Archives for February 2017

OFA Workshop Posts Session Abstracts for Austin Meeting in March

Today the OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) published the session abstracts for its 13th Annual OFA Workshop. Sponsored by Intel, the workshop takes place March 27-31 in Austin, Texas. “The workshop will include more than 50 sessions covering a variety of critical networking topics delivered by industry experts from around the world. Additionally, the OFA has announced that Al Geist of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) will deliver a workshop keynote address on the impact of the Exascale Computing Project. The workshop program is designed to educate attendees and encourage lively exchanges among OFA members, developers, and users who share a vested interest in high performance networks.”

Interview: Dr. Thomas Sterling on New Approaches to Efficient Supercomputing

In this video from KAUST, Professor Thomas Sterling, Professor of Intelligent Systems Engineering at Indiana University, shares his thoughts on new approaches to energy efficient supercomputing. “Our technical strategy focuses on the research and development of advanced technologies for extreme-scale computing and future exascale systems, including the following key elements: Execution Models; Runtime Systems; Graph Processing; Programming Interfaces; Compilers, Libraries, and Languages; Systems Architecture (Architecture, Power/Energy, Fault Tolerance, Networking), and Extreme Scale Applications and Visualization.”

Call for Papers: Workshop On Performance and Scalability of Storage Systems (WOPSSS)

The Second Workshop On Performance and Scalability of Storage Systems (WOPSSS) has issued its Call for Papers. The one-day workshop will be held jointly with ISC 2017 in Frankfurt, Germany. “The Workshop On Performance and Scalability of Storage Systems aims to present state-of-the-art research, innovative ideas, and experience that focus on the design and implementation of HPC storage systems in both academic and industrial worlds, with a special interest on their performance analysis. The arrival of new storage technologies and scales unseen in previous practice lead to significant loss of performance predictability. This will leave storage system designers, application developers and the storage community at large in the difficult situation of not being able to precisely detect bottlenecks, evaluate the room for improvement, or estimate the matching of applications with a given storage architecture.”

Mellanox ConnectX-5 Sets DPDK Performance Record with 100Gb/s Ethernet

“The I/O intensive nature of the Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) including virtual Firewall, virtual Evolved Packet Core (vEPC), virtual Session Border Controller (vSBC), Anti-DDoS and Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) applications have posed significant challenges to build cost-effective NFV Infrastructures that meet packet rate, latency, jitter and security requirements. Leveraging its wealth of experience in building high-performance server/storage I/O components and switching systems for High Performance Computing, Hyperscale data centers, and telecommunications operators, Mellanox has the industry’s broadest range of intelligent Ethernet NIC and switch solutions; spanning interface speeds from 10, 25, 40, 50 to 100Gb/s.”

Exhibit Sales are Booming for SC17

SC17 is still more than eight months away, but the conference has already outsold SC16 in terms of the number of exhibits spaces sold and number of exhibitors. “As HPC’s importance only continues to grow, the most important HPC decision makers from both research and industry from all corners of the world recognize that attending SC is essential to their success,” said Bronis R. de Supinski, SC17 Exhibits Chair from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “We also spend considerable time and resources on adding new components to the exhibition that enhance both the attendee and the exhibitor experience.”

Podcast: How Humans Bias AI

In this AI Podcast, Kris Hammond from Narrative Science explains that while it’s easy to think of AI as cold, unbiased, and objective, it is also very good at repeating our own bias against us. “I am not saying that we should give ourselves over to algorithmic decision-making. We should always remember that just as the machine is free of the cognitive biases that often defeat us, we have information about the world that the machine does not. My argument is that, with intelligent systems, we now have the opportunity to be genuinely smarter.”

PRACE Publishes Best Practices for GPU Computing

The European PRACE initiative has published a Best Practices Guide for GPU Computing. “This Best Practice Guide describes GPUs: it includes information on how to get started with programming GPUs, which cannot be used in isolation but as “accelerators” in conjunction with CPUs, and how to get good performance. Focus is given to NVIDIA GPUs, which are most widespread today.”

Katrin Amunts to Present on Decoding the Human Brain at PASC17

Today the PASC17 Conference announced Professor Katrin Amunts plenary presentation will be entitled, “Towards the Decoding of the Human Brain.” Regarded as one of the world’s foremost neuroscientists in the field of brain mapping, Dr. Amunts is director of the Cécile and Oskar Vogt Institute of Brain Research at the University of Düsseldorf, and director of the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine at Forschungszentrum Jülich.

Application Profiling at the HPCAC High Performance Center

“To achieve good scalability performance on the HPC scientific applications typically involves good understanding of the workload though performing profile analysis, and comparing behaviors of using different hardware which pinpoint bottlenecks in different areas of the HPC cluster. In this session, a selection of HPC applications will be shown to demonstrate various methods of profiling and analysis to determine the bottleneck, and the effectiveness of the tuning to improve on the application performance from tests conducted at the HPC Advisory Council High Performance Center.”

Call for Papers: International Conference on Parallel Processing in Bristol

The International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP 2017) has issued its Call for Papers. The event takes place August 14-17 in Bristol, UK. “Parallel and distributed computing is a central topic in science, engineering and society. ICPP, the International Conference on Parallel Processing, provides a forum for engineers and scientists in academia, industry and government to present their latest research findings in all aspects of parallel and distributed computing.”