Code Archives - The Next Platform

The Biggest Shift in Supercomputing Since GPU Acceleration

June 22, 2017 Nicole Hemsoth

For years, the pace of change in large-scale supercomputing neatly tracked with the curve of Moore’s Law. As that swell flattens, and as the competitive pressure ticks up to build productive exascale supercomputers in the next few years, HPC has been scrambling to find the silver bullet architecture to reach sustained exascale performance. And as it turns out, there isn’t one.

But there is something else—something few saw coming three years ago, has less to do with hardware than it does a shift in how we approach massive-scale simulations, and is happening so fast that too-far-ahead-of-time procurements are …
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Python Coils Around FPGAs for Broader Accelerator Reach

June 5, 2017 Nicole Hemsoth

Over the last couple of years, much work has been shifted into making FPGAs more usable and accessible. From building around OpenCL for a higher-level interface to having reconfigurable devices available on AWS, there is momentum—but FPGAs are still far from the grip of everyday scientific and technical application developers.

In an effort to bridge the gap between FPGA acceleration and everyday domain scientists who are well-versed in using the common scripting language, a team from the University of Southern California has created a new platform for Python-based development that abstracts the complexity of using low-level approaches (HDL, Verilog). “Rather …
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HPC Center NERSC Eases Path to Optimization at Scale

May 25, 2017 Rob Farber

The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) application performance team knows that for many users, “optimization is hard.” They’ve thought a lot about how to distill the application optimization process for users in a way that would resonate with them.

One of the analogies they use is the “Ant Farm.” Optimizing code is like continually “running a lawnmower over a lawn to find and cut-down the next tallest blade of grass,” where the blade of grass is analogous to a code bottleneck that consumes the greatest amount of runtime. One of the challenges is that each bottleneck …
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A Health Check For Code And Infrastructure In The Cloud

May 24, 2017 Jeffrey Burt

As businesses continue their migration to the cloud, the issue of monitoring the performance and health of their applications gets more challenging as they try to track them across both on-premises environments and in both private and public clouds. At the same time, as they become more cloud-based, they have to keep an eye on the entire stack, from the customer-facing applications to the underlying infrastructure they run on.

Since its founding eight years ago, New Relic has steadily built upon its first product, a cloud-based application performance management (APM) tool that is designed to assess how well the …
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One Programming Model To Support Them All

May 24, 2017 Danny Bradbury

Many hands make light work, or so they say. So do many cores, many threads and many data points when addressed by a single computing instruction. Parallel programming – writing code that breaks down computing problems into small parts that run in unison – has always been a challenge. Since 2011, OpenACC has been gradually making it easier. OpenACC is a de facto standard set of parallel extensions to Fortran, C and C++ designed to enable portable parallel programming across a variety of computing platforms.

Compilers, which are used to translate higher-level programming languages into binary executables, first appeared in …
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OpenMP: From Parallel Loops To Exaflops

May 3, 2017 Rob Farber

This fall will mark twenty years since the publication of the v1.0 specification of OpenMP Fortran. From early loop parallelism to a heterogeneous, exascale future, OpenMP has apparently weathered well the vicissitudes and tumultuous changes of the computer industry over that past two decades and appears to be positioned to address the needs of our exascale future.

In the 1990s when the OpenMP specification was first created, memory was faster than the processors that performed the computation. This is the exact opposite of today’s systems where memory is the key bottleneck and the HPC community is rapidly adopting faster memory …
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Red Hat Gears Up OpenShift For Developers

May 2, 2017 Jeffrey Burt

During the five years that Red Hat has been building out its OpenShift cloud applications platform, much of the focus has been on making it easier to use by customers looking to adapt to an increasingly cloud-centric world for both new and legacy applications. Just as it did with the Linux operating system through Red Hat Enterprise Linux and related middleware and tools, the vendor has worked to make it easier for enterprises to embrace OpenShift.

That has included a major reworking of the platform with the release of version 3.0 last year, which ditched Red Hat’s in-house technologies for …
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The Next Battleground for Deep Learning Performance

April 28, 2017 Nicole Hemsoth

The frameworks are in place, the hardware infrastructure is robust, but what has been keeping machine learning performance at bay has far less to do with the system-level capabilities and more to do with intense model optimization.

While it might not be the sexy story that generates the unending wave of headlines around deep learning, hyperparameter tuning is a big barrier when it comes to new leaps in deep learning performance. In more traditional machine learning, there are plenty of open sources tools for this, but where it is needed most is in deep learning—an area that does appear to …
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KAUST Hackathon Shows OpenACC Global Appeal

March 23, 2017 Rob Farber

OpenACC’s global attraction can be seen in the recent February 2017 OpenACC mini-hackathon and GPU conference at KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science & Technology) in Saudi Arabia. OpenACC was created so programmers can insert pragmas to provide information to the compiler about parallelization opportunities and data movement operations to and from accelerators. Programmers use pragmas to work in concert with the compiler to create, tune and optimize parallel codes to achieve high performance.

Demand was so high to attend this mini-hackathon that the organizers had to scramble to find space for ten teams, even though the hackathon was originally …
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ARM Antes Up For An HPC Software Stack

March 15, 2017 Darren Cepulis

The HPC community is trying to solve the critical compute challenges of next generation high performance computing and ARM considers itself well-positioned to act as a catalyst in this regard. Applications like machine learning and scientific computing are driving demands for orders of magnitude improvements in capacity, capability and efficiency to achieve exascale computing for next generation deployments.

ARM has been taking a co-design approach with the ecosystem from silicon to system design to application development to provide innovative solutions that address this challenge. The recent Allinea acquisition is one example of ARM’s commitment to HPC, but ARM has worked …
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