Making Python Fly: Accelerate Performance Without Recoding

Developers are increasingly besieged by the big data deluge. Intel Distribution for Python uses tried-and-true libraries like the Intel Math Kernel Library (Intel MKL)and the Intel Data Analytics Acceleration Library to make Python code scream right out of the box – no recoding required. Intel highlights some of the benefits dev teams can expect in this sponsored post.

Intel High-Performance Python Extends to Machine Learning and Data Analytics

One of the big surprises of the past few years has been the spectacular rise in the use of Python* in high-performance computing applications. With the latest releases of Intel® Distribution for Python, included in Intel® Parallel Studio XE 2019, the numerical and scientific computing capabilities of high-performance Python now extends to machine learning and data analytics.

Python Power: Intel SDK Accelerates Python Development and Execution

It was with one goal – accelerating Python execution performance – that lead to the creation of Intel Distribution for Python, a set of tools designed to provide Python application performance right out of the box, usually with no code changes required. This sponsored post from Intel highlights how Intel SDK can enhance Python development and execution, as Python continues to grow in popularity.

HiPEAC Vision 2019 Looks to the Future of Computing

“Today, the possibilities of an interconnected, heterogeneous and intelligent world are only just beginning to make themselves known. This stunning advancement in digital technology was made possible by ever-increasing performance at ever lower costs. However, physical limits mean we won’t be able to keep shrinking computing components while increasing performance for much longer. So where do we go from here? What are the main challenges and conditions for future developments, and where? The HiPEAC Vision 2019 explores all these questions, and more.”

Intel Performance Libraries Accelerate Python Performance for HPC and Data Science

Python is now the most popular programming language, according to IEEE Spectrum’s fifth annual interactive ranking of programming languages, ahead of C++ and C. Recent Intel Distributions for Python show that real HPC performance can be achieved with compilers and library packages optimized for the latest Intel architectures. Moreover, the library packages targeted for big data analysis and numerical computation included in this distribution now support scaling for multi-core and many-core processors as well as distributed cluster and cloud infrastructures.

Machine Learning with Python: Distributed Training and Data Resources on Blue Waters

Aaron Saxton from NCSA gave this talk at the Blue Waters Symposium. “Blue Waters currently supports TensorFlow 1.3, PyTorch 0.3.0 and we hope to support CNTK and Horovod in the near future. This tutorial will go over the minimum ingredients needed to do distributed training on Blue Waters with these packages. What’s more, we also maintain an ImageNet data set to help researchers get started training CNN models. I will review the process by which a user can get access to this data set.”

Python Can Do It

“Python remains a single threaded environment with the global interpreter lock as the main bottleneck. Threads must wait for other threads to complete before starting to do their assigned work. The result of this model is that production code is produced that is too slow to be useful for large simulations.”

Performance Insights Using the Intel Advisor Python API

Tuning a complex application for today’s heterogeneous platforms requires an understanding of the application itself as well as familiarity with tools that are available for assisting with analyzing where in the code itself to look for bottlenecks.  The process for optimizing the performance of an application, in general, requires the following steps that are most likely applicable for a wide range of applications.

HPC Carpentry Learning Portal Offers an Intro to HPC

The good folks at HPC Carpentry have posted a new set of teaching materials designed to help new users take advantage of high-performance computing systems. No prior computational experience is required – these lessons are ideal for either an in-person workshop or independent study. “HPC Carpentry is not an organization – it is merely a set of publicly available teaching materials designed to make the task of teaching HPC a little easier. We welcome all contributions, in particular adaptations of our Intro to HPC lesson for other schedulers besides SLURM.”

Intel MPI Library 2017 Focuses on Intel Multi-core/Many-Core Clusters

With the release of Intel Parallel Studio XE 2017, the focus is on making applications perform better on Intel architecture-based clusters. Intel MPI Library 2017, a fully integrated component of Intel Parallel Studio XE 2017, implements the high-performance MPI-3.1 specification on multiple fabrics. It enables programmers to quickly deliver the best parallel performance, even if you change or upgrade to new interconnects, without requiring changes to the software or operating environment.