Podcast: The Trouble with ZFS

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team discuss whether ZFS is ever going to meet its potential. “Henry weighs in on the evolution of ZFS and how his opinion of ZFS has changed over the last decade or so. Both Shahin and Henry feel ZFS is unique and highly useful and that maybe Linus isn’t up on current ZFS capabilities.”

Google Compute Engine offers VMs with 96 Skylake CPUs and 624GB of Memory

Google Compute Engine now offers new VMs with the most Skylake vCPUs of any cloud provider. “Skylake in turn provides up to 20% faster compute performance, 82% faster HPC performance, and almost 2X the memory bandwidth compared with the previous generation Xeon. Need even more compute power or memory? We’re also working on a range of new, even larger VMs, with up to 4TB of memory.”

MIT Professor Runs Record Google Compute Engine job with 220K Cores

Over at the Google Blog, Alex Barrett writes that an MIT math professor recently broke the record for the largest-ever Compute Engine cluster, with 220,000 cores on Preemptible VMs. According to Google, this is the largest known HPC cluster to ever run in the public cloud.

Video: Using Google Compute Engine Pre-Emptible VMs for Cancer Research

In this video from the HPC in the Cloud Educational Series, Marco Novaes, Solutions Engineer with the Google Cloud Platform team explains how the Broad Institute was able to use Google Pre-Emptible VMs to leverage over 50,000 cores to advance cancer research. “Cancer researchers saw value in a highly-complex genome analysis, but even though they already had powerful processing systems in-house, running the analysis would take months or more. We thought this would be a perfect opportunity to utilize Google Compute Engine’s Preemptible VMs to further their cancer research, which was a natural part of our mission. And now that Preemptible VMs are generally available, we’re excited to tell you about this work.”

Podcast: Preemptible VMs Lower Cost of Cancer Research at Broad Insitutue

In this podcast, Jason Stowe from Cycle Computing describes how the Broad Institute is mapping cancer genes with CycleCloud. According to Stowe, Cycle Computing recently ran a 50,000+ core workload for the B​road Institute with low-cost Preemptible VMs on the Google Compute Engine, performing three decades of cancer research computations in a single afternoon.