Radio Free HPC Recaps SC19

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks back the “State Fair for Nerds” that was SC19. “At this year’s conference, we not only learned the latest discoveries in our evolving field – but also celebrated the countless ways in which HPC is improving our lives … our communities … our world. So many people worked together to make SC19 possible – more than: 780 volunteers, 370 exhibitors, 1,150 presenters, and a record 13,950 attendees.”

HDR 200Gb/s InfiniBand Sees Major Growth on Latest TOP500 List

Today the InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) reported the latest TOP500 List results show that HDR 200Gb/s InfiniBand accelerates 31 percent of new InfiniBand-based systems on the List, including the fastest TOP500 supercomputer built this year. The results also highlight InfiniBand’s continued position in the top three supercomputers in the world and acceleration of six of the top 10 systems. Since the TOP500 List release in June 2019, InfiniBand’s presence has increased by 12 percent, now accelerating 141 supercomputers on the List.

GIGABYTE Steps up with a Broad Array of Server Offerings for AI & HPC

In this video from SC19, Peter Hanley from GIGABYTE describes how the company delivers a full range of server solutions for HPC, AI, and the Edge. “GIGABYTE is an industry leader in HPC, delivering systems with the highest GPU density combined with excellent cooling performance, power efficiency and superior networking flexibility. These systems can provide massive parallel computing capabilities to power your next AI breakthrough.”

Call for Sessions: OpenFabrics Alliance Workshop in March

The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) has published a Call for Sessions for its 16th annual OFA Workshop. “The OFA Workshop 2020 Call for Sessions encourages industry experts and thought leaders to help shape this year’s discussions by presenting or leading discussions on critical high-performance networking issues. Session proposals are being solicited in any area related to high performance networks and networking software, with a special emphasis on the topics for this year’s Workshop. In keeping with the Workshop’s emphasis on collaboration, proposals for Birds of a Feather sessions and panels are particularly encouraged.”

Designing Scalable HPC, Deep Learning, Big Data, and Cloud Middleware for Exascale Systems

DK Panda from Ohio State University gave this talk at the UK HPC Conference. “This talk will focus on challenges in designing HPC, Deep Learning, Big Data and HPC Cloud middleware for Exascale systems with millions of processors and accelerators. For the HPC domain, we will discuss about the challenges in designing runtime environments for MPI+X (PGAS – OpenSHMEM/UPC/CAF/UPC++, OpenMP, and CUDA) programming models by taking into account support for multi-core systems (Xeon, ARM and OpenPower), high-performance networks, and GPGPUs (including GPUDirect RDMA).”

Mellanox Accelerates NVMe/TCP and RoCE Fabrics to 200Gb/s

Today Mellanox announced acceleration of NVMe/TCP at speeds up to 200Gb/s. The entire portfolio of shipping ConnectX adapters supports NVMe-oF over both TCP and RoCE, and the newly-introduced ConnectX-6 Dx and BlueField-2 products also secure NVMe-oF connections over IPsec and TLS using hardware-accelerated encryption and decryption. These Mellanox solutions empower cloud, telco and enterprise data […]

Report: Mellanox ConnectX Ethernet NICs Outperforming Competition

Today Mellanox announced that laboratory tests by The Tolly Group prove its ConnectX 25GE Ethernet adapter significantly outperforms the Broadcom NetXtreme E series adapter in terms of performance, scalability and efficiency. “Our testing shows that with RoCE, storage traffic, and DPDK, the Mellanox NIC outperformed the Broadcom NIC in throughput and efficient CPU utilization. ConnectX-5 also used ‘Zero-Touch RoCE’ to deliver high throughput even with partial and no congestion control, two scenarios where Broadcom declined to be tested.”

IBTA Celebrates 20 Years of Growth and Industry Success

“This year, the IBTA is celebrating 20 years of growth and success in delivering these widely used and valued technologies to the high-performance networking industry. Over the past two decades, the IBTA has provided the industry with technical specifications and educational resources that have advanced a wide range of high-performance platforms. InfiniBand and RoCE interconnects are deployed in the world’s fastest supercomputers and continue to significantly impact future-facing applications such as Machine Learning and AI.”

Video: Mellanox Rolls Out SmartNICs

In this video, Mellanox CTO Michael Kagan talks about the next step for SmartNICs and the company’s newly released ConnectX-6 Dx product driven by its own silicon. “The BlueField-2 IPU integrates all the advanced capabilities of ConnectX-6 Dx with an array of powerful Arm processor cores, high performance memory interfaces, and flexible processing capabilities in a single System-on-Chip (SoC), supporting both Ethernet and InfiniBand connectivity up to 200Gb/s.”

Video: Lustre, RoCE, and MAN

Marek Magryś from Cyfronet gave this talk at the DDN User Group. “This talk will describe the architecture and implementation of high capacity Lustre file system for the need of a data intensive project. Storage is based on DDN ES7700 building block and uses RDMA over Converged Ethernet as network transport. What is unusual is that the storage system is located over 10 kilometers away from the supercomputer. Challenges, performance benchmarks and tuning will be the main topic of the presentation.”