Radio Free HPC:  Cerebras AI Computing at EPCC and HPE’s Chippewa Falls Remodel

We have a full crew for this wide-ranging episode of RFHPC. We start with a discussion of the new Cerebras and HPE-based supercomputer slated for the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Center in, well, Edinburgh. We talk some feeds-and-speeds for the new boxes, particularly about the 400,000-core wafer Cerebras box, along with some of the workloads that will be […]

EPCC Selects Cerebras Systems AI Supercomputer

Los Altos, Calif. & Edinburgh, UK — Cerebras Systems, the high performance artificial intelligence (AI) compute company, and EPCC, the supercomputing centre at the University of Edinburgh, today announced the selection of what Cerebras said is the world’s fastest AI computer, the Cerebras CS-1, for EPCC’s new international data facility for the Edinburgh and southeastern […]

UKRI Awards ARCHER2 Supercomputer Services Contract

UKRI has awarded contracts to run elements of the next national supercomputer, ARCHER2, which will represent a significant step forward in capability for the UK’s science community. ARCHER2 is provided by UKRI, EPCC, Cray (an HPE company) and the University of Edinburgh. “ARCHER2 will be a Cray Shasta system with an estimated peak performance of 28 PFLOP/s. The machine will have 5,848 compute nodes, each with dual AMD EPYC Zen2 (Rome) 64 core CPUs at 2.2GHz, giving 748,544 cores in total and 1.57 PBytes of total system memory.”

Arm HPC User Group Returns to Denver Nov. 18

The Arm HPC team invites you to our 5th Annual Arm HPC User Group (AHUG) session at SC19. The all-day event takes place on Monday, Nov. 18 at the Curtis Hotel in Denver. “We have a full day agenda of strategic partners and end-users from all regions of the world sharing their experiences, best practices, plans, ecosystem advances, and results on Arm-based platforms for HPC applications. The goal of this event is, as always, to candidly share and network among the growing number of users and sites that are deploying Arm for HPC and to highlight the work of the many leaders in this area.”

A New World of Simulation for Oil & Gas

In this special guest feature from Scientific Computing World, Gemma Church writes that the Oil and Gas market aims to use more simulation to ensure sound decision making s the world makes better use of renewable energy. “Oil and gas companies are increasingly relying on digital technology to improve their operational efficiency, reduce manpower through automation and developing autonomous systems for drilling, offshore platforms and increasing use of remotely operated systems and equipment for inspection.”

CSCS to Host HPC User Forum in October

CSCS will host the HPC User Forum October 7-8 in Lugano, Switzerland. “It is the first time that CSCS has the pleasure to host the HPC User Forum. The meeting will offer a review of key trends in high-performance computing, with representation of Swiss, European and U.S. perspectives. Special focus will be given to the positioning of Switzerland in the (European) HPC landscape with a presentation by Peter Brönnimann (State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation) and by the Director of CSCS, Thomas Schulthess.”

A Performance Comparison of Different MPI Implementations on an ARM HPC System

Nicholas Brown from EPCC gave this talk at the MVAPICH User Group. “In this talk I will describe work we have done in exploring the performance properties of MVAPICH, OpenMPI and MPT on one of these systems, Fulhame, which is an HPE Apollo 70-based system with 64 nodes of Cavium ThunderX2 ARM processors and Mellanox InfiniBand interconnect. In order to take advantage of these systems most effectively, it is very important to understand the performance that different MPI implementations can provide and any further opportunities to optimize these.”

Registration Opens for HPC User Forums in Switzerland and Scotland

The HPC User Forum Steering Committee and Hyperion Research invite interested HPC community members to reserve a seat at one or both HPC User Forum meetings that will take place during the same week at CSCS (the Swiss National Supercomputing Center, Lugano) and EPCC/University of Edinburgh in October. The meetings will begin and end at midday, to make same-day travel easier. Registration and food/refreshments are free, but space is strictly limited. Seats will be assigned on a first-come, first-served basis. We look forward to seeing you in October.

NVIDIA Launches U.K. Technology Center to Advance AI Research

EPCC, Hartree Centre, and the University of Reading are the first to join the NVIDIA AI Technology Center, which provides a collaborative community for world-class talent driving AI adoption and excellence across the UK. “We want to be able to leverage the rapid advances of large-scale machine learning to help traditional supercomputing applications,” said Mark Parsons, EPCC director and associate dean of e-research.”

ISC19 Student Cluster Configurations: Less is More, GPUs Rule

In this special guest feature, Dan Olds from OrionX shares first-hand coverage of the Student Cluster Competition at the recent ISC 2019 conference. “I’m constantly amazed by the how many different system configurations we see in Student Cluster Competitions. Given that everyone has to use hardware that’s currently available on the market and they all have to be under the 3,000 watt power cap, you’d think that the systems would gravitate towards a common configuration – but you’d be wrong.”