Converging Workflows Pushing Converged Software onto HPC Platforms

Are we witnessing the convergence of HPC, big data analytics, and AI? Once, these were separate domains, each with its own system architecture and software stack, but the data deluge is driving their convergence. Traditional big science HPC is looking more like big data analytics and AI, while analytics and AI are taking on the flavor of HPC.

Scalable and Distributed DNN Training on Modern HPC Systems

DK Panda from Ohio State University gave this talk at the Swiss HPC Conference. “We will provide an overview of interesting trends in DNN design and how cutting-edge hardware architectures are playing a key role in moving the field forward. We will also present an overview of different DNN architectures and DL frameworks. Most DL frameworks started with a single-node/single-GPU design.”

Call for Papers: EuroMPI Conference in Zurich

The EuroMPI conference has issued its Call for Papers. The event takes place September 10-13 in Zurich, Switzerland. “The EuroMPI conference is since 1994 the preeminent meeting for users, developers and researchers to interact and discuss new developments and applications of message-passing parallel computing, in particular in and related to the Message Passing Interface (MPI). This includes parallel programming interfaces, libraries and langauges, architectures, networks, algorithms, tools, applications, and High Performance Computing with particular focus on quality, portability, performance and scalability.”

How Mellanox SHARP technology speeds Ai workloads

Mellanox Scalable Hierarchical Aggregation and Reduction Protocol (SHARP) technology improves upon the performance of MPI operations by offloading collective operations from the CPU to the switch network, and by eliminating the need to send data multiple times between endpoints. This innovative approach decreases the amount of data traversing the network as aggregation nodes are reached, and dramatically reduces the MPI operations time. Implementing collective communication algorithms in the network also has additional benefits, such as freeing up valuable CPU resources for computation rather than using them to process communication.”

Interview: The Importance of the Message Passing Interface to Supercomputing

In this video, Mike Bernhardt from the Exascale Computing Project catches up with ORNL’s David Bernholdt at SC18. They discuss supercomputing the conference, his career, the evolution and significance of message passing interface (MPI) in parallel computing, and how ECP has influenced his team’s efforts.

Podcast: Evolving MPI for Exascale Applications

In this episode of Let’s Talk Exascale, Pavan Balaji and Ken Raffenetti describe their efforts to help MPI, the de facto programming model for parallel computing, run as efficiently as possible on exascale systems. “We need to look at a lot of key technical challenges, like performance and scalability, when we go up to this scale of machines. Performance is one of the biggest things that people look at. Aspects with respect to heterogeneity become important.”

Amazon and Libfabric: A case study in flexible HPC Infrastructure

Brian Barrett from Amazon gave this talk at the 2018 OpenFabrics Workshop. “As network performance becomes a larger bottleneck in application performance, AWS is investing in improving HPC network performance. Our initial investment focused on improving performance in open source MPI implementations, with positive results. Recently, however, we have pivoted to focusing on using libfabric to improve point to point performance.”

Podcast: Open MPI for Exascale

In this Let’s Talk Exascale podcast, David Bernholdt from ORNL discusses the Open MPI for Exascale project, which is focusing on the communication infrastructure of MPI, or message-passing interface, an extremely widely used standard for interprocessor communications for parallel computing. “It’s possible that even though applications may make millions or billions of short calls to the MPI library during the course of an execution, performance improvements can have a significant overall impact on the application runtime.”

Sylabs Startup forms Commercial Entity behind Singularity for HPC

Today an HPC Startup called Sylabs entered the market to provide solutions and services based on Singularity, an open source container technology designed for high performance computing. Founded by the inventor and project lead for Singularity, Sylabs will license and support Singularity Pro, an enterprise version of the software, and introduce it to businesses in the enterprise and HPC commercial markets.

Video: How MVAPICH & MPI Power Scientific Research

Adam Moody from LLNL presented this talk at the MVAPICH User Group. “High-performance computing is being applied to solve the world’s most daunting problems, including researching climate change, studying fusion physics, and curing cancer. MPI is a key component in this work, and as such, the MVAPICH team plays a critical role in these efforts. In this talk, I will discuss recent science that MVAPICH has enabled and describe future research that is planned. I will detail how the MVAPICH team has responded to address past problems and list the requirements that future work will demand.”