Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is enlisting AiMOS, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, in the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic. Rensselaer is reaching out to the research community, including government entities, universities, and industry, to offer access to AiMOS in support of research related to the new coronavirus disease. “This effort requires expertise, collaboration, and the ability to process incredible amounts of data, and Rensselaer is offering all three at this critical time. In particular, the ability to model at very large scales requires the unique capabilities of AiMOS.”
IBM & DOE Launch COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium
March 22, 2020 by
Today, IBM, in collaboration with the DOE, launched the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium. “The consortium bring together an unprecedented amount of supercomputing power—16 systems with more than 330 petaflops, 775,000 CPU cores, 34,000 GPUs, and counting—to help researchers everywhere tackle this global challenge. These high-performance computing systems allow researchers to run very large numbers of calculations in epidemiology, bioinformatics, and molecular modeling in hours or days, not weeks, months or years.”
UK to establish Northern Intensive Computing Environment (NICE)
February 18, 2020 by
The N8 Centre of Excellence in Computationally Intensive Research, N8 CIR, has been awarded £3.1m from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Resources Council to establish a new Tier 2 computing facility in the north of England. This investment will be matched by £5.3m from the eight universities in the N8 Research Partnership which will fund operational costs and dedicated research software engineering support. “The new facility, known as the Northern Intensive Computing Environment or NICE, will be housed at Durham University and co-located with the existing STFC DiRAC Memory Intensive National Supercomputing Facility. NICE will be based on the same technology that is used in current world-leading supercomputers and will extend the capability of accelerated computing. The technology has been chosen to combine experimental, modelling and machine learning approaches and to bring these specialist communities together to address new research challenges.”
Predictions for HPC in 2020
February 17, 2020 by
In this special guest feature from Scientific Computing World, Laurence Horrocks-Barlow from OCF predicts that containerization, cloud, and GPU-based workloads are all going to dominate the HPC environment in 2020. “Over the last year, we’ve seen a strong shift towards the use of cloud in HPC, particularly in the case of storage. Many research institutions are working towards a ‘cloud first’ policy, looking for cost savings in using the cloud rather than expanding their data centres with overheads, such as cooling, data and cluster management and certification requirements.”
UMass Dartmouth Speeds Research with Hybrid Supercomputer from Microway
January 24, 2020 by
UMass Dartmouth’s powerful new cluster from Microway affords the university five times the compute performance its researchers enjoyed previously, with over 85% more total memory and over four times the aggregate memory bandwidth. “The UMass Dartmouth cluster reflects a hybrid design to appeal to a wide array of the campus’ workloads. “Over 50 nodes include Intel Xeon Scalable Processors, DDR4 memory, SSDs and Mellanox ConnectX-5 EDR 100Gb InfiniBand. A subset of systems also feature NVIDIA V100 GPU accelerators. Equally important are a second subset of POWER9 with 2nd Generation NVLink- based- IBM Power Systems AC922 Compute nodes.”
Los Alamos National Laboratory joins IBM Q Network for quantum computing
January 12, 2020 by
Today Los Alamos National Laboratory announced that it is joining the cloud-based IBM Q Network as part of the Laboratory’s research initiative into quantum computing, including developing quantum computing algorithms, conducting research in quantum simulations, and developing education tools. “Joining the IBM Q Network will greatly help our research efforts in several directions, including developing and testing near-term quantum algorithms and formulating strategies for mitigating errors on quantum computers,” said Irene Qualters, associate laboratory director for Simulation and Computation at Los Alamos.
IBM Doubles Quantum Volume with 28 Qubit Raleigh System
January 9, 2020 by
All qubits are not created equal. Over at the IBM Blog, Jerry Chow and Jay Gambetta write that the company’s new Raleigh 28-qubit quantum computer has achieved the company’s goal of doubling its Quantum Volume. The development marks a shift from experimentation towards building Quantum Computers with a systems approach.
Delta Partners with IBM to Explore Quantum Computing
January 8, 2020 by
Today IBM and Delta Air Lines announced a multi-year collaborative effort to explore the potential capabilities of quantum computing to transform experiences for customers and employees. “Delta joins more than 100 clients already experimenting with commercial quantum computing solutions alongside classical computers from IBM to tackle problems like risk analytics and options pricing, advanced battery materials and structures, manufacturing optimization, chemical research, logistics and more.”
Video: Democratizing the World’s Weather Data with IBM GRAF
December 30, 2019 by
In this video, scientists describes IBM GRAF, a powerful new global weather forecasting system that will provide the most accurate local weather forecasts ever seen worldwide. The IBM Global High-Resolution Atmospheric Forecasting System (GRAF) is the first hourly-updating commercial weather system that is able to predict something as small as thunderstorms globally. Compared to existing models, it will provide a nearly 200% improvement in forecasting resolution for much of the globe (from 12 to 3 sq km).
IBM Launches Quantum Computing Initiative for Japan
December 23, 2019 by
IBM and the University of Tokyo have announced an agreement to partner to advance quantum computing and make it practical for the benefit of industry, science and society. “Under the agreement, an IBM Q System One will be installed in an IBM facility in Japan. It will be the first installation of its kind in the region and only the third in the world following the United States and Germany. The Q System One will be used to advance research in quantum algorithms, applications and software, with the goal of developing the first practical applications of quantum computing.”
