Today NERSC announced plans for Perlmutter, a pre-exascale system to be installed in 2020. With thousands of NVIDIA Tesla GPUs, the system is expected to deliver three times the computational power currently available on the Cori supercomputer at NERSC. “Optimized for science, the supercomputer will support NERSC’s community of more than 7,000 researchers. These scientists rely on high performance computing to build AI models, run complex simulations and perform data analytics. GPUs can speed up all three of these tasks.”
Video: Tackling Energy Storage Challenges at America’s National Labs
September 23, 2018 by
In this video, researchers use NERSC supercomputers to discover new battery materials. “The DOE’s InnovationXLab Energy Storage Summit took place September 18-19, 2018 at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Silicon Valley. Energy storage is one of the biggest challenges to unlocking the potential from the next generation of transportation and electricity grid technologies. The Summit will showcase the broad array of technical resources available from across DOE’s National Lab complex that can be leveraged by industry to address these challenges.”
Job of the Week: HPC Architecture and Performance Engineer at LBNL
August 11, 2018 by
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab is seeking an HPC Architecture and Performance Engineer in our Job of the Week. “Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) has an opening for a Computer Systems Engineer 3. The incumbent will contribute to an on-going Advanced Technology Group (ATG) group effort to develop a complete understanding of the issues that lead to improved application and computer system performance on extreme-scale advanced architectures. As a team member, they will contribute to efforts for NERSC in evaluating existing and emerging High Performance Computing (HPC) systems by analyzing the performance characteristics of leading-edge DOE Office of Science application codes.”
Podcast: Deep Learning for Scientific Data Analysis
July 15, 2018 by
In this NERSC News Podcast, Debbie Bard from NERSC describes how Deep Learning can help scientists accelerate their research. “Deep learning is enjoying unprecedented success in a variety of commercial applications, but it is also beginning to find its footing in science. Just a decade ago, few practitioners could have predicted that deep learning-powered systems would surpass human-level performance in computer vision and speech recognition tasks.”
Extreme Scale Deep Learning at NERSC
July 15, 2018 by
Thorsten Kurth from LBNL gave this talk at the PASC18 conference. “We present various studies on very large scale distributed deep learning on HPC systems including the ~10k node Intel Xeon-Phi-based Cori system at NERSC. We explore CNN classification architectures and generative adversarial networks for HEP problems using large images corresponding to full LHC detectors and high-resolution cosmology convergence maps.”
The Galactos Project: Using HPC To Run One of Cosmology’s Hardest Challenges
May 19, 2018 by
Debbie Bard from NERSC gave this talk at the HPC User Forum. “We present Galactos, a high performance implementation of a novel, O(N^2 ) algorithm that uses a load-balanced k-d tree and spherical harmonic expansions to compute the anisotropic 3PCF. Our implementation is optimized for the Intel Xeon Phi architecture, exploiting SIMD parallelism, instruction and thread concurrency, and signicant L1 and L2 cache reuse, reaching 39% of peak performance on a single node. Galactos scales to the full Cori system, achieving 9.8 PF (peak) and 5.06 PF (sustained) across 9636 nodes, making the 3PCF easily computable for all galaxies in the observable universe.”
Deep Learning at Scale for Cosmology Research
May 12, 2018 by
In this video from Google I/O 2018, Debbie Bard from NERSC describes Deep Learning at scale for cosmology research. “Debbie Bard is acting group lead for the Data Science Engagement Group at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Berkeley National Lab. A native of the UK, her career spans research in particle physics, cosmology and computing on both sides of the Atlantic.”
Video: Addressing Key Science Challenges with Adversarial Neural Networks
April 18, 2018 by
Wahid Bhimji from NERSC gave this talk at the 2018 HPC User Forum in Tucson. “Machine Learning and Deep Learning are increasingly used to analyze scientific data, in fields as diverse as neuroscience, climate science and particle physics. In this page you will find links to examples of scientific use cases using deep learning at NERSC, information about what deep learning packages are available at NERSC, and details of how to scale up your deep learning code on Cori to take advantage of the compute power available from Cori’s KNL nodes.”
Reconstructing Nuclear Physics Experiments with Supercomputers
February 9, 2018 by
For the first time, scientists have used HPC to reconstruct the data collected by a nuclear physics experiment—an advance that could dramatically reduce the time it takes to make detailed data available for scientific discoveries. “By running multiple computing jobs simultaneously on the allotted supercomputing cores, the team transformed 4.73 petabytes of raw data into 2.45 petabytes of “physics-ready” data in a fraction of the time it would have taken using in-house high-throughput computing resources, even with a two-way transcontinental data journey.”
Hayward Fault Earthquake Simulations Increase Fidelity of Ground Motions
February 8, 2018 by
Researchers at LLNL are using supercomputers to simulate the onset of earthquakes in California. “This study shows that powerful supercomputing can be used to calculate earthquake shaking on a large, regional scale with more realism than we’ve ever been able to produce before,” said Artie Rodgers, LLNL seismologist and lead author of the paper.”
