insideHPC

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.

Slidecast: Allinea Software – Meeting the Quest to Run Applications Faster

Rich Brueckner — Mon, 21 May 2012 11:00:56 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEmL9gCboLQ

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.”

As announced recently, the Allinea DDT software is being used by the NCSA Blue Waters team fix their bugs at full scale and exploit the maximum computational power.

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

Load Testing with the Cloud – This Week on inside* Publications

Rich Brueckner — Sun, 20 May 2012 19:42:48 +0000

GPUs were all the rage this week, but there was also a lot more going on in the news. In case you missed them, here are some recent highlights our inside* publications:

Video: 30x Faster Regular Expressions on a GPU. David Lehavi from HP Labs presents a regular expression (regex) engine on a GPU, and the results can teach us lessons on how to utilize GPUs for more general application workloads.
Video: Intersect360 Research Presents HPC Industry Trends. Addison Snell looks at emerging trends with an emphasis on the opportunities for HPC technologies in emerging Big Data applications.

Slidecast: SOASTA CloudTest Overview. By leveraging the cloud, tests can be distributed globally, executed at any scale, and run affordably. And real-time analytics provide immediate, actionable intelligence — a requirement for testing live production environments.
Interview: Toyota Relies on ZL Unified Archive. Toyota’s primary reason for bringing ZL in-house as their primary archiving system was to ensure defensible preservation of data for litigation, including search, retention and storage management.

Video: Fireside Chat from Emerging Companies Summit. Jen-Hsun Huang and Tim Bajarin from Creative Strategies discuss trends in mobile, visual and parallel computing, and the transformational changes ahead for the industry.
Feature: Turning Entrepreneurship into a Science. Max Marmeer from the Startup Genome writes that we are missing a common language and framework to describe and measure entrepreneurship and innovation.

Student Cluster Competition Comes to ISC’12

Rich Brueckner — Sun, 20 May 2012 17:07:05 +0000

Clipped from: www.hpcadvisorycouncil.com (share this clip)

One of the most exciting additions to ISC’12 this year is the Student Cluster Competition. The goal: derive the most possible application performance using less than 3000 watts.

The competition will feature small teams that compete to demonstrate the incredible capabilities of state-of- the-art high-performance cluster hardware and software. In a real-time challenge, teams of six undergraduate and/or high school students will build a small cluster of their own design on the ISC exhibit floor and race to demonstrate the greatest performance across a series of benchmarks and applications. The students will have a unique opportunity to learn, experience and demonstrate how high-performance computing influence our world and day-to-day learning. Held in collaboration of the HPC Advisory Council and ISC, the Student Cluster Competition is designed to introduce the next generation of students to the high performance computing world and community.

The Teams:

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany)

The University of Colorado (USA)

Stony Brook University (USA)

Tsinghua University (China)

NUDT (China)

Our intrepid reporter, Dan Olds will be there covering the play-by-play. Read the Full Story.

Webinar: NSF Big Data Solicitation May 21

Rich Brueckner — Sat, 19 May 2012 16:21:12 +0000

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 & Engineering solicitation. 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.

Update: The webinar audio is now available for replay. Download the slides (PDF).

Interview: Author Rob Farber on the Secret Sauce for Programmers in the Kepler GPU

Rich Brueckner — Sat, 19 May 2012 15:51:06 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoNnIVwW824

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.

New Whitepaper: NVIDIA’s Next-Gen CUDA Compute Architecture – Kepler GK110

Rich Brueckner — Fri, 18 May 2012 17:12:35 +0000

If you still looking for more details on the new Kepler GPUs, Nvidia has stepped up with a new GK110 Architecture whitepaper for you.

Comprising 7.1 billion transistors, Kepler GK110 is not only the fastest, but also the most architecturally complex microprocessor ever built. Adding many new innovative features focused on compute performance, GK110 was designed to be a parallel processing powerhouse for Tesla and the HPC market. Kepler GK110 will provide over 1 TFlop of double precision throughput with greater than 80% DGEMM efficiency versus 60‐65% on the prior Fermi architecture. In addition to greatly improved performance, the Kepler architecture offers a huge leap forward in power efficiency, delivering up to 3x the performance per watt of Fermi.

Is the news all good? Blogger Paul Caheny writes that the K10 in particular continues a disturbing downward trend on memory capacity per FLOPs.

A couple of high level observations on how this fits into general HPC architecture trends. Firstly the ratio of memory capacity and memory bandwidth to compute is likely to continue to decrease, signifying the increasing necessity to make use of strong scaling in applications rather than the previously rich seam of weak scaling. K10 represents a more than 60% fall in Bytes/FLOPs (memory capacity per FLOPs) compared to M2090 and a reduction of 50% in Bytes/sec/FLOPs (memory bandwidth per FLOPs) compared to M2090 (both using SP FLOPs as per K10′s target market). It will be interesting to see what the corresponding numbers are for the upcoming K20.

Download the whitepaper (PDF).

SGI Brings Kepler K10 GPU to Rackable Servers, K20 in the Fall

RichB — Fri, 18 May 2012 15:14:36 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGmZBbsL6_A

In this video, Bill Mannel from SGI describes the company’s GPU-powered HPC solutions. Recorded at GTC 2012 in San Jose.

SGI recently announced announced the availability of a complete, managed GPU solution of its SGI Rackable servers with the new high-performance Nvidia Tesla K10 GPU Computing Accelerator. Coupled with SGI Management and Performance Suite software, the solution is built, completely integrated, and tested in SGI’s manufacturing facility so that it can be installed at the customer site and begin running application codes in less than a day.

Read the Full Story.