NEC Delivers HPC Cluster to RWTH Aachen University in Germany

Today NEC announced that RWTH Aachen University in Germany has started operations of a new HPC cluster. Called CLAIX-2018 the system augments the university’s existing CLAIX-2016 installation. “RWTH Aachen is one of the most renowned universities in Germany, and this project is a lighthouse project not only for the HPC datacentre, but also for NEC,” said Yuichi Kojima, Vice President HPC EMEA at NEC Deutschland.

NEXTGenIO Project Delivers Prototype to EPCC

The EPCC supercomputing centre at the University of Edinburgh has installed a prototype system developed by the NEXTGenIO project. Funded by the European Commission, NEXTGenIO is an R&D project tasked with developing solutions to high performance computing’s I/O and data challenges. “Our ongoing collaboration with NEXTGenIO allows us to develop solutions to speed up time-consuming I/O operations in HPC applications and workflows, leading to faster execution, less use of resources, and improved scalability,” said Trish Damkroger from Intel.

Microway Shipping Intel Cascade Lake Systems in Volume

Today Microway announced that the company is now shipping 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors in volume, including next-generation NumberSmasher clusters, servers, and WhisperStations. “This new family of processors boosts performance for Microway custom deployments with increased CPU core counts, higher memory capacity and bandwidth, improved clock speeds, and innovative new features for HPC, AI, and Deep Learning. A Microway analysis finds that, without exception, 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs are expected to outperform their predecessors.”

NVIDIA EGX Accelerates AI on TYAN Edge Server

Today TYAN announced that it is teaming with NVIDIA to integrate the NVIDIA EGX platform with its Thunder SX TN76-B7102 edge server, completing TYAN’s GPU server product line. “NVIDIA EGX provides the missing link for low-latency AI computing at the edge with an advanced, light-compute platform, reducing the amount of data that needs to be pushed to the cloud.”

The Pending Age of Exascale

In this special guest feature from Scientific Computing World, Robert Roe looks at advances in exascale computing and the impact of AI on HPC development. “There is a lot of co-development, AI and HPC are not mutually exclusive. They both need high-speed interconnects and very fast storage. It just so happens that AI functions better on GPUs. HPC has GPUs in abundance, so they mix very well.”

Intel Xeon Scalable Processors Set Deep Learning Performance Record on ResNet-50

Today Intel announced a deep learning performance record on image classification workloads. “Today, we have achieved leadership performance of 7878 images per second on ResNet-50 with our latest generation of Intel Xeon Scalable processors, outperforming 7844 images per second on Nvidia Tesla V100, the best GPU performance as published by Nvidia on its website including T4.”

Speed Machine Learning with the Model Zoo for Intel Architecture

Intel has launched a Model Zoo for Intel Architecture, an open-sourced collection of optimized machine learning inference applications that demonstrates how to get the best performance on Intel platforms. The project contains more than 20 pre-trained models, benchmarking scripts, best practice documents, and step-by-step tutorials for running deep learning (DL) models optimized for Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

Video: Intel HPC Platform and Memory Technologies

Dr. Jean-Laurent Philippe from Intel gave this talk at the Swiss HPC Conference. “Intel continues to deliver performance leadership with the introduction of the 56-core, 12 memory channel Intel Xeon Platinum 9200. This processor is designed to deliver leadership socket-level performance and unprecedented DDR memory bandwidth in a wide variety of HPC workloads, AI applications, and high-density infrastructure”

Supermicro Shipping new Scale-Up In-Memory Computing Platforms with Intel Xeon Scalable processors

Today Supermicro announced that its new 4-socket servers featuring 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors and Intel Optane DC persistent memory are now shipping in volume. “Using 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors and Intel Optane DC persistent memory, these servers deliver tremendous performance boost for in-memory computing all at a dramatically lower cost compared to the previous generation architectures.”

Penguin Computing steps up with 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors

Today Penguin Computing announced that the company’s Relion family of Linux-based servers is now available with the latest generation of Intel Xeon Scalable processors including both the processor formerly codenamed Cascade Lake-SP as well as the Walker Pass-based Cascade Lake-AP technology. This enhancement will enable Penguin Computing to improve performance for data center, HPC, and AI customers while also delivering the flexibility, density, and scalability of the Relion server design.