IBM’s HPC Dreams are Tattered

In this special guest feature, Dan Olds from OrionX.net writes that IBM ambitions in the HPC market have fallen short. “Without more commitment and support, IBM’s POWER processor runs the risk of becoming this generations version of the DEC Alpha CPU. It was a fantastic processor and ran rings around competitors, but ultimately failed because of a lack of marketing and operating environment support from DEC.”

OCF Deploys Largest IBM POWER9 Machine Learning Cluster in the UK

With a new upgrade, the University of Birmingham is set to benefit from the largest IBM POWER9 machine learning cluster in the UK, delivering unprecedented performance for AI workloads. Working with OCF, the high-performance compute, the University will integrate a total of 11 IBM POWER9-based IBM Power Systems servers into its existing HPC infrastructure. “With our early deployment of the two IBM POWER9 servers we have seen what is possible. By scaling up, we can keep-pace with the escalating demand and offer the computational capacity and capability to attract leading researchers to the University.”

Video: Unified Memory on Summit (Power9 + V100)

Jeff Larkin from NVIDIA gave this talk at the Summit Application Readiness Workshop. The event had the primary objective of providing the detailed technical information and hands-on help required for select application teams to meet the scalability and performance metrics required for Early Science proposals. Technical representatives from the IBM/NVIDIA Center of Excellence will be delivering a few plenary presentations, but most of the time will be set aside for the extended application teams to carry out hands-on technical work on Summit.”

Summit Supercomputer Breaks Exaop Barrier on Neural Net Trained to Recognize Extreme Weather Patterns

“Using a climate dataset from Berkeley Lab on the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge, they trained a deep neural network to identify extreme weather patterns from high-resolution climate simulations. By tapping into the specialized NVIDIA Tensor Cores built into the GPUs at scale, the researchers achieved a peak performance of 1.13 exaops and a sustained performance of 0.999 – the fastest deep learning algorithm reported to date and an achievement that earned them a spot on this year’s list of finalists for the Gordon Bell Prize.”

MareNostrum 4 Adds POWER9 Racks with Volta GPUS for AI Research

The Barcelona Supercomputing Centre has augmented their hybrid MareNostrum supercomputer with the new racks of IBM AC922 servers. This upgrade makes BSC becomes the first center in Europe to offer access to the same technologies of the brand new Summit, the most powerful supercomputer in the world. “Accelerated by NVIDIA Volta V100 GPUs, the new three racks have a peak performance of 1.48 Petaflops, a 50% more than MareNostrum3 supercomputer, which was uninstalled just one year ago”

POWER9 for AI & HPC

Jeff Stuecheli from IBM gave this talk at the HPC User Forum in Tucson. “Built from the ground-up for data intensive workloads, POWER9 is the only processor with state-of-the-art I/O subsystem technology, including next generation NVIDIA NVLink, PCIe Gen4, and OpenCAPI.”

The Transformation of HPC: Simulation and Cognitive Methods in the Era of Big Data

Dave Turek from IBM gave this talk at the Swiss HPC Conference. “There is a shift underway where HPC is beginning to be addressed with novel techniques and technologies including cognitive and analytic approaches to HPC problems and the arrival of the first quantum systems. This talk will showcase how IBM is merging cognitive, analytics, and quantum with classic simulation and modeling to create a new path for computational science.”

Video: IBM Brings NVIDIA Volta to Supercharge Discoveries

In this video from GTC 2018, Adel El-Hallak from IBM describes how IBM and NVIDIA are partnering to build the largest supercomputers in the world to enable data scientists and application developers to not be limited to any device memory. Between IBM and NVIDIA, you can capitalize on the Volta 32GB memory and the entire system as a whole.

OCF deploys first IBM POWER9 systems in UK Academia

Queen Mary University of London and Newcastle University are the first UK academic institutions to install POWER9 systems. Deployed by OCF, both Universities have already integrated the machines into their existing HPC infrastructures. “Modern AI, HPC and Analytics workloads are driving an ever-growing set of data intensive challenges,” comments Julian Fielden, Managing Director of OCF. “These challenges can only be met with accelerated infrastructure, such as IBM’s POWER9. In such a highly competitive field as academic research, providing superior HPC services to compute large quantities of data quickly, can help to attract world-class researchers, as well as grants and funding.”

Application Readiness Projects for the Summit Supercomputer Architecture

Dr. Tjerk P. Straatsma from ORNL gave this talk at SC17. “The Center for Accelerated Application Readiness (CAAR) projects are using an Early Access Power8+/Pascal system named SummitDev to prepare for the Power9/Volta system Summit. This presentation highlights achievements on this system, and the experience of the teams that will be a valuable resource for other development teams.”