A group of HPC thinkers, including the estimable Satoshi Matsuoka of the RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Japan, have come together to challenge common lines of thought they say have become, to varying degrees, accepted wisdom in HPC. In a paper entitled “Myths and Legends of High-Performance Computing” appearing this week on the Arvix […]
Podcast: Is Cloud too expensive for HPC?
July 30, 2019 by
Is Cloud too expensive for HPC? Enquiring minds want to know, as does the HPC community whose single-minded obsession with maximum price-performance is notorious and legendary. The Radio Free team looks at actual cloud pricing based on available data and Dan’s research which fuel a hearty discussion. They look at configurations, compare prices, talk about the costs that are not included, segment the market, and then segment the applications.
Intel Parallel Studio XE 2018 Released
September 14, 2017 by
Intel has announced the release of Intel® Parallel Studio XE 2018, with updated compilers and developer tools. It is now available for downloading on a 30-day trial basis. ” This week’s formal release of the fully supported product is notable with new features that further enhance the toolset for accelerating HPC applications.”
Radio Free HPC Looks at the Posit and Next Generation Computer Arithmetic
February 13, 2017 by
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team discusses a recent presentation by John Gustafson on Next Generation Computer Arithmetic. “A new data type called a “posit” is designed for direct drop-in replacement for IEEE Standard 754 floats. Unlike unum arithmetic, posits do not require interval-type mathematics or variable size operands, and they round if an answer is inexact, much the way floats do. However, they provide compelling advantages over floats, including simpler hardware implementation that scales from as few as two-bit operands to thousands of bits.”
Tutorial: Towards Exascale Computing with Fortran 2015
February 9, 2017 by
“This tutorial will present several features that the draft Fortran 2015 standard introduces to meet challenges that are expected to dominate massively parallel programming in the coming exascale era. The expected exascale challenges include higher hardware- and software-failure rates, increasing hardware heterogeneity, a proliferation of execution units, and deeper memory hierarchies.”
Managing Lots of Tasks for Intel Xeon Phi
January 19, 2017 by
“OpenMP, Fortran 2008 and TBB are standards that can help to create parallel areas of an application. MKL could also be considered to be part of this family, because it uses OpenMP within the library. OpenMP is well known and has been used for quite some time and is continues to be enhanced. Some estimates are as high as 75 % of cycles used are for Fortran applications. Thus, in order to modernize some of the most significant number crunchers today, Fortran 2008 should be investigated. TBB is for C++ applications only, and does not require compiler modifications. An additional benefit to using OpenMP and Fortran 2008 is that these are standards, which allows code to be more portable.”
Fortran for HPC
September 22, 2016 by
“Fortran has been proven to be extremely resilient to new developments that have appeared in other programming languages over the years. New versions continue to be available and associated with ANSI standards, so that an application written for one operating system should be able to be compiled and run with different compilers on different operating systems. The latest version is Fortran 2008, with the next version reportedly to be available as Fortran 2015, in 2018.”
Video: What’s New with Fortran?
March 13, 2016 by
Originally developed by IBM in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications, Fortran came to dominate this area of programming early on and has been in continuous use for over half a century in computationally intensive areas such as numerical weather prediction, finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, computational physics and computational chemistry. It is a popular language for high-performance computing and is used for programs that benchmark and rank the world’s fastest supercomputers.
Changes Afoot from the HPC Crystal Ball
February 18, 2016 by
In this special guest feature from Scientific Computing World, Andrew Jones from NAG looks ahead at what 2016 has in store for HPC and finds people, not technology, to be the most important issue. “A disconcertingly large proportion of the software used in computational science and engineering today was written for friendlier and less complex technology. An explosion of attention is needed to drag software into a state where it can effectively deliver science using future HPC platforms.”
PGI and NNSA to Open Source Fortran Compiler
November 15, 2015 by
Today the NNSA and its three national labs announced they have reached an agreement with Nvidia’s PGI software to create an open-source Fortran compiler designed for integration with the widely used LLVM compiler infrastructure.
