As you plan for next week’s Virtual SC20, we thought it would be helpful to ask four HPC industry experts for guidance regarding the sessions, trends, news and other highlights worthy of your attention coming out of what one of our panelists, Dr. Thomas Sterling of the University of Indiana (and of Beowulf cluster pioneering fame), described as “a diverse and rich” program agenda.
Video: Evolving Cyberinfrastructure, Democratizing Data, and Scaling AI to Catalyze Research Breakthroughs
Nick Nystrom from the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center gave this talk at the Stanford HPC Conference. “The Artificial Intelligence and Big Data group at Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center converges Artificial Intelligence and high performance computing capabilities, empowering research to grow beyond prevailing constraints. The Bridges supercomputer is a uniquely capable resource for empowering research by bringing together HPC, AI and Big Data.”
AMD Wins Slot in Latest NVIDIA A100 Machine Learning System
Today AMD demonstrated continued momentum in HPC with NVIDIA’s announcement that 2nd Generation AMD EPYC 7742 processors will power their new DGX A100 dedicated AI and Machine Learning system. AMD has an impressive set of HPC wins in the past year, and has been chosen by the DOE to power two pending exascale-class supercomputers, Frontier and El Capitan. “2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors are the first and only current x86-architecture server processor supporting PCIe 4.0, providing up to 128 lanes of I/O, per processor for high performance computing and connections to other devices like GPUs.”
New NVIDIA DGX A100 Packs Record 5 Petaflops of AI Performance for Training, Inference, and Data Analytics
Today NVIDIA unveiled the NVIDIA DGX A100 AI system, delivering 5 petaflops of AI performance and consolidating the power and capabilities of an entire data center into a single flexible platform. “DGX A100 systems integrate eight of the new NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs, providing 320GB of memory for training the largest AI datasets, and the latest high-speed NVIDIA Mellanox HDR 200Gbps interconnects.”
Video: The Future of Quantum Computing with IBM
In this video, Dario Gil from IBM shares results from the IBM Quantum Challenge and describes how you can access and program quantum computers on the IBM Cloud today. “Those working in the Challenge joined all those who regularly make use of the 18 quantum computing systems that IBM has on the cloud, including the 10 open systems and the advanced machines available within the IBM Q Network. During the 96 hours of the Challenge, the total use of the 18 IBM Quantum systems on the IBM Cloud exceeded 1 billion circuits a day.”
New Gordon Bell Special Prize announced for HPC-Based COVID-19 Research
Today ACM announced the inception of the ACM Gordon Bell Special Prize for HPC-Based COVID-19 Research. The new award will be presented in 2020 and 2021 and will recognize outstanding research achievements that use high performance computing applications to understand the COVID-19 pandemic, including the understanding of its spread. Nominations will be selected based on performance and innovation in their computational methods, in addition to their contributions toward understanding the nature, spread and/or treatment of the disease.
Using AI to Identify Brain Tumors with Federated Learning
Researchers at Intel Labs and the Perelman School of Medicine are using privacy-preserving technique called federated learning to train AI models that identify brain tumors. With federated learning, research institutions can collaborate on deep learning projects without sharing patient data. “AI shows great promise for the early detection of brain tumors, but it will require more data than any single medical center holds to reach its full potential,” said Jason Martin, principal engineer at Intel Labs.