In this special guest feature, Mahesh Pancholi from OCF writes that many of universities are now engaging in cloud bursting and are regularly taking advantage of public cloud infrastructures that are widely available from large companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft. “By bursting into the public cloud, the university can offer the latest and greatest technologies as part of its Research Computing Service for all its researchers.”
Amazon and Libfabric: A case study in flexible HPC Infrastructure
April 13, 2018 by Leave a Comment
Brian Barrett from Amazon gave this talk at the 2018 OpenFabrics Workshop. “As network performance becomes a larger bottleneck in application performance, AWS is investing in improving HPC network performance. Our initial investment focused on improving performance in open source MPI implementations, with positive results. Recently, however, we have pivoted to focusing on using libfabric to improve point to point performance.”
Amazon SageMaker goes for “Infinitely Scalable” Machine Learning
March 23, 2018 by Leave a Comment
Over at the All Things Distributed blog, Werner Vogels writes that the new Amazon SageMaker is designed for building machine learning algorithms that can handle an infinite amount of data. “To handle unbounded amounts of data, our algorithms adopt a streaming computational model. In the streaming model, the algorithm only passes over the dataset one time and assumes a fixed-memory footprint. This memory restriction precludes basic operations like storing the data in memory, random access to individual records, shuffling the data, reading through the data several times, etc.”
Big 3 Cloud Providers join with NSF to Support Data Science
February 8, 2018 by Leave a Comment
“NSF’s participation with major cloud providers is an innovative approach to combining resources to better support data science research,” said Jim Kurose, assistant director of NSF for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE). “This type of collaboration enables fundamental research and spurs technology development and economic growth in areas of mutual interest to the participants, driving innovation for the long-term benefit of our nation.”
Video: How to Get the HPC Best-in-class Performance via Intel Xeon Skylake
December 20, 2017 by Leave a Comment
“HPC Cloud services built on the latest Intel architecture, Skylake Xeon processor, are now powering the C5 compute intensive instance at AWS and can serve as your next-generation HPC platform. Hear how customers are starting to consider hybrid strategies to increase productivity and lower their capital expenditure and maintenance costs. Also learn how to adapt this model to meet the increasing HPC and data analytics needs for your applications with the new technologies incorporated into the platform.”
Dell EMC Powers HPC at University of Liverpool with Alces Flight
December 9, 2017 by Leave a Comment
Today Dell EMC announced a joint solution with Alces Flight and AWS to provide HPC for the University of Liverpool. Dell EMC will provide a fully managed on-premises HPC cluster while a cloud-based HPC account for students and researchers will enable cloud bursting computational capacity. “We are pleased to be working with Dell EMC and Alces Flight on this new venture,” said Cliff Addison, Head of Advanced Research Computing at the University of Liverpool. “The University of Liverpool has always maintained cutting-edge technology and by architecting flexible access to computational resources on AWS we’re setting the bar even higher for what can be achieved in HPC.”
Radio Free HPC Looks at a Controversy in the Irish Supercomputing List
December 4, 2017 by Leave a Comment
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at a controversy stirred up by the recent Irish Supercomputing List.
The 9th Irish Supercomputer List was released this week. For the first time, Ireland has four computers ranked on the Top500. “Since the publication of the List, a third party called the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) has expressed concerns that the press release issued by the Irish Supercomputing List is misleading. You can read their opinion here.”
Video: Introducing the Nitro Hypervisor – the Evolution of Amazon EC2 Virtualization
December 2, 2017 by Leave a Comment
In this video from AWS Reinvent, Anthony Liguori from Amazon presents: Nitro Hypervisor – the Evolution of Amazon EC2 Virtualization. “The new Nitro hypervisor for Amazon EC2, introduced with the launch of C5 instances, is a component that primarily provides CPU and memory isolation for C5 instances. VPC networking, and EBS storage resources are implemented by dedicated hardware components that are part of all current generation EC2 instance families. It is built on core Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) technology, but does not include general purpose operating system components.
Intel Xeon Scalable Processors power new AWS C5 Instances for HPC
November 7, 2017 by Leave a Comment
Today, Amazon Web Services announced the availability of C5 instances, the next generation of compute optimized instances for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Designed for compute-heavy applications like batch processing, distributed analytics, and HPC, C5 instances feature 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Skylake-SP) up to 72 vCPUs, and 144 GiB of memory—twice the vCPUs and memory of previous generation C4 instances—providing the best price-performance of any Amazon EC2 instance.
NVIDIA GPU Cloud comes to AWS with Volta GPUs
October 26, 2017 by Leave a Comment
“In just a few steps, the NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC) container registry helps developers get started with no-cost access to a comprehensive, easy-to-use, fully optimized deep learning software stack. The cloud-based service is available immediately to users of the just-announced Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) P3 instances featuring NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. NVIDIA plans to expand support to other cloud platforms soon.”
