Archives for March 2017

Recent Topics in the IBTA… and a Look Ahead

Bill Magro from IBTA gave this talk at the OpenFabrics Workshop. “This talk discusses some recent activities in the InfiniBand Trade Association including recent specification updates. It also provides a glimpse into the future for the IBTA.” Bill Magro is an Intel Fellow and Intel’s Chief Technologist for HPC software. In this role, he serves as the technical lead and strategist for Intel’s high-performance computing software and provides HPC software requirements for Intel product roadmaps.”

NICE Software Releases EnginFrame 2017

“Since the NICE acquisition by Amazon Web Services (AWS), many customers asked us how to make the HPC experience in the Cloud as simple as the one they have on premises, while still leveraging the elasticity and flexibility that it provides. While we stay committed to delivering new and improved capabilities for on-premises deployments, like the new support for Citrix XenDesktop and the new HTML5 file transfer widgets, EnginFrame 2017 is our first step into making HPC easier to deploy and use in AWS, even without an in-depth knowledge of its APIs and rich service offering.”

Video: RDMA on ARM

Pavel Shamis from ARM Research presented this talk at the OpenFabrics Workshop. “With the emerging availability server platforms based on ARM CPU architecture, it is important to understand ARM integrates with RDMA hardware and software eco-system. In this talk, we will overview ARM architecture and system software stack. We will discuss how ARM CPU interacts with network devices and accelerators. In addition, we will share our experience in enabling RDMA software stack (OFED/MOFED Verbs) and one-sided communication libraries (Open UCX, OpenSHMEM/SHMEM) on ARM and share preliminary evaluation results.”

Quantum Startup Rigetti Computing Raises $64 Million in Funding

Today Rigetti Computing, a leading quantum computing start-up, announced it has raised $64 million in Series A and B funding. “Quantum computing will enable people to tackle a whole new set of problems that were previously unsolvable,” said Chad Rigetti, founder and chief executive officer of Rigetti Computing. “This is the next generation of advanced computing technology. The potential to make a positive impact on humanity is enormous.”

Intel Xeon Phi Cluster Mode Programming (and interactions with memory modes) in a Nutshell

In previous articles (1 and 2) here on insideHPC, James Reinders described “Intel Xeon Phi processor Programming in a Nutshell” for Intel’s 72-core processor. In this special guest feature, he discusses cluster modes and the interaction of the memory modes with these cluster modes.

New Univa Grid Engine Release Doubles Performance over Previous Versions

“Grid Engine 8.5’s significant performance improvement for submitting jobs and reduced scheduling times will have a profound impact to our customers’ bottom line as they can now get more work done in the same amount of time. By reducing the wait time for end-users, our customers can save significant costs. Managing the purchase of more servers and getting higher throughput means deadlines can be met with confidence and on budget. Our goal was to increase the value Univa provides over previous versions of Grid Engine, including the popular open source version 6.2U5,” said Bill Bryce, Vice President of Products at Univa.

Call for Papers: iRODS User Group in The Netherlands

Users of the integrated iRODS Rule Oriented Data System from around the globe will gather at the iRODS User Group meeting to discuss iRODS-enabled applications, discoveries, and technologies. The event takes place June 13-15 in Utrecht, The Netherlands. “Thousands of businesses, research centers, and government agencies located in the U.S., Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, and Africa use iRODS for flexible, policy-based data management that provides long-term preservation and federation.”

Valerie Taylor Named Director of Mathematics and Computer Science at Argonne

Today Argonne announced that computer scientist Valerie Taylor has been appointed as the next director of the Mathematics and Computer Science (MCS) division at Argonne National Laboratory, effective July 3, 2017. “Valerie brings with her a wealth of leadership experience, computer science knowledge and future vision,” said Rick Stevens, Argonne Associate Laboratory Director for Computing, Environment and Life Sciences. “We feel strongly that her enthusiasm and drive will serve her well in her new role, and are pleased to have her joining our staff.”

Supermicro Unveils RSD Rack Scale Design

“Supermicro RSD makes it easy for companies of any size to build cloud infrastructure that until now are limited to leading large public and private cloud providers,” said Charles Liang, President and CEO of Supermicro. “The Supermicro RSD solution enables more customers to build large scale modern data centers leveraging Supermicro’s best-of-breed server, storage and networking product portfolio.”

Exascale Computing Project – Driving a HUGE Change in a Changing World

“In this keynote, Al Geist will discuss the need for future Department of Energy supercomputers to solve emerging data science and machine learning problems in addition to running traditional modeling and simulation applications. The ECP goals are intended to enable the delivery of capable exascale computers in 2022 and one early exascale system in 2021, which will foster a rich exascale ecosystem and work toward ensuring continued U.S. leadership in HPC. He will also share how the ECP plans to achieve these goals and the potential positive impacts for OFA.”