10 Things You’re Wrong About in HPC

Rich Brueckner from insideHPC presented this talk at the Switzerland HPC Conference. “While High Performance Computing has gone through dramatic changes since Seymour Cray created the supercomputer industry in the 1970’s, misnomers, myths, and Alternative Facts have established themselves in the hive mind of the HPC community. In this session, Rich will turn the industry on its ear and reveal the whole truth in the service of outright parody.”

Video: HPC Trends for 2017

In this video from Switzerland HPC Conference, Michael Feldman from TOP500.org presents an annual deep dive into the trends, technologies and usage models that will be propelling the HPC community through 2017 and beyond. “Emerging areas of focus and opportunities to expand will be explored along with insightful observations needed to support measurably positive decision making within your operations.”

OpenStack for Research Computing

“This talk will present the motivating factors for considering OpenStack for the management of research computing infrastructure. Stig Telfer will give an overview of the differences in design criteria between cloud, HPC and data analytics, and how these differences can be mitigated through architectural and configuration choices of an OpenStack private cloud. Some real-world examples will be given that demonstrate the potential for using OpenStack for managing HPC infrastructure. This talk will present ways that the HPC community can gain the benefits of using software-defined infrastructure without paying the performance overhead.”

The Computer That Could Be Smarter than Us – Cognitive Computing

Ingolf Wittmann from IBM presented this talk for the Switzerland HPC Conference. “This presentation will point out based on real examples how HPC environments can benefit from such solutions and technologies to drive cognitive solutions, machine/deep learning where we can ask ourselves, ‘What will be possible in the near future – can the future computers be smarter than humans?”

HPC Workflows Using Containers

“In this talk we will discuss a workflow for building and testing Docker containers and their deployment on an HPC system using Shifter. Docker is widely used by developers as a powerful tool for standardizing the packaging of applications across multiple environments, which greatly eases the porting efforts. On the other hand, Shifter provides a container runtime that has been specifically built to fit the needs of HPC. We will briefly introduce these tools while discussing the advantages of using these technologies to fulfill the needs of specific workflows for HPC, e.g., security, high-performance, portability and parallel scalability.”

High Performance Interconnects – Assessments, Rankings and Landscape

Dan Olds from OrionX.net presented this talk at the Switzerland HPC Conference. “Dan Olds will present recent research into the history of High Performance Interconnects (HPI), the current state of the HPI market, where HPIs are going in the future, and how customers should evaluate HPI options today. This will be a highly informative and interactive session.”

Open CAPI: A New Standard for High Performance Attachment of Memory, Acceleration, and Networks

In this video from the Switzerland HPC Conference, Jeffrey Stuecheli from IBM presents: Open CAPI, A New Standard for High Performance Attachment of Memory, Acceleration, and Networks. “OpenCAPI sets a new standard for the industry, providing a high bandwidth, low latency open interface design specification. This session will introduce the new standard and it’s goals. This includes details on how the interface protocol provides unprecedented latency and bandwidth to attached devices.”

SPACK: A Package Manager for Supercomputers, Linux, and MacOS

“HPC software is becoming increasingly complex. The space of possible build configurations is combinatorial, and existing package management tools do not handle these complexities well. Because of this, most HPC software is built by hand. This talk introduces “Spack”, an open-source tool for scientific package management which helps developers and cluster administrators avoid having to waste countless hours porting and rebuilding software.” A tutorial video on using Spack is also included.

Lenovo HPC Strategy Update

Luigi Brochard from Lenovo gave this talk at the Switzerland HPC Conference. “High performance computing is converging more and more with the big data topic and related infrastructure requirements in the field. Lenovo is investing in developing systems designed to resolve todays and future problems in a more efficient way and respond to the demands of Industrial and research application landscape.”

Deep Learning on the SaturnV Cluster

“The basic idea of deep learning is to automatically learn to represent data in multiple layers of increasing abstraction, thus helping to discover intricate structure in large datasets. NVIDIA has invested in SaturnV, a large GPU-accelerated cluster, (#28 on the November 2016 Top500 list) to support internal machine learning projects. After an introduction to deep learning on GPUs, we will address a selection of open questions programmers and users may face when using deep learning for their work on these clusters.”