HPC in the Cloud got a boost this week with this announcement of two updates to the Amazon EC2 instance family. EC2 Bare Metal instances provide customers’ applications with direct access to the processor and memory resources of the underlying server. C5D instances with local SSD storage are designed for applications that benefit from high-speed, ultra-low latency local storage, such as video encoding, manipulation, and other forms of media processing that often include large numbers of reads and writes to temporary storage.
Asetek Receives Order For New HPC Cluster From Fujitsu
May 16, 2018 by Leave a Comment
Today Asetek announced an order from Fujitsu, an established global data center OEM, for a new High Performance Computing system at a currently undisclosed location in Japan. This major installation will be implemented using Asetek’s RackCDU liquid cooling solution throughout the cluster which includes 1300 Direct-to-Chip (D2C) coolers for the cluster’s compute nodes. “We are pleased to see the continuing success of Fujitsu using Asetek’s technology in large HPC clusters around the world,” said André Sloth Eriksen, CEO and founder of Asetek.
Red Hat’s AI Strategy
May 16, 2018 by Leave a Comment
“The impact of AI will be visible in the software industry much sooner than the analog world, deeply affecting open source in general, as well as Red Hat, its ecosystem, and its userbase. This shift provides a huge opportunity for Red Hat to offer unique value to our customers. In this session, we’ll provide Red Hat’s general perspective on AI and how we are helping our customers benefit from AI.”
Video: Women and Open Source
May 16, 2018 by Leave a Comment
“Women are becoming a driving force in the open source community as the industry becomes more diverse and inclusive. However, a recent study found that only 3% of contributors in open source were women. As a community of women at Red Hat, we want to not only highlight how we contribute, but also inspire others to contribute. In the spirit of diversity, this panel will include women from different departments at Red Hat—including marketing, management, sales, consulting, and engineering—sharing the unique ways we help grow the open source community.”
Video: Building Computing and Data Centres for Exascale in the EU
May 11, 2018 by Leave a Comment
In this video from the 2018 Swiss HPC Conference, Peter Hopton from the EuroEXA project shares the problems and the solutions that are being developed in the EuroEXA co-design project. “EuroEXA hardware designers work together with system software experts optimizing the entire stack from language runtimes to low-level kernel drivers, and application developers that bring in a rich mix of key HPC applications from across climate/weather, physical/energy and life-science/bioinformatics domains to enable efficient system co-design and maximize the impact of the project.”
The Need for Deep Learning Transparency
May 10, 2018 by Leave a Comment
Steve Conway from Hyperion Research gave this talk at the HPC User Forum. “We humans don’t fully understand how humans think. When it comes to deep learning, humans also don’t understand yet how computers think. That’s a big problem when we’re entrusting our lives to self-driving vehicles or to computers that diagnose serious diseases, or to computers installed to protect national security. We need to find a way to make these “black box” computers transparent.”
Intel FPGAs Power Realtime AI in the Azure cloud
May 10, 2018 by Leave a Comment
At the Microsoft Build conference held this week, Microsoft announced Azure Machine Learning Hardware Accelerated Models powered by Project Brainwave integrated with the Microsoft Azure Machine Learning SDK. In this configuration, customers gain access to industry-leading artificial intelligence inferencing performance for their models using Azure’s large-scale deployments of Intel FPGA (field programmable gate array) technology. “With today’s announcement, customers can now utilize Intel’s FPGA and Intel Xeon technologies to use Microsoft’s stream of AI breakthroughs on both the cloud and the edge.”
Viking Technology Introduces NVMe Persistent Memory Drives
May 9, 2018 by Leave a Comment
Today Viking Technology announced its new VT-PM8 and VT-PM16 persistent memory drives that deliver performance and unlimited write endurance similar to that of DRAM, while simultaneously providing the data persistence desired for enterprise applications. VT-PM drives, part of Viking’s family of persistent memory technology products, are 2.5 inch U.2 NVMe PCIe Gen3 drives built with architecture from Radian Memory Systems Incorporated.
POWER9 for AI & HPC
May 9, 2018 by Leave a Comment
Jeff Stuecheli from IBM gave this talk at the HPC User Forum in Tucson. “Built from the ground-up for data intensive workloads, POWER9 is the only processor with state-of-the-art I/O subsystem technology, including next generation NVIDIA NVLink, PCIe Gen4, and OpenCAPI.”
New AI Performance Milestones with NVIDIA Volta GPU Tensor Cores
May 7, 2018 by Leave a Comment
Over at the NVIDIA blog, Loyd Case shares some recent advancements that deliver dramatic performance gains on GPUs to the AI community. “We have achieved record-setting ResNet-50 performance for a single chip and single server with these improvements. Recently, fast.ai also announced their record-setting performance on a single cloud instance. A single V100 Tensor Core GPU achieves 1,075 images/second when training ResNet-50, a 4x performance increase compared to the previous generation Pascal GPU.”
