NCI Doubles Raijin Supercomputer Throughput with IBM POWER8

Today NCI in Australia announced that it has adopted IBM’s Power8 architecture as part of Raijin, the system  fastest supercomputer in the Southern Hemisphere. The hybrid x86/Power8 system will offer local researchers the opportunity to explore the intersection of AI and HPC. “The extraordinary bandwidth in Power Systems provides a significant performance advantage, and we look forward to scientists exploiting those capabilities now and into the future.”

OCF Builds POWER8 Supercomputer for Atomic Weapons Establishment in the UK

High Performance Computing integrator OCF is supporting scientific research at the UK Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), with the design, testing and implementation of a new HPC cluster and a separate big data storage system. “The new HPC system is built on IBM’s POWER8 architecture and a separate parallel file system, called Cedar 3, built on IBM Spectrum Scale. In early benchmark testing, Cedar 3 is operating 10 times faster than the previous high-performance storage system at AWE. Both server and storage systems use IBM Spectrum Protect for data backup and recovery.”

IBM POWER8 System to Advance Genomic Health Research at University of Calgary

Today IBM and the University of Calgary announced a five-year collaboration to accelerate and expand genomic research into common childhood conditions such as autism, congenital diseases and the many unknown causes of illness. As part of the collaboration, IBM will augment the existing research capacity at the Cumming School of Medicine’s Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute by installing a POWER8-based computing and storage infrastructure along with advanced analytics and cognitive computing software.

LSU Deploys IBM Power8 Delta Supercomputer

Today LSU announced the deployment of a POWER8-based supercomputer to advance big data research in Louisiana. Named Delta, the new supercomputer’s unique design brings a new way of conducting computational research to LSU. The supercomputer will be housed at the LSU Center for Computation & Technology, or CCT.

HPC News Bytes for Friday, June 26

While we’re always on the lookout for HPC news, not everything makes it to the front page. Notable items from this week include new benchmarks for 100GB Ethernet, the Open MPI roadmap, and Docker containers.

Test Bed Systems Pave the Way for 150 Petaflop Summit Supercomputer

Oak Ridges is preparing for their upcoming Summit supercomputer with two modest test bed systems using Power8 processors. “Summit will deliver more than five times the computational performance of Titan’s 18,688 nodes, using only approximately 3,400 nodes when it arrives in 2017.”

PGI Steps up with Support for Jetson TK1 and Power8

At SC14, Nvidia announced that it is developing an enhanced version of the widely used PGI optimizing compilers which will allow developers to quickly develop new applications or run Linux x86-based GPU-accelerated applications on IBM POWER CPU systems with minimal effort.

AMD & Pathscale Join OpenACC While Nvidia Readies Compilers for IBM Power

At SC14 last week, AMD and Pathscale announced that they have joined the OpenACC standards group. Meanwhile, Nvidia announced that high-performance computing compilers are coming to IBM Power Systems.

Why IBM is Not Backing Away from Hardware

Over at The Register, Dan Olds writes that the notion that IBM is getting out of the systems business is completely wrong. Sure, they’ve sold off their x86 server business and handed off their fab to Global Foundries, but in Dan’s estimation, it’s more about doubling-down on Power8.

Slidecast: Power Systems — Open Innovation to Put Data to Work

“According to Big Blue, the new scale-out Power servers culminate a $2.4 billion investment and are built from the ground up to harness Big Data with the new IBM Power8 processor. During the launch event, IBM unveiled a rack full of 2U Power8 servers with up to 100 Terabytes of in-memory analytics capacity.”