Simply Beautiful: MareNorstum4 Supercomputer Sports 13.7 Petaflops

Over at Lenovo, Gavin O’Hara writes that the world’s most beautiful supercomputer center now sports a 13.7 Petaflop system so novel in design that it has captured the attention of the global HPC community. It landed at #13 on the TOP500 this week, and that’s just the beginning.

Lenovo Powers World’s Largest Skylake Cluster at Barcelona Supercomputing Center

Today Lenovo announced the deployment of the world’s largest, next-generation Intel-based Supercomputer at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). The 11.1 petaFLOP1 Supercomputer called MareNostrum 4, will be housed in the world’s “most beautiful data center”at the Chapel Torre Girona at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain, and will be used to power diverse science from human genome research, bioinformatics and biomechanics to weather forecasting and atmospheric composition. This new system, which will continue to grow over time, is listed at #13 on the latest TOP500 list that was released this week. “The fast delivery, installation and optimization of the MareNostrum 4 system at BSC, showcases Lenovo’s end-to-end, high-performance computing strength,” said Kirk Skaugen, President of Lenovo Data Center Group. “Building on our 25 years of history in x86 server computing and our number one position in x86 server customer satisfaction and reliability, our goal at Lenovo is to be the largest supercomputing company on earth helping solve humanities biggest challenges through the rapid advancement of technology and innovation.”

BSC and NVIDIA Showcase Interactive Simulation of Human Body

This week at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia and Barcelona Supercomputing Center demonstrated an interactive visualization of a cardiac computational model that shows the potential of HPC-based simulation codes and GPU-accelerated clusters to simulate the human cardiovascular system. “This demonstration brings together Alya simulation code and NVIDIA IndeX scalable software to implement an in-situ visualization solution for of electro mechanical simulations of the BSC cardiac computational model. While Alya simulates the electromechanical cardiac propagation, NVIDIA IndeX is used for an immediate in-situ visualization. The in-situ visualization allows researchers to interact with the data on the fly giving a better insight into the simulations.”

INRIA to Host Workshop on HPC Roadmap for Energy Industry

The HPC for Energy (HPC4E) project is organizing a workshop entitled HPC Roadmap for Energy Industry. Hosted by INRIA, the event takes place Feb 1 at the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation. “Energy is one of the current priorities for EU-Brazil cooperation. The main objective is to develop high-performance simulation tools that go beyond the state-of-the-art to help the energy industry respond to both future energy demands and carbon-related environmental issues.”

Apply Now for Summer of HPC 2017 in Barcelona

“The PRACE Summer of HPC is an outreach and training program that offers summer placements at top High Performance Computing centers across Europe to late-stage undergraduates and early-stage postgraduate students. Up to twenty top applicants from across Europe will be selected to participate. Participants will spend two months working on projects related to PRACE technical or industrial work and produce a report and a visualization or video of their results.”

Beauty Meets HPC: An Overview of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center

“The multidisciplinary research team and computational facilities –including MareNostrum– make BSC an international centre of excellence in e-Science. Since its establishment in 2005, BSC has developed an active role in fostering HPC in Spain and Europe as an essential tool for international competitiveness in science and engineering. The center manages the Red Española de Supercomputación (RES), and is a hosting member of the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) initiative.”

Supercomputing Sandstorm Forecasts at BSC

“Over the past 15 years, a number of factors have resulted in an increase in the frequency, intensity, and operational impact of sand and dust storms in the Middle East and surrounding areas,” said Bob Richard, vice president, ARINC Direct for Rockwell Collins. “Integrating high-resolution forecast information into our flight and international trip support services will provide safety and performance benefits for business aviation operators in the region.”

BSC Releases COMPSs Version 2.0 at SC16

This version of COMPSs, available from today, updates the result of the team’s work in the last years on the provision of a set of tools that helps developers to program and execute their applications efficiently on distributed computational infrastructures such as clusters, grids and clouds. COMPSs is a task based programming model known for notably improving the performance of large scale applications by automatically parallelizing their execution.

BSC Collaborates with OpenFog Consortium

“To reinforce and continue with our pioneering work on fog computing that started in 2008, we pursue synergies between leading technology companies and academic and scientific community,” said Mario Nemirovsky, Network Processors Manager at BSC. “By collaborating with the OpenFog Consortium, we will be able to contribute to the consolidation of an IoT platform for the interoperability for consumers, business, industry and research. We are looking forward to a constructive and fruitful collaborations with all OpenFog members.”

BSC Joins OpenPOWER Foundation

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) has joined the OpenPOWER Foundation. The news will be part of a keynote address by BSC Director, Mateo Valero at the OpenPOWER Summit Europe, which takes place this week in Barcelona.