From interviews with the people and companies making news in the HPC community, to in-depth video features that examine pressing technological and social issues in supercomputing, this is exclusive content you’ll only see at insideHPC.com.
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:
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
In this slidecast, Patrick Wohlschlegel from Allinea Software describes the company’s advanced parallel debugging capabilities.
Our mission is to make it easier for software developers and scientists to make their software scale up to take full advantage of current and emerging parallel computer systems. We do this by developing innovative tools that ensure correctness and optimization of parallel codes, and we are recognized as a leader and innovator in our market. We created the world’s first petascale debugger - allowing users for the first time to debug at any scale. We also developed the first hybrid GPU debugger - enabling simultaneous debugging across multiple architectures in the same tool.”
On May 21, The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health will host a webinar on their joint Core Techniques and Technologies for Advancing Big Data Science & Engineeringsolicitation. This webinar is designed to describe the goals and focus of the BIGDATA solicitation, help investigators understand its scope, and answer any questions potential Principal Investigators may have.
The BIGDATA solicitation aims to advance the core scientific and technological means of managing, analyzing, visualizing, and extracting useful information from large, diverse, distributed and heterogeneous data sets so as to: accelerate the progress of scientific discovery and innovation; lead to new fields of inquiry that would not otherwise be possible; encourage the development of new data analytic tools and algorithms; facilitate scalable, accessible, and sustainable data infrastructure; increase understanding of human and social processes and interactions; and promote economic growth and improved health and quality of life.
In this video, Rob Farber discusses new features in the Nvidia Kepler GPUs that make it easier for programmers to maximize application performance. Recorded at GTC 2012 in San Jose.
Farber’s book, CUDA Application Design and Development was the best-selling title at SC11 and at GTC 2012 this year. The book is designed to meet the needs of working software developers who need to understand GPU programming with CUDA and increase efficiency in their projects.
In this video, Tom Coull from Penguin Computing describes the company’s GPU-powered computing solutions for HPC. Penguin On Demand has offered GPUs in the Cloud for years, and the recent Kepler GPU announcement from Nvidia is figuring prominently in Penguin’s plans.
Coulll also describes Penguin Computing’s move to provide enterprise customers with the same powerful server and storage solutions that have powered its HPC customers.
Our GTC 2012 coverage continues with Dan Olds’s report on the rapid spread of Cuda and GPU computing. One measure is its increased presence the annual Supercomputing Conference series.
This story is perhaps best told via pictures. In this first picture, we’re looking at the booth layout of the SC07 show floor in Reno. Like a typical SC show, there were a few hundred exhibitors ranging from hardware, software, and service vendors to academic institutions, research labs, and government research organizations. The sole presence of hybrid computing is the tiny green dot at the upper left of the schematic. It’s NVIDIA’s small booth – the lone beachhead for GPU-accelerated HPC. Fast-forward four years and… look at the progress. The SC11 show floor diagram is literally covered with green squares and rectangles.”
In this special guest feature, Tom Wilkie from Scientific Computing World clears his head from all the technical information gathered at yesterday’s GTC2012 keynote.
The latest processor from Nvidia will lead to ‘the democratisation of computing happening in front of us,’ according to Jen-Hsun Huang, president and chief executive of the company.
He unveiled the new chip, known as ‘Kepler’, to an audience of nearly 3,000 scientists and engineers at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California, on 15 May. It was, he said, more than three times as energy efficient as its predecessor.
Nvidia specialises in the graphics processing units, as one of the major suppliers of computer graphics cards to PCs but the technology is now widely used as an accelerator in high performance computers. Kepler was, he said, the most energy efficient GPU ever built and he expected it to advance high-performance computing, computer graphics and cloud computing. In HPC, he said, ‘We know that ultimate performance is limited by energy efficiency and at the chip architecture level we have had to design for energy efficiency and this is a huge step forward.’
Among the applications in HPC that he demonstrated was a massive simulation of the collision between our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and the nearby Andromeda galaxy – an event expected some three billion years or so into the future. The simulation involved a many-body problem of millions of gravitationally interacting stars – a highly intensive computational problem.
But according to Sumit Gupta, head of Nvidia’s Tesla high-performance computing business, supercomputing will be the beneficiary of the other applications for the Kepler chip – in gaming, virtualisation and cloud computing. It is because Nvidia has such a strong presence in these high-volume consumer markets that it is able to produce its processors so cheaply. And it is this aspect, according to Gupta that is leading to the ‘democratisation of high performance computing’ proclaimed by Huang.
‘With the same GPU,’ Gupta said, ‘we can go into many different markets Cloud gaming will be a huge market – we are able to leverage all of these high volume markets and get into HPC at a price point other people cannot.’
Nvidia is launching two versions of the processor: one is available almost immediately that will have single precision and will be suitable for some scientific applications such as seismic profiling. The other, known as K20, will have double precision and enhanced queuing and parallelism but it will not be available until the last quarter of this year.
He pointed out that ‘with Kepler you can build a petaflop system, in just ten racks of servers. Two years ago, Tokyo Tech built a petaflop machine with Fermi [the predecessor to Kepler] and it took them 42 racks.’ To build a machine of similar performance based on Intel’s Sandybridge processor, would take about 100 racks of servers. ‘So Kepler is 10 times better than Sandybridge in terms of petaflops,’ he claimed. He also said that there would be a tenfold improvement in power consumption, with a 1 petaflop Kepler-based machine consuming just 400 kW as opposed to around 3MW with Sandybridge.
‘A petaflop machine of this size means that every university in the world can put one in,’ he said. He estimated that it would cost less than $4M for a petaflop machine, whereas in the recent past people have spent $30M to $40M to get the same performance. ‘There are universities out there that consume 400kW with a 10 rack system but they only get 20 teraflops, so they have this outlay but they are getting a twentieth of what they could be getting.’
But Gupta promised that Kepler was only one step along the road. Although, he said, ‘from my perspective, Kepler is a bigger shift than we have ever done before – much more revolutionary – there is so much innovation for us still to do. It’s a long road.’
In this video, Michael Wolfe from The Portland Group describes the advantages of OpenACC and new Nvidia Kepler GPU features including Dynamic Parallelism and Hyper-Q.
Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang will keynote the GTC 2012 conference this morning at 10:30am PDT. You can watch the live streaming video here.
Do not miss the opening keynote, featuring Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO and Co-Founder of NVIDIA. Hear about what’s next in computing and graphics, and preview disruptive technologies and exciting demonstrations from across industries. Jen-Hsun co-founded NVIDIA in 1993 and has served since its inception as president, chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors.
Minimum requirements to watch the website will be 400kb downstream (equivalent to DSL), and the latest Flash Player.
In this video, Frederik Ferner from Diamond Light Source presents: Lustre as a Data Acquisition File System at Diamond Light Source. Recorded at LUG 2012 in Austin.
Note: Most of the videos from LUG 2012 are now posted at the OpenSFS site.
In this video, Jim Ryan and Rupert Dance from the Open Fabrics Alliance present: OFA Distribution Updates to OpenFabrics Software (OFS).
With these changes by the OFA, the OpenFabrics RDMA Software, also known as OFED, is moving into the mainstream Linux kernel and into the distribution’s user space environments,” said Doug Ledford, lead engineer for RDMA technologies, Red Hat, Inc. “This will eliminate the need for users to download a separate OFS stack to put on top of their operating system of choice, increase the quality and ubiquity of RDMA stacks across all Linux distributions, and help the role of OFS move from being an add‐on item to an integral part of the core RDMA provider in every Linux operating system.”
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