Sometimes the inbox for HPC news fills up faster than we can handle. In an effort to keep up, we’ve compiled noteworthy news into a Jeopardy type of Speed Round that phrases topics in the form a question.
- Does NSCI Matter? Kristen Hansen from Bright Computing writes about NSCI sessions at the recent HPC User Forum. “As supercomputing becomes more powerful, more standardized, better staffed, and more capable of embracing a blend of computational and data-driven approaches to problem solving, all sectors and tiers of the economy stand to benefit. The convergence of HPC and big data – of “petaflops” and “petabytes” – will bring supercomputing to the masses, enabling more and more of us to participate in solving the world’s biggest challenges.”
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How do you back up big datasets to the Cloud? Now you can use the Amazon AWS Import/Export Snowball to ship it for backup, 50 Terabytes at a crack. “Built around appliances that we own and maintain, the new model is faster, cleaner, simpler, more efficient, and more secure. You don’t have to buy storage devices or upgrade your network. Snowball is designed for customers that need to move lots of data (generally 10 terabytes or more) to AWS on a one-time or recurring basis. You simply request one or more from the AWS Management Console and wait a few days for the appliance to be delivered to your site. If you want to import a lot of data, you can order one or more Snowball appliances and run them in parallel.”
How is Trinity supercomputer install progressing? The Trinity supercomputer at LANL is designed to provide increased computational capability for the NNSA Nuclear Security Enterprise in support of ever-demanding workloads, e.g., increasing geometric and physics fidelities while maintaining expectations for total time to solution. The capabilities of Trinity are required for supporting the NNSA Stockpile Stewardship program’s certification and assessments to ensure that the nation’s nuclear stockpile is safe, reliable, and secure.
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Is Data Collection Big Business? Molly Rector from DDN discusses Big Data on BizTalkRadio. So how does the company stand out in a crowded field? “The tiebreaker is that we built our business on doing this with supercomputing university folks who’ve been using data-driven analytics for decades. And that’s where our business is optimized.”
When will we have an Exascale supercomputer? Jeremy Hsu at IEEE writes that the USA will get to Exascale “by 2023 if we do it right; tomorrow if we do it crazy.” I think he is right, though some folks in the know like Andrew Jones from HPC Notes predict it will be in 2020.
What does Mellanox bring to the table for OpenPower & CAPI? Scot Schultz from Mellanox writes that the company’s 100Gb/s ConnectX-4 architecture with native support for CAPI is capable of handling communications of massive parallelism. “By delivering up to 100Gb/s of reliable, zero-loss connectivity, ConnectX-4 with CAPI provides an optimized platform for moving enormous volumes of data. With much tighter integration between the Mellanox high-performance interconnect and the processor, POWER-based systems can rip through high volumes of data and bring compute and data closer together to derive greater insights. Mellanox ConnectX-4 can be leveraged for 100Gb CAPI-attached InfiniBand, Ethernet, or storage.”
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What are the current trends with the world’s fastest supercomputers? Intel’s Winston Saunders has updated his Exascalar performance and efficiency mapping project. “While the #1 performing supercomputer in the Top500 has not changed in the last five publications of the Top500 list (since Jun 2013), the population of the Top500 and Green500 list has been far from stagnant. Exascalar explores the full richness of this data thru simple ‘data visualization’ which in this case is a fancy name for plotting.”
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Why aren’t there more HPC-inspired Startups? Shahin Khan from OrionX writes that StartupHPC aims to accelerate the creation of STEM- and HPC-inspired startups. It’s 2nd annual event will be held on Mondaym Nov. 16th at the Capital Factory in Austin. Learn more at StartupHPC and register here for the event.