• An Exascale Timeline for Storage and I/O Systems

  August 16, 2017 Nicole Hemsoth

  

  The more things change, the more they stay the same.

  While exascale supercomputers mark a next step in performance capability, at the broader architectural level, the innovations that go into such machines will be the result of incremental improvements to the same components that have existed on HPC systems for several years.

  In large-scale supercomputing, many performance trends have jacked up capability and capacity—but the bottlenecks have not changed since the dawn of computing as we know it. Memory latency and memory bandwidth remain the gating factors to how fast, efficiently, and reliably big sites can run—and there is still …

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• Performance Portability on the Road to Exascale

  August 14, 2017 Nicole Hemsoth

  

  The software ecosystem in high performance computing is set to be more complex with the leaps in capability coming with next generation exascale systems. Among several challenges is making sure that applications retain their performance as they scale to higher core counts and accelerator-rich systems.

  Software development and performance profiling company, Allinea, which has been around for almost two decades in HPC, was recently acquired by ARM to add to the company’s software ecosystem story. We talked with one of the early employees of Allinea, VP of Product Development, Mark O’Connor about what has come before—and what the software performance …

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• Nvidia Is A Textbook Case Of Sowing And Reaping Markets

  August 11, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  In a properly working capitalist economy, innovative companies make big bets, help create new markets, vanquish competition or at least hold it at bay, and profit from all of the hard work, cleverness, luck, and deal making that comes with supplying a good or service to demanding customers.

  There is no question that Nvidia has become a textbook example of this as it helped create and is now benefitting from the wave of accelerated computing that is crashing into the datacenters of the world. The company is on a roll, and is on the very laser-sharp cutting edge of its …

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• One Small Step Toward Supercomputers in Space

  August 11, 2017 Nicole Hemsoth

  

  While it is not likely we will see large supercomputers on the International Space Station (ISS) anytime soon, HPE is getting a head start on providing more advanced on-board computing capabilities via a pair of its aptly-named “Apollo” water-cooled servers in orbit.

  The two-socket machines, connected with Infiniband will put Broadwell computing capabilities on the ISS, mostly running benchmarks, including High Performance Linpack (HPL), the metric that determines the Top 500 supercomputer rankings. These tests, in addition to the more data movement-centric HPCG benchmark and NASA’s own NAS parallel benchmark will determine what performance changes, if any, are to be …

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• A Look Inside U.S. Nuclear Security’s Commodity Technology Systems

  August 10, 2017 Ken Strandberg

  

  In the following interview, Dr. Matt Leininger, Deputy for Advanced Technology Projects at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), one of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Tri Labs describes how scientists at the Tri Labs—LLNL, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), and Sandia National Laboratories (SNL)—carry out the work of certifying America’s nuclear stockpile through computational science and focused above-ground experiments.

  We spoke with Dr. Leininger about some of the workflow that Tri Labs scientists follow, how the Commodity Technology Systems clusters are used in their research, and how machine learning is helping them.

  The overall goal is to demonstrate a …

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• The Shape Of AMD HPC And AI Iron To Come

  August 8, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  In the IT business, just like any other business, you have to try to sell what is on the truck, not what is planned to be coming out of the factories in the coming months and years. AMD has put a very good X86 server processor into the market for the first time in nine years, and it also has a matching GPU that gives its OEM and ODM partners a credible alternative for HPC and AI workload to the combination of Intel Xeons and Nvidia Teslas that dominate hybrid computing these days.

  There are some pretty important caveats to …

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• A MapReduce Accelerator to Tackle Molecular Dynamics

  August 8, 2017 Nicole Hemsoth

  

  Novel architectures are born out of necessity and for some applications, including molecular dynamics, there have been endless attempts to push parallel performance.

  In this area, there are already numerous approaches to acceleration. At the highest end is the custom ASIC-driven Anton machine from D.E. Shaw, which is the fastest system, but certainly not the cheapest. On the more accessible accelerators side are Tesla GPUs for accelerating highly parallel parts of the workload—and increasingly, FPGAs are being considered for boosting the performance of major molecular dynamics applications, most notably GROMACS as well as general purpose, high-end CPUs (Knights Landing …

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• Accelerating Deep Learning Insights With GPU-Based Systems

  August 3, 2017 Bill Mannel

  

  Explosive data growth and a rising demand for real-time analytics are making high performance computing (HPC) technologies increasingly vital to success. Organizations across all industries are seeking the next generation of IT solutions to facilitate scientific research, enhance national security, ensure economic stability, and empower innovation to face the challenges of today and tomorrow.

  HPC solutions are key to quickly answering some of the world’s most daunting questions. From Tesla’s self-driving car to quantum computing, artificial intelligence (AI) is enabling unparalleled compute capabilities and outmatching humans at many cognitive tasks. Deep learning, an advanced AI technique, is growing in popularity …

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• The Supercomputing Slump Hits HPC

  July 28, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  Supercomputing, by definition, is an esoteric, exotic, and relatively small slice of the overall IT landscape, but it is, also by definition, a vital driver of innovation within IT and in all of the segments of the market where simulation, modeling, and now machine learning are used to provide goods and services.

  As we have pointed out many times, the supercomputing business is not, however, one that is easy to participate in and generate a regular stream of revenues and predictable profits and it is most certainly one where the vendors and their customers have to, by necessity, take the …

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• Texas Advanced Supercomputing Center Taps Latest HPC Tech

  July 25, 2017 Rob Johnson

  

  Building on the successes of the Stampede1 supercomputer, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) has rolled out its next-generation HPC system, Stampede2. Over the course of 2017, Stampede2 will undergo further optimization phases with the support of a $30 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). With the latest Xeon and Skylake processors, and enhanced networking provided by the Omni-Path architecture, the new flagship system is expected to deliver approximately 18 petaflops, nearly doubling Stampede1’s performance.

  Stampede2 continues Stampede1’s mission: enabling thousands of scientists and researchers across the United States to deliver breakthrough scientific discoveries in science, engineering, artificial …

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