information from electron microscopy and knowledge about drug binding to create 3D models and to simulate the interactions of drug molecules with the target site.

More and more, they’re moving into the computational drug screening arena, and more and more it’s teams of people working together,” said Chandrajit Bajaj, professor of computer science at The University of Texas at Austin. “The biophysicist, the biochemist and the synthetic chemist are sitting together with the computational expert, and they say it’s giving them clues as to what they should be doing next.”

Read the Full Story.

Allinea DDT CUDA Education Pack for Student Programmers

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 24 May 2012 17:53:23 +0000

This week Allinea Software announced the launch of a new DDT CUDA Education pack, designed to help teach the art of debugging CUDA.

This is a big step forward in educating the programmers of the future on GPU computing. It gives students access to a robust and powerful debugging tool within their institution’s budget,” added David Luebke, senior director of research and head of academic research programs at NVIDIA.

The pack contains annual subscriptions to a classroom-sized set of CUDA scalar workstation licences, white papers on debugging CUDA, and complete lecture notes suitable for introductory CUDA debugging and hands-on walkthrough examples and exercises. Read the Full Story.

3D Supernova Simulations on Jaguar

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 24 May 2012 15:43:11 +0000

In an effort to measure the size of the universe, researchers are using the Jaguar supercomputer at ORNL to simulate the explosions of white dwarf star supernova.

The physics of supernova explosions is something astrophysicists have been trying to figure out for about 50 years now,” said Stan Woosley, principal investigator of an Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) project and professor of astrophysics at the University of California–Santa Cruz. “It is an interesting physics problem in turbulent combustion, but it is also important because—as the 2011 Nobel Prize attested—Type Ia supernovae can be used to show that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.” This is because the supernovas function as “standard candles,” brilliant lights of known properties usable as measuring tools because their distance can be inferred by how bright they appear.

Because of the size of the computational runs, the studies are decoupled and done in three successive stages—ignition, explosion, and supernova. The multiyear project was allocated 50 million computing hours on Jaguar in 2011 and 47 million in 2012 through the INCITE program, which is jointly managed by the US Department of Energy’s Leadership Computing Facilities at Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories. Read the Full Story.

Boomer Super Comes Online at University of Oklahoma

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 24 May 2012 15:28:51 +0000

The University of Oklahoma powered up its new Boomer supercomputer today. The 109-Teraflop Dell system will power a variety of research with emphasis on weather forecasting, molecular dynamics and high-energy physics.

For the past decade, OU has been a national leader in supporting the computational research and education needs of local students, faculty and staff,” said Henry Neeman, Director of the OU Supercomputing Center for Education and Research. “We’re extremely proud to expand a great tradition with this fourth generation OU IT supercomputer, which will enhance research capabilities by connecting scientific collaborators throughout the state and nation.”

Read the Full Story.

ISC’12 Ramps up to 175 Exhibitors

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 23 May 2012 21:54:37 +0000

The good folks at ISC’12 are out with their latest newsletter and it looks like this year’s exhibition will be a record breaker with a total of 175 companies and research organizations from around the world. The conference runs June 17-21 in Hamburg, Germany.

Hot Topics at ISC’12:

Energy Efficient HPC Centers

Future Heterogeneous Architectures

Supercomputer Architectures for Data Intensive Applications

Alternative Processors, Architectures and Multidisciplinary Applications

Best Practices of Large-Scale Applications across Industries

Petascale Systems in the World and their Applications

Application Performance: Lessons learnt from Petascale Computing

Critical Aspects of High Performance Networking

The Realities and Challenges of HPC in the Cloud

Exascale Computing: Where we are?

Networking/Interconnect within HPC-Systems

Parallel File Systems

Computational Chemistry

HPC for Small and Medium Sized Enterprises

At insideHPC, we are proud to join the ranks of 54 first-time exhibitors at ISC’12. Look for the Red Hat and be sure to stop by and say hello.

Warewulf Cluster Manager is “Howlingly Great”

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 23 May 2012 18:47:44 +0000

Over at HPC Admin, Dell’s Jeff Layton has posted an in-depth look into the open source Warewulf Cluster Manager.

In this article, I want to discuss the one I have been using for a long time: Warewulf. It pioneered many of the stateless methods that other tools use today and is considered the standard stateless open source toolkit for clustering. It is primarily a stateless cluster provisioning and management tool that can also be installed as a stateful tool (i.e., installed onto disks in the compute nodes). It is simple, automates the process, and is very scalable. In this four-part series on using Warewulf in production clusters, I’ll start by discussing how to install Warewulf on a master node and statelessly boot compute nodes.

Read the Full Story.

ARCHIE Boosts Research at Scottish Universities

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 23 May 2012 17:50:40 +0000

A high-performance computer that can tackle complex calculations to solve major challenges in science and engineering, including drug development, energy systems and space technologies research, has been installed at the University of Strathclyde, UK.

The computer is at the core of a new £1.6 million regional Supercomputing Centre, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), which will help academics further their research and support business and industry through the next generation of product design and development.

Professor David Littlejohn, associate deputy principal at the University of Strathclyde, said: ‘The new centre will make a step-change in high-performance computing provision for Scotland, helping researchers to work with industrial colleagues from around the world to develop and test innovative new products and technologies.

‘Our plans for the centre have received overwhelming support from industry, and we are delighted that the EPSRC has chosen to invest in our infrastructure and the work of our internationally leading scientists and engineers.’

The advanced computer is known as ARCHIE (Academic and Research Computer Hosting Industry and Enterprise), and was the result of a successful funding bid submitted by scientists Professor Littlejohn, Professor Maxim Federov and Dr Richard Martin, and engineers Professor Jason Reese and Dr Paul Mulheran.

The funding will enable multidisciplinary researchers at the Universities of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Glasgow Caledonian, Stirling and the University of the West of Scotland to access the Supercomputing Centre and link up with other supercomputing centres around the world.

They will work with public and private sector partners in a wide range of research areas, including the purification of seawater, renewable energy, the next generation of mobile communications and improved air transport systems.

This story originally appeared on HPC Projects. It appears here as part of a cross-publishing agreement with Scientific Computing World.

Video: Programming Heterogeneous Many-cores Using Directives

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 23 May 2012 11:00:05 +0000

In this Part 1 of this video, Francois Bodin from CAPS presents: Programming Heterogeneous Many-cores Using Directives.

Directive-based programming is a very promising technology to deal with Many-Core. In this context, HPC users can rely on emerging standards such as OpenACC and OpenHMPP. CAPS will introduce OpenACC and HMPP directive-based programming models with companion tools (e.g. for tracing, tuning, debugging): HMPP Wizard, CULA, ArrayFire, Vampir, Paraver, DDT, CodeletFinder, etc. The speakers will provide insights on how GPU / CPU can be exploited in a unified manner and how code tuning issues can be minimized. The discussion will also cover the use of libraries which is essential when addressing Many-Core Programming. Pathscale will present its product supporting OpenHMPP programming model.

Recorded at GTC 2012 in San Jose. Download the slides (PDF).

In Part 2 of this video (starting at the 30 minute mark) Christopher Bergstrom from Pathscale presents: Pathscale Enzo. ENZO is a complete GPGPU and multi-core solution, which tightly couples the best programming models with highly optimizing code generation for Nvidia Tesla. Download the slides (PDF).

May 24 Webinar: How Do You Make Grid Engine Faster?

Rich Brueckner — Tue, 22 May 2012 19:54:26 +0000

In HPC, speed is everything. Join Univa’s Bill Bryce, VP Products for an all new webinar about how to make Grid Engine faster. You’ll learn about Univa Grid Engine 8.1 and the new features that translate into speed and productivity — and how they affect your business.

Each webinar will be less than 30 minutes, so you can get the practical information you need quickly.

Webinar Times :

Thursday, May 24: 13:00 – 13:30 (EDT / UTC/GMT -5 hours)

Thursday, June 15: 10:00- 10:30 (CEST/ UTC / GMT +1 hour)

Register now.

Interview: IBM’s David Ungar on End-to-End Non-Determinism

Rich Brueckner — Tue, 22 May 2012 19:04:29 +0000

In this interview, cloud consultant Miha Ahronovitz discusses parallel programming with Dr. David Ungar from IBM Research. Ungar is author of the popular article Many Core processors: Everything You Know (about Parallel Programming) Is Wrong!

Miha Ahronovitz: In parallel distributed computing, using a product like Grid Engine we got different results if the round robin servers were processing some sequential jobs mixed with parallel, or if we dedicated the servers to parallel MPI processing exclusively. We didn’t know why at the time. How can you explain this?

David Ungar: I think the problem you described, is that you have different results if you configure the servers differently. One of the principles in our project is what we call “end-to-end non-determinism”. The idea is if you go into these parallel systems to get performance – this holds for multi-core, many-core, distributed, then you need to take an approximate route.

Read the Full Story.

Bull Enters €28 Million Joint Venture to Mainstream HPC

Staff — Tue, 22 May 2012 16:38:52 +0000

Bull has announced a €28 million joint venture with a French investment company, aimed at accelerating the widespread adoption of high-performance computing (HPC).

The new joint company will focus on delivering secured HPC services, as a Cloud computing service provider. The other investor, CDC (Caisse des Dépots), is a public group serving France’s general interest and economic development. CDC will contribute nearly €10m in equity to the project.

The ‘NumInnov’ project aims to create an independent service provider specialising in HPC applications, which will operate at a European level.

I am delighted at the launch of this project, which will have a tangible impact on the industry and the digital economy in both France and in Europe,’ said Philippe Vannier, chairman and chief executive officer of Bull. “The project will be a very powerful driver to accelerate the adoption of HPC technologies, and will trigger the development of new applications and services by large enterprises as well as SMEs. As a specialist company in critical digital systems, Bull is the only European player capable of delivering expertise in on-demand HPC within the security constraints that are critical to this project.”

This story originally appeared on HPC Projects. It appears here as part of a cross-publishing agreement with Scientific Computing World.

Podcast: Spectra to Deliver 380 Petabytes of Tape Storage to Blue Waters

Rich Brueckner — Tue, 22 May 2012 16:05:04 +0000

In this podcast, Michelle Butler from NCSA and Molly Rector from Spectra Logic discuss the massive tape storage system that is being deployed for the 10 Petaflop Blue Waters supercomputer. As announced this week, the Blue Waters system will be one of the world’s largest active file repositories stored on tape media and will scale to a capacity of 380 raw petabytes within the first two years of operation.

NCSA designed Blue Waters to be one of the largest, most powerful supercomputing ecosystems in the world,” said Bill Kramer deputy director of the Blue Waters project at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “The Spectra Logic T-Finity met our rigorous requirements with its high enterprise-level performance, ready data accessibility and massively scalable capacity. We are confident it will provide our user community with fast, reliable access to the massive volumes of critical data stored within Blue Waters’ Petascale near-line file repository.”

Spectra T-Finity tape libraries will provide the Blue Waters project with the ability to keep all near-line data accessible in an active repository, perform automated data integrity verification for the data store, and deliver high performance read/write rates of up to 2.2 PBs per hour utilizing enterprise TS1140 Technology tape drives.

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

Video: GTC 2012 Full Keynote

Rich Brueckner — Tue, 22 May 2012 14:48:53 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gx3P6vm1luw

Last week, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang rolled out the new Kepler GPUs at his GTC 2012 keynote. And while this video is available elsewhere in pieces, we thought it would be worthwhile to stitch it together as one streaming movie for our readers.

Note: Many of the GTC 2012 talks are now available as streaming video, and we plan to highlight some of our favorites in the coming days.

Podcast: DDN WOS Software on OCP Storage Hardware to Enable Hyperscale Storage Clouds

Rich Brueckner — Tue, 22 May 2012 11:30:22 +0000

In this podcast, Jeff Denworth from DDN provides details on the company’s recent announcement that their Web Object Scaler (WOS) will support Open Compute server and storage platforms in cooperation with the Open Compute Project.

Historically, there has not been an industry movement around standardizing and driving the adoption of mass-market hyperscale hardware technology,” said Jean-Luc Chatelain, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Technology, DDN. “With the new OCP storage hardware specification, DDN is able to focus its cloud storage efforts and investments on the software intelligence that drives today’s business and social connection. The Open Compute movement allows us to harness the power of crowd-sourced hardware design and a highly optimized supply chain to drive the best value for our customers.”

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

Video: GPUs Accelerate Risk Analysis for Financial Services

Rich Brueckner — Mon, 21 May 2012 16:22:25 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pup6yVdJOcU

In this video, Pierre Spatz from Murex and Alastair Houston from Nvidia discuss how GPUs are being successfully used to run financial risk analysis at higher speeds and for less cost. Recorded at GTC 2012 in San Jose.

July HPC User Forums in London and Stuttgart

Rich Brueckner — Mon, 21 May 2012 16:14:42 +0000

At insideHPC, we are pleased to announce that we will co-sponsor two HPC User Forum meetings in Europe in July. The first meeting is at Imperial College London on July 5-6 and the second meeting is at the HLRS/University of Stuttgart on July 9-10. Registration is free and refreshments will be served.

The HPC User Forum was established in 1999 to promote the health of the global HPC industry and address issues of common concern to users. The organization has grown to 150 members. It is directed by a volunteer Steering Committee of HPC users from government, industry and academia, and is operated for the users by market analyst firm IDC.

The meetings will include presentations on Big Data, Blue Waters, regional supercomputing, and more. Read the Full Story.

Kepler K10 Single-Precision GPU Speeds Oil & Gas

Staff — Mon, 21 May 2012 15:59:36 +0000

Nvidia has announced the launch of an accelerator designed to meet what it describes as the two most difficult challenges in high-performance computing.

The Tesla K10 is aimed at seismic data processing in oil and gas exploration, as well as signal and image processing in the defence industry. The company claims it is based on the fastest, most efficient and highest-performance computing architecture ever built.

The Kepler architecture enables two high-performance Tesla K10 GPUs to be placed on a single accelerator board. It delivers an aggregate performance of 4.58 teraflops of single-precision floating point and 320 gigabytes per second memory bandwidth.

Seismic processing uses large data centers to crunch through petabytes of information about the Earth’s subsurface area, generated from reflected seismic waves. Geophysicists analyse the resulting 2D and 3D images to discover oil and gas deposits, and to determine the best and safest locations to drill.

In addition, the Tesla K10 can help agencies increase national security by improving the quality, and speeding the delivery of, actionable video analytics and image forensics to security and law-enforcement officials.

GPUs speed up by as much as 100 times the process of analysing thousands of video feeds generated by security cameras and drones, enabling analysts to better identify events and individuals of interest.

This story originally appeared on HPC Projects. It appears here as part of a cross-publishing agreement with Scientific Computing World.