Intersect360 Research has released a new report guiding its clients that the market for HPC products and services will fall significantly short of its previous 2020 forecast, due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. The newly-revised forecast predicts the overall worldwide HPC market will be flat to down 12% in 2020. “Intersect360 Research had previously forecast the HPC market would grow 7.0% in 2020, year-over-year from 2019. This projected shortfall essentially wipes out that growth. This would end a streak of ten straight growth years for the HPC market.”
Exascale Computing Project Releases Milestone Report
March 27, 2020 by
The US Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP) has published a milestone report that summarizes the status of all thirty ECP Application Development (AD) subprojects at the end of fiscal year 2019. “This report contains not only an accurate snapshot of each subproject’s current status but also represents an unprecedentedly broad account of experiences porting large scientific applications to next-generation high-performance computing architectures.”
The Role of Middleware in Optimizing Vector Processing
March 25, 2020 by
A new whitepaper from NEC X delves into the world of unstructured data and explores how vector processors and their optimization software can help solve the challenges of wrangling the ever-growing volumes of data generated globally. “In short, vector processing with SX-Aurora TSUBASA will play a key role in changing the way big data is handled while stripping away the barriers to achieving even higher performance in the future.”
Is Your Storage Infrastructure Ready for the Coming AI Wave?
March 23, 2020 by
In this new whitepaper from our friends over at Panasas, we take a look at whether your storage infrastructure is ready for the robust requirements in support of AI workloads. AI promises to not only create entirely new industries, but it will also fundamentally change the way organizations large and small conduct business. IT planners need to start revising their storage infrastructure now to prepare the organization for the coming AI wave.
Alibaba Cloud Offers AI Cloud Services to Help Battle COVID-19 Globally
March 19, 2020 by
Today the Alibaba Cloud announced it has offered medical personnel around the world a set of advanced cloud-based technology applications in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. Included are artificial intelligence-enhanced innovations based on learnings and insights garnered during the initial outbreak of the virus. “The series of cloud-native anti-coronavirus solutions stem from joint efforts of Alibaba Cloud’s solution experts, scientists and researchers from Alibaba DAMO Academy and the technical team at DingTalk, one of the platforms UNESCO has tabbed as facilitating distance learning during the coronavirus outbreak.”
Case Study: Magseis Fairfield Uses a Sea of Data to Support Environmentally Responsible Energy Exploration
March 17, 2020 by
This whitepaper contains a compelling HPC data storage solution case study highlighting the use of Panasas ActiveStor® by Magseis Fairfield, a geophysics firm that specializes in providing seismic 3D and 4D data acquisition services to exploration and production (E&P) companies. The whitepaper, “Magseis Fairfield Uses a Sea of Data to Support Environmentally Responsible Energy Exploration,” […]
New Paper: A novel error-correction scheme for quantum computers
March 12, 2020 by
By taking advantage of the infinite geometric space of a particular quantum system made up of bosons, the researchers, led by Dr Arne Grimsmo from the University of Sydney, have developed quantum error correction codes that should reduce the number of physical quantum switches, or qubits, required to scale up these machines to a useful size. “The beauty of these codes is they are ‘platform agnostic’ and can be developed to work with a wide range of quantum hardware systems,” Dr Grimsmo said.
New Paper Surveys Optimization Techniques for Intel Xeon Phi
March 5, 2020 by
A new paper by Dr Sparsh Mittal surveys techniques for evaluating and optimizing Intel’s Xeon Phi. Now accepted in Concurrency and Computation 2020, the survey reviews nearly 100 papers. “Intel Xeon Phi combines the parallel processing power of a many-core accelerator with the programming ease of CPUs. Phi has powered many supercomputers, e.g., in June 2018 list of Top500 supercomputers, 19 supercomputers used Phi as the main processing unit. This paper surveys works that study the architecture of Phi and use it as an accelerator for various applications. It critically examines the performance bottlenecks and optimization strategies for Phi. For example, the main motivation and justification for development of Phi was ease of programming.”
SLIDE algorithm for training deep neural nets faster on CPUs than GPUs
March 2, 2020 by
Rice researchers created a cost-saving alternative to GPU, an algorithm called “sub-linear deep learning engine” (SLIDE) that uses general purpose central processing units (CPUs) without specialized acceleration hardware. “Our tests show that SLIDE is the first smart algorithmic implementation of deep learning on CPU that can outperform GPU hardware acceleration on industry-scale recommendation datasets with large fully connected architectures.”
Argonne Publishes AI for Science Report
February 28, 2020 by
Argonne National Lab has published a comprehensive AI for Science Report based on a series of Town Hall meetings held in 2019. Hosted by Argonne, Oak Ridge, and Berkeley National Laboratories, the four town hall meetings were attended by more than 1,000 U.S. scientists and engineers. The goal of the town hall series was to examine scientific opportunities in the areas of artificial intelligence (AI), Big Data, and high-performance computing (HPC) in the next decade, and to capture the big ideas, grand challenges, and next steps to realizing these opportunities.
