NERSC Supercomputer to Help Fight Coronavirus
“NERSC is a member of the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium. In support of the Consortium, NERSC has reserved a portion of its Director’s Discretionary Reserve time on Cori, a Cray XC40 supercomputer, to support COVID-19 research efforts. The GPU partition on Cori was installed to help prepare applications for the arrival of Perlmutter, NERSC’s next-generation system that is scheduled to begin arriving later this year and will rely on GPUs for much of its computational power.” [READ MORE…]
Featured Stories
HPC at Scale Enabled by DDN A3i and NVIDIA SuperPOD
William Beaudin from DDN gave this talk at GTC Digital. “Enabling high performance computing through the use of GPUs requires an incredible amount of IO to sustain application performance. We’ll cover architectures that enable extremely scalable applications through the use of NVIDIA’s SuperPOD and DDN’s A3I systems. The groundbreaking performance delivered by the DGX SuperPOD enables the rapid training of deep learning models at great scale.” [READ MORE…]
Scientists Look to Exascale and Deep Learning for Developing Sustainable Fusion Energy
Scientists from Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory are leading an Aurora ESP project that will leverage AI, deep learning, and exascale computing power to advance fusion energy research. “With a suite of the world’s most powerful path-to-exascale supercomputing resources at their disposal, William Tang and colleagues are developing models of disruption mitigation systems (DMS) to increase warning times and work toward eliminating major interruption of fusion reactions in the production of sustainable clean energy.” [READ MORE…]
Altair offers free training tools and software licensing in response to COVID-19
Over at the Altair Blog, CEO James Scapa writes that the company is offering free training tools and software licensing in response to COVID-19. “Altair can provide temporary software licenses for clients working from home without access to their enterprise Altair software solutions with no additional fees or charges. If customers wish to move their HyperWorks Units from on-premises to Altair hosted servers or require temporary software licenses, they should contact their account representative.” [READ MORE…]
Featured Resource
Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing – Choosing the Right GPU for the Job
In this new whitepaper from our friends over at Exxact Corporation we take a look at the important topic of deep learning for Natural Language Processing (NLP) and choosing the right GPU for the job. Focus is given to the latest developments in neural networks and deep learning systems, in particular a neural network architecture called transformers. Researchers have shown that transformer networks are particularly well suited for parallelization on GPU-based systems.
Industry Perspectives
Interview: Under Secretary Paul Dabbar on the COVID-19 HPC Consortium
The DOE laboratory complex has many core capabilities that can be applied to addressing the threats posed by COVID-19. “This public-private partnership includes the biggest players in advanced computing from government, industry, and academia. At launch, the consortium includes five DOE laboratories, industry leaders like IBM, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, and preeminent U.S. universities like MIT, RPI, and UC San Diego. And within a week, we’ve already received more than a dozen requests from other organizations to join the consortium.” [READ MORE…]
Podcast: A Look inside the El Capitan Supercomputer coming to LLNL
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at some of the more interesting configuration aspects of the pending El Capitan exascale supercomputer coming to LLNL in 2023. “Dan talks about the briefing he received on the new Lawrence Livermore El Capitan system to be built by HPE/Cray. This new $600 million system will be fueled by the AMD Genoa processor coupled with AMD’s Instinct GPUs. Performance should come in at TWO 64-bit exaflops peak, which is very, very sporty.” [READ MORE…]
Featured from insideBIGDATA
- TOP 10 insideBIGDATA Articles for March 2020In this continuing regular feature, we give all our valued readers a monthly heads-up for the top 10 most viewed articles appearing on insideBIGDATA. Over the past several months, we’ve heard from many of our followers that this feature will enable them to catch up with important news and features flowing across our many channels.
News from insideBIGDATA
- Supercomputers vs Superviruses: Why Tech is Our Best Hope in the Coronavirus Pandemic
- TOP 10 insideBIGDATA Articles for March 2020
- Understanding Forecasting Methods in an AI World
- Elite CX in the New Decade: Big Data, Meet Small Data
- Video Highlights: Python Machine Learning Tutorials
- DataRobot Opens Up its Platform for COVID-19 Response Efforts
- How AI is Transforming the Customer Experience
Editor’s Choice
How Your Computer Can Help Scientists Fight COVID-19
Today IBM announced that anyone in the world with a PC, laptop or Mac and an Internet connection could help scientists seek chemical compounds that might be effective against COVID-19. “The project, designed and led by Scripps Research, will be hosted on IBM’s World Community Grid. Volunteers download an app that works when their devices are otherwise idle or in light use. Operating unobtrusively in the background without slowing users’ systems, the app distributes computational assignments and returns completed calculations to researchers, all via the IBM cloud.” [READ MORE…]
IBM & DOE Launch COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium
Today, IBM, in collaboration with the DOE, launched the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium. “The consortium bring together an unprecedented amount of supercomputing power—16 systems with more than 330 petaflops, 775,000 CPU cores, 34,000 GPUs, and counting—to help researchers everywhere tackle this global challenge. These high-performance computing systems allow researchers to run very large numbers of calculations in epidemiology, bioinformatics, and molecular modeling in hours or days, not weeks, months or years.” [READ MORE…]
Video: Overview of the Fujitsu A64fx processor
This video from Coreteks provides an overview of the Fujitsu A64FX processor that will power the pending Fugaku supercomputer in Japan. “The A64FX is a many core CPU like AMD Epyc or Intel’s Xeons, but at the same time it behaves like a GPU in some workloads matching NVIDIA’s most powerful offering, Volta. Today we’ll look at how this chip operates, why it could challenge Intel, AMD, NVIDIA and cloud and hyperscalers and what it could mean for us PC enthusiasts.” [READ MORE…]
SLIDE algorithm for training deep neural nets faster on CPUs than GPUs
Rice researchers created a cost-saving alternative to GPU, an algorithm called “sub-linear deep learning engine” (SLIDE) that uses general purpose central processing units (CPUs) without specialized acceleration hardware. “Our tests show that SLIDE is the first smart algorithmic implementation of deep learning on CPU that can outperform GPU hardware acceleration on industry-scale recommendation datasets with large fully connected architectures.” [READ MORE…]
Full Roundup: SC19 Booth Tour Videos from insideHPC
Now that SC19 is behind us, it’s time to gather our booth tour videos in one place. Throughout the course of the show, insideHPC talked to dozens of HPC innovators showcasing the very latest in hardware, software, and cooling technologies. [READ MORE…]
