Call for Papers: International Workshop on Accelerators and Hybrid Exascale Systems

The eight annual  International Workshop on Accelerators and Hybrid Exascale Systems (AsHES) has issued its Call for Papers. Held in conjunction with the 32nd IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium, the AsHES Workshop takes place May 23 in Vancouver, Canada. “This workshop focuses on understanding the implications of accelerators and heterogeneous designs on the hardware systems, porting applications, performing compiler optimizations, and developing programming environments for current and emerging systems. It seeks to ground accelerator research through studies of application kernels or whole applications on such systems, as well as tools and libraries that improve the performance and productivity of applications on these systems.”

Trinity Supercomputer lands at #7 on TOP500

The Trinity Supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory was recently named as a top 10 supercomputer on two lists: it made number three on the High Performance Conjugate Gradients (HPCG) Benchmark project, and is number seven on the TOP500 list. “Trinity has already made unique contributions to important national security challenges, and we look forward to Trinity having a long tenure as one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.” said John Sarrao, associate director for Theory, Simulation and Computation at Los Alamos.

Supermicro Booth Tour Showcases HPC Innovation at SC17

In this video, Akira Sano provides a tour of the Supermicro booth at SC17 in Denver. “Supermicro offers the best selection of leading HPC optimized servers in the industry as evidenced by the recent selection of our twin architecture by the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS).”

Podcast: Optimizing Cosmos Code on Intel Xeon Phi

In this TACC podcast, Cosmos code developer Chris Fragile joins host Jorge Salazar for a discussion on how researchers are using supercomputers to simulate the inner workings of Black holes. “For this simulation, the manycore architecture of KNL presents new challenges for researchers trying to get the best compute performance. This is a computer chip that has lots of cores compared to some of the other chips one might have interacted with on other systems,” McDougall explained. “More attention needs to be paid to the design of software to run effectively on those types of chips.”

1000x Faster Deep-Learning at Petascale Using Intel Xeon Phi Processors

A cumulative effort over several years to scale the training of deep-learning neural networks has resulted in the first demonstration of petascale deep-learning training performance, and further to deliver this performance when solving real science problems. The result reflects the combined efforts of NERSC (National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center), Stanford and Intel to solve real world use cases rather than simply report on performance benchmarks.

Intel Parallel Studio XE 2018 For Demanding HPC Applications

“For those that develop HPC applications, there are usually two main areas that must be considered. The first is the translation of the algorithm, whether simulation based, physics based or pure research into the code that a modern computer system can run. A second challenge is how to move from the implementation of an algorithm to the performance that takes advantage of modern CPUs and accelerators.”

JAIST in Japan installs Cray XC40 Supercomputer

Today Cray announced the Japan Advanced Institute for Science and Technology (JAIST) has put a Cray XC40 supercomputer into production. The Cray XC40 supercomputers incorporate the Aries high performance network interconnect for low latency and scalable global bandwidth, as well as the latest Intel Xeon processors, Intel Xeon Phi processors, and NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators. “Our new Cray XC40 supercomputer will support our mission of becoming a premier center of excellence in education and research.”

OCF Builds Isca Supercomputer for Life Sciences at University of Exeter

Researchers from across the University of Exeter can now benefit from a new HPC machine – Isca – that was configured and integrated by OCF to give the university a larger capacity for computational research. “We’ve seen in the last few years a real growth in interest in High-Performance Computing from life sciences, particularly with the availability of new high-fidelity genome sequencers, which have heavy compute requirements, and that demand will keep going up.”

Intel Discontinues Xeon Phi 7200-Series Knights Landing Coprocessors

AnandTech reports that Intel is discontinuing it’s line of Knights Landing PCIe based Co-processors. The move is not a surprise given that the company has been producing bootable Xeon Phi processors since early in 2016. “At least for now, Intel does not want to compete against add-on PCIe compute accelerators with its Xeon Phi products. A big question is whether it actually needs to, given the stand-alone capabilities of Xeon Phi and its performance characteristics.”

Feed The Cores – Memory Bandwidth Usage

“Memory bandwidth to the CPUs has always been important. There were typically CPU cores that would wait for the data (if not in cache) from main memory. However, with the advanced capabilities of the Intel Xeon Phi processor, there are new concepts to understand and take advantage of.”