• 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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• CPU, GPU Potential for Visualization and Irregular Code

  March 6, 2017 Sean Thielen

  

  Conventional wisdom says that choosing between a GPU versus CPU architecture for running scientific visualization workloads or irregular code is easy. GPUs have long been the go-to solution, although recent research shows how the status quo could be shifting.

  At SC 16 in Salt Lake City in a talk called CPUs versus GPUs, Dr. Aaron Knoll of the University of Utah, and Professor Hiroshi Nakashima of Kyoto University, presented comparisons of various CPU and GPU-based architectures running visualizations and irregular code. Notably, both researchers have found that Intel Xeon Phi processor-based systems show stand-out performance compared to GPUs for …

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• Inside Exxon’s Effort to Scale Homegrown Codes, Keep Architectural Pace

  February 21, 2017 Nicole Hemsoth

  

  Many oil and gas exploration shops have invested many years and many more millions of dollars into homegrown codes, which is critical internally (competitiveness, specialization, etc.) but leaves gaps in the ability to quickly exploit new architectures that could lead to better performance and efficiency.

  That tradeoff between architectural agility and continuing to scale a complex, in-house base of codes is one that many companies with HPC weigh—and as one might imagine, oil and gas giant, ExxonMobil is no different.

  The company came to light last week with news that it scaled one of its mission-critical simulation codes on the …

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• How Yahoo’s Internal Hadoop Cluster Does Double-Duty on Deep Learning

  February 16, 2017 Nicole Hemsoth

  

  Five years ago, many bleeding edge IT shops had either implemented a Hadoop cluster for production use or at least had a cluster set aside to explore the mysteries of MapReduce and the HDFS storage system.

  While it is not clear all these years later how many ultra-scale production Hadoop deployments there are in earnest (something we are analyzing for a later in-depth piece), those same shops are likely on top trying to exploit the next big thing in the datacenter—machine learning, or for the more intrepid, deep learning.

  For those that were able to get large-scale Hadoop clusters into …

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• Top Chinese Supercomputer Blazes Real-World Application Trail

  February 13, 2017 Jeffrey Burt

  

  China’s massive Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer sent ripples through the computing world last year when it debuted in the number-one spot on the Top500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers. Delivering 93,000 teraflops of performance – and a peak of more than 125,000 teraflops – the system is nearly three times faster than the second supercomputer on the list (the Tianhe-2, also a Chinese system) and dwarfs the Titan system Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a Cray-based machine that is the world’s third-fastest system, and the fastest in the United States.

  However, it wasn’t only the system’s performance that garnered a lot …

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• Riding The Coattails Of Google Kubernetes And AWS Lambda

  February 1, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  There are individuals and companies that create whole new technologies for their own consumption and that sometimes open source them for others to help steer their development and fix their bugs. And then there are still other companies that polish these tools, giving them some enterprise fit and finish, and thereby make it possible for others to deploy a particular technology without having to have PhDs, who are not available anyway, on staff.

  From the enterprise perspective, the Apache web server and related Tomcat application server needed its Big Blue, the Linux operating system needed its Red Hat, and the …

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