HPC News Bytes for Oct. 7, 2015

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hatnewsSometimes 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.”
  • Amazon Snowball

    Amazon Snowball

    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.”

  • trinity-2015How 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.
  • CAPI-Mellanox-Interconnect-Data-Flow-1024x607What 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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