Video: Building Computing and Data Centres for Exascale in the EU

In this video from the 2018 Swiss HPC Conference, Peter Hopton from the EuroEXA project shares the problems and the solutions that are being developed in the EuroEXA co-design project. “EuroEXA hardware designers work together with system software experts optimizing the entire stack from language runtimes to low-level kernel drivers, and application developers that bring in a rich mix of key HPC applications from across climate/weather, physical/energy and life-science/bioinformatics domains to enable efficient system co-design and maximize the impact of the project.”

Kubernetes as a Service Built on OpenStack

Saverio Proto from SWITCH gave this talk at the Swiss HPC Conference. “At SWITCH we are looking to provide a container platform as a Service solution. We are working on Kubernetes leveraging the Openstack cloud provider integration. In this talk we show how to re-use the existing keystone credentials to access the K8s cluster, how to obtain PVCs using the Cinder storage class and many other nice integration details.”

Containers Using Singularity on HPC

Abhinav Thota, from Indiana University gave this talk at the 2018 Swiss HPC Conference. “Container use is becoming more widespread in the HPC field. There are various reasons for this, including the broadening of the user base and applications of HPC. One of the popular container tools on HPC is Singularity, an open source project coming out of the Berkeley Lab. In this talk, we will introduce Singularity, discuss how users of Indiana University are using it and share our experience supporting it. This talk will include a brief demonstration as well.”

Introducing the SPEC High Performance Group and HPC Benchmark Suites

Robert Henschel from Indiana University gave this talk at the Swiss HPC Conference. “In this talk, I will present an overview of the High Performance Group as well as SPEC’s benchmarking philosophy in general. Most everyone knows SPEC for the SPEC CPU benchmarks that are heavily used when comparing processor performance, but the High Performance Group specifically focusses on whole system benchmarking utilizing the parallelization paradigms common in HPC, like MPI, OpenMP and OpenACC.”

Ceph on the Brain: Storage and Data-Movement Supporting the Human Brain Project

Adrian Tate from Cray and Stig Telfer from StackHPC gave this talk at the 2018 Swiss HPC Conference. “This talk will describe how Cray, StackHPC and the HBP co-designed a next-generation storage system based on Ceph, exploiting complex memory hierarchies and enabling next-generation mixed workload execution. We will describe the challenges, show performance data and detail the ways that a similar storage setup may be used in HPC systems of the future.”

Scratch to Supercomputers: Bottoms-up Build of Large-scale Computational Lensing Software

Gilles Fourestey from EPFL gave this talk at the Swiss HPC Conference. “LENSTOOL is a gravitational lensing software that models mass distribution of galaxies and clusters. It is used to obtain sub-percent precision measurements of the total mass in galaxy clusters and constrain the dark matter self-interaction cross-section, a crucial ingredient to understanding its nature.”

Shifter – Docker Containers for HPC

Alberto Madonaa gave this talk at the Swiss HPC Conference. “In this work we present an extension to the container runtime of Shifter that provides containerized applications with a mechanism to access GPU accelerators and specialized networking from the host system, effectively enabling performance portability of containers across HPC resources. The presented extension makes possible to rapidly deploy high-performance software on supercomputers from containerized applications that have been developed, built, and tested in non-HPC commodity hardware, e.g. the laptop or workstation of a researcher.”

The Transformation of HPC: Simulation and Cognitive Methods in the Era of Big Data

Dave Turek from IBM gave this talk at the Swiss HPC Conference. “There is a shift underway where HPC is beginning to be addressed with novel techniques and technologies including cognitive and analytic approaches to HPC problems and the arrival of the first quantum systems. This talk will showcase how IBM is merging cognitive, analytics, and quantum with classic simulation and modeling to create a new path for computational science.”

Call for Submissions: 2018 Perth HPC Conference

The 2018 Perth HPC Conference has announced their Call for Submissions. Hosted by the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre, The event takes place August 28-29 in Perth, Australia. “The second annual HPCAIAC Perth Conference will bring industry luminaries and leading subject matter experts together from all over the world to explore major and emerging domains and share in-depth insights on AI, Data Sciences, HPC, Deep/Machine Learning, Visualization and more.”

Linac Coherent Laser Source (LCLS-II): Data Transfer Requirements

Les Cottrell from SLAC gave this talk at the Stanford HPC Conference. “Scientists use LCLS to take crisp pictures of atomic motions, watch chemical reactions unfold, probe the properties of materials and explore fundamental processes in living things. The talk will introduce LCLS and LCLS-II with a short video, discuss its data reduction, collection, data transfer needs and current progress in meeting these needs.”