Our Video Sunday feature continues with this slidecast entitled: Optimizing for the Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor, Part 1. You can see the rest of the videos in this series on the Intel YouTube Channel.
Job of the Week: HPC Senior Engineer at NREL
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is seeking a Senior High Performance Computing Engineer in our Job of the Week.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, located in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Golden, Colorado, is the nation’s primary laboratory for research and development of renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies. The NREL Computational Science Center (CSC) has an immediate opening for a High Performance Computing Systems Engineer. This senior position is responsible for implementing and operating HPC systems and related infrastructure in support of Science and Technical computing in support of NRELs mission.
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Video: QMachine – Commodity Supercomputing with Web Browsers
In this video, Sean Wilkinson from the University of Alabama at Birmingham demonstrates QMachine, a web service that allows ordinary web browsers to execute distributed workloads, all without installing anything.
QMachine (QM) is a web service that uses Quanah to create a distributed computer that can use ordinary web browsers as ephemeral nodes. It contains three main components: an API server, a web server, and a website. The API server and the web server are both implemented in Node.js and available for use in server environments via NPM. The API server supports CORS and configurable persistent storage for a variety of popular databases, including Apache CouchDB, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, and SQLite.
Read the Full Story.
SC13 Seeking Proposals for New Emerging Technologies Track
The SC13 conference is seeking proposals for the Emerging Technologies Track, which is a new element of their Technical Program. Aimed at providing an exhibit showcase for novel projects at a national or international scale, the Emerging Technologies Track differs from other aspects of the technical program in that it will provide a forum for discussing large-scale, long-term efforts in HPC, networking, storage, and analysis.
Emerging Technologies welcomes exhibitions of real hardware prototypes and demonstrations of software as well as project presentations in poster form, animated displays, and scheduled presentations or discussions. Successful projects will display future technologies with the potential to influence computing and society as a whole.
Submissions are due July 31, 2013. Read the Full Story.
Podcast: The Big Data Revolution
In this podcast from the Leonard Lopate Show, Author Viktor Mayer-Schönberger explores how Big Data will affect the economy, science, and society at large.
Big data” refers to our burgeoning ability to crunch vast collections of information, analyze it instantly, and draw sometimes profoundly surprising conclusions from it. Big Data: A Revolution that Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think shows how this emerging science can translate myriad phenomena—from the price of airline tickets to the text of millions of books—into searchable form, and uses our increasing computing power to reach epiphanies that we never could have seen before.
Video: How Supercomputers Power NASA Climate Research
In this video, Phil Webster, Director of Computational Information & Sciences at NASA describes how supercomputer resources power climate science.
The computer is the climate scientist’s tool — the better the tool, the better the scientific results, and the greater the understanding of what’s happening in the complete Earth system,” says Phil Webster, head of Goddard’s Computational and Information Sciences and Technology Office. “A key challenge for us is to build better machines because what we need doesn’t exist.
Read the Full Story.
Autotune – Supercomputer-assisted Calibration for Better Energy Models
One way to improve the energy efficiency of buildings is through energy models that simulate various aspects such as power, cooling, and heat loss through windows. Until now, however, building accurate models for diverse building designs has been very difficult. Over at NICS, Scott Gibson writes that supercomputer-assisted calibration methodology from Oak Ridge National Labs is being used to enhance the accuracy of these energy models.
The cost required to collect data and tune a model to such accuracy involves so much manual effort that it is rarely employed—outside of research—for energy-service company projects smaller than $1 million,” New says. “An automated methodology for model calibration that realistically adjusts input parameters would eliminate risk from energy savings estimates and open up new business opportunities and energy-savings performance contracts in the light commercial and residential sectors. A cost-effective methodology that can meet Guideline 14 requirements is estimated to lead to a cumulative U.S. energy savings of 27.4 TBtus per year, or $1.6 billion annually.”
Over at ORNL, Joshua New and Jibo Sanyal are leading a project called Autotune that uses advanced analytical and optimization methodology to tackle this problem. Leveraging terabytes of HPC-generated simulation data, Autotune uses data mining with multiple-machine learning algorithms to quickly calibrate a building energy model to measured (utility or sensor) data. Read the Full Story.
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The Villany of Silent Data Corruption
Over at the Emulex Blog, Sonny Singh writes that increasing complexity of data center environments and growth in storage have led to significant concerns about silent data corruption.
But really what it comes down to is without end-to-end protection technology, data corruption can go unnoticed until recovery is difficult and costly or even impossible to perform. Furthermore, without end-to-end integrity checking, these silent data corruptions can lead to unexpected and unexplained problems.
Read the Full Story or check out the podcast on this topic from Radio Free HPC.
Video: Grid Computing Powers Research for Better Anesthetics
In this video, researchers from Utrecht University use grid computing to digitally modify molecules found in cone snail venom in an effort to develop new anesthetics. The grid allows them to run a lot of trial and error tests extremely quickly to look for the right molecular shape that will be the perfect fit for the pain receptors in humans.
Read the Full Story.
Oracle Server Business Missing in Action
Fans of the old Sun Microsystems may be wondering how the server business is doing at Oracle some three years after the acquisition. Over at GigaOm, Barb Darrow writes that Oracle’s gamble on hardware just isn’t paying off.
Here’s the problem, since it entered the hardware business, Oracle hasn’t sold enough engineered systems to make up for lost sales of lower-end machines, according to third-party researchers. Its hardware revenue and unit share is headed south. For the fourth calendar quarter of 2012, Oracle server revenue was down 18 percent year over year according to both Gartner and IDC. Meanwhile, as GigaOM’s Jordan Novet reported last week, the “other” server vendors — companies like Quanta and Wistron – saw their aggregate revenue rise nearly 22 percent in the fourth quarter compared to the year-ago period.
Read the Full Story.
Video: TACC’s Dr. Kelly Gaither Testifies at House Subcommittee on Research
There is no doubt that the Sequester is putting extreme pressure on critical R&D in this country. As members of the HPC community, how can we help to ensure that we continue to fund important supercomputing research?
In this video from February 15, 2013, the House Subcommittee on Research holds a hearing on Applications for Information Technology Research & Development.
Witnesses:
- Dr. Kelly Gaither, Director, Visualization Lab, Texas Advanced Computing Center, University of Texas, Austin
- Dr. Kathryn McKinley, Principal Researcher, Microsoft
- Dr. Ed Lazowska, Bill and Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington
The topic of this afternoon’s hearing, Applications for Information Research & Development, is important to our national security, global competitiveness and technological innovation. This hearing will provide us with examples of practical applications and the benefits of Federal investment in networking and information technology R&D. The Networking and Information Technology Research and Development program, or NITRD, was originally authorized in 1991 in the High Performance and Computing Act. It coordinates the networking and information R&D efforts of 15 Federal member agencies, including DHS, NASA, NIH, EPA and the Department of Energy. The program is the main R&D investment portfolio of member agencies in networking, computing, software, cyber security and related information technologies totaling over $3.7 billion in FY2013.
On behalf of insideHPC, I just want to say, “Great job, Kelly!” Read the Full Story.
Altair HyperWorks 12 Release Focuses on Simulation-Driven Design
Today Altair announced the release of the HyperWorks 12.0 computer-aided engineering platform. With new functionalities and end-user productivity advancements in product optimization, Version 12 has already received accolades from customer beta users.
The new 3D capability creates a fully-immersive environment that improves our ability to support conceptual design and analysis efforts,” said Jonathan Gabrys, Technical Fellow of The Boeing Company. “Specifically, being able to interrogate complex analysis results, such as stress fields or deflections, using 3D visualization provides an enhanced level of understanding.”
Read the Full Story.
OFA Course on Writing Applications for RDMA Using OpenFabrics Software
Over at Open Fabrics, Rupert Dance from the OFA Interoperability Working Group discusses the organization’s RDMA training courses.
The RDMA training courses are delivered in two formats: (1) at the University of New Hampshire Interoperability Lab (UNH-IOL) or (2) at a vendor location using the vendor’s equipment. When we have a group of registrants from different organizations, we host the course at the UNH-IOL and use the university’s cluster for demonstration. The course runs from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. over two days, and the first 4 hours focus on an architectural overview of RDMA, while the remainder of the day is used for learning programming constructs (programming verbs, writing your own RDMA code). The courses generally consist of an attendance of a small (4-16) group of people as the lessons are hands-on, and all course material, including presentations and code framework built during the course, are available to attendees afterwards.
Read the Full Story.
In related news, the Open Fabrics Alliance will be hosting two workshops this April in Monterey, California:
- The User Day Workshop on April 18-19
- The International Developer Workshop on April 21-24
NetApp E-5500 Storage System Delivers Record Performance per Spindle
Today NetApp announced the new NetApp E5500 storage system for Big Data and HPC applications. Derived from Engenio technology acquired from LSI, the seventh-generation E-Series is a high-density platform with record per-spindle throughput.
The SGI InfiniteStorage 5600, which is an OEM version of the NetApp E5500, has produced a new SPC-2 result confirming the performance and cost efficiency of the new E5500; it showcases the performance possibilities the E5500 unlocks for HPC and big data organizations. The audited, peer-reviewed SPC-2 result demonstrates the highest throughput per spindle by more than 2.5 times over the nearest non-NetApp published result.
Read the Full Story.
In related news, SGI rolled out the InfiniteStorage 5600 storage system today, noting that the flexibility of the platform enables users to push the limit without breaking their budget.
