“MeteoSwiss, the Swiss national weather forecast institute, has selected densely populated accelerator servers as their primary system to compute weather forecast simulation. Servers with multiple accelerator devices that are primarily connected by a PCI-Express (PCIe) network achieve a significantly higher energy efficiency. Memory transfers between accelerators in such a system are subjected to PCIe arbitration policies. In this paper, we study the impact of PCIe topology and develop a congestion-aware performance model for PCIe communication. We present an algorithm for computing congestion factors of every communication in a congestion graph that characterizes the dynamic usage of network resources by an application.”
A PCIe Congestion-Aware Performance Model for Densely Populated Accelerator Servers
April 14, 2017 by
Panel Discussion: The Exascale Era
April 13, 2017 by
In this video from Switzerland HPC Conference, Rich Brueckner from insideHPC moderates a panel discussion on Exascale Computing. “The Exascale Computing Project in the USA is tasked with developing a set of advanced supercomputers with 50x better performance than today’s fastest machines on real applications. This panel discussion will look at the challenges, gaps, and probable pathways forward in this monumental endeavor.”
Panelists:
Gilad Shainer, HPC Advisory Council
Jeffrey Stuecheli, IBM
DK Panda, Ohio State University
Torsten Hoefler, ETH Zurich
Rich Graham, Mellanox
High-Performance and Scalable Designs of Programming Models for Exascale Systems
April 11, 2017 by
“This talk will focus on challenges in designing programming models and runtime environments for Exascale systems with millions of processors and accelerators to support various programming models. We will focus on MPI+X (PGAS – OpenSHMEM/UPC/CAF/UPC++, OpenMP, and CUDA) programming models by taking into account support for multi-core systems (KNL and OpenPower), high-performance networks, GPGPUs (including GPUDirect RDMA), and energy-awareness.”
Visionary Perspective: Foundations of Cognitive Computing
April 10, 2017 by
Costas Bekas from IBM Research Zurich presented this talk at the Switzerland HPC Conference. “IBM Research builds applications that enable humans to collaborate with powerful AI technologies to discover, analyze and tackle the world’s greatest challenges. Humans are on the cusp of augmenting their lives in extraordinary ways with AI. At IBM Research Labs around the globe, we envision and develop next-generation systems that work side-by side with humans, accelerating our ability to create, learn, make decisions and think.”
HPC Advisory Council Announces Global Conference Series for 2017
December 23, 2016 by
Today the HPC Advisory Council announced key dates for its 2017 international conference series in the USA and Switzerland. The conferences are designed to attract community-wide participation, industry leading sponsors and subject matter experts. “HPC is constantly evolving and reflects the driving force behind many medical, industrial and scientific breakthroughs using research that harnesses the power of HPC and yet, we’ve only scratched the surface with respect to exploiting the endless opportunities that HPC, modeling, and simulation present,” said Gilad Shainer, chairman of the HPC Advisory Council. “The HPCAC conference series presents a unique opportunity for the global HPC community to come together in an unprecedented fashion to share, collaborate, and innovate our way into the future.”
Manage Reproducibility of Computational Workflows with Docker Containers and Nextflow
April 8, 2016 by
“Research computational workflows consist of several pieces of third party software and, because of their experimental nature, frequent changes and updates are commonly necessary thus raising serious deployment and reproducibility issues. Docker containers are emerging as a possible solution for many of these problems, as they allow the packaging of pipelines in an isolated and self-contained manner. This presentation will introduce our experience deploying genomic pipelines with Docker containers at the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG). I will discuss how we implemented it, the main issues we faced, the pros and cons of using Docker in an HPC environment including a benchmark of the impact of containers technology on the performance of the executed applications.”
Video: HPC and Hyperscale Trends for 2016
April 5, 2016 by
Addison Snell from Intersect360 Research presented this talk at the Switzerland HPC Conference. “Based on updated research studies, Addison Snell of Intersect360 Research will present on forward-looking topics for HPC and Hyperscale markets. With an expanding look at hyper- scale, Intersect360 Research will describe the size and influence of the market, including evolving standards like Open Compute Project, OpenStack, and Beiji/Scorpio. Intersect360 Research has also investigated users’ plans for evaluating competing processing and interconnect options, including Xeon, Xeon Phi, GPU, FPGA, POWER, ARM, InfiniBand, and OmniPath.”
Video: Seagate Exascale HPC Storage
April 5, 2016 by
“Traditionally, storage have been using brute force rather than intelligent design to deliver the required throughputs but the current trend is to design balanced systems with full utilization of the back-end storage and other related components. These new systems need to use fine grained power control all the way down to individual disk drives as well as tools for continuous monitoring and management of these systems. In addition, the storage solutions of tomorrow needs to support multiple tiers including backend archiving systems supported by HSM as well multiple file systems if required. This presentation is intended to provide a short update of where Seagate HPC storage is today.”
Video: OpenPOWER Roadmap Toward CORAL
April 3, 2016 by
“Last year IBM together with partners out of the OpenPOWER foundation won two of the multi-year contacts of the US CORAL program. Within these contracts IBM develops an accelerated HPC infrastructure and software development ecosystem that will be a major step towards Exascale Computing. We believe that the CORAL roadmap will enable a massive pull for transformation of HPC codes for accelerated systems. The talk will discuss the IBM HPC strategy, explain the OpenPOWER foundation and the show IBM OpenPOWER roadmap for CORAL and beyond.”
Video: Huawei Powers Efficient and Scalable HPC
March 31, 2016 by
“Huawei focuses on R&D of IT infrastructure, cooling solutions, software integration, and provides end-to-end HPC solution by building ecosystems with partners. Huawei help customers from different sectors and fields, solving challenges and problems with computing resources, energy expenditure and business needs. This presentation will introduce how Huawei brings fresh technologies to next-generation HPC solutions for more innovation, higher efficiency and scale, as well as presenting our best practices for HPC.”
