Radio HPC: The Rich Report

A look back at the 2019 Exascale Computing Project Annual Meeting

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Mon, 4 Feb 2019 09:32:00 -0800

In this podcast, Doug Kothe from the Exascale Computing Project describes the 2019 ECP Annual Meeting. "The 2019 Exascale Computing Project (ECP) Annual Meeting will convene to highlight technical accomplishments that are being enabled by interactions and collaborations within the ECP community, which encompasses the ECP focus areas, U.S. Department of Energy high-performance computing facilities, and vendors. Networking opportunities will be emphasized and project participants asked to explore ways to leverage and share requirements with other ECP efforts. Key topics to be covered at the meeting are discussions of future systems, software stack plans, and interactions with facilities. Several parallel sessions are also planned throughout the meeting.'

Podcast: TensorFlow for HPC?

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Mon, 4 Feb 2019 09:31:00 -0800

In this podcast, Peter Braam looks at how TensorFlow framework could be used to accelerate high performance computing. "Google has developed TensorFlow, a truly complete platform for ML. The performance of the platform is amazing, and it begs the question if it will be useful for HPC in a similar manner that GPU’s heralded a revolution."

Novel Therm: Geothermal HPC

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Mon, 28 Jan 2019 08:29:00 -0800

In this slidecast, Greg Stewart from Novel Therm describes how the company provides HPC As a Service using geothermal energy. As a wholesale provider of Geothermal HPC Data Centers, Novel Therm is a truly renewable energy source option for your HPC data center.

Building an HPC data center? You've come to the right place. Tell us what you need and we will create a fixed price, wholesale, green energy solution for your data center needs. We will save you money and time while saving the planet. Low Impact Geothermal Energy Is At The Core Of What We Do. Providing The Lowest Cost Solution For HPC Is What We Do Best."

Watch the video: https://wp.me/p3RLHQ-jL7

Learn more: http://noveltherm.com/

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AI and the Virtuous Cycle of Compute

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Tue, 2 Jan 2018 07:36:00 -0800

In this Rich Report podcast, Pradeep Dubey discusses AI & The Virtuous Cycle of Compute.

Traditionally, there has been a division of labor between computers and humans where all forms of number crunching and bit manipulation are left to computers, whereas intelligent decision-making is left to us humans. We are now at the cusp of a major transformation that can disrupt this balance. This disruption is triggered by an unprecedented convergence of massive compute with massive data, and some recent algorithmic advances. This confluence has the potential to spur a virtuous cycle of compute.

Deep Learning was recently scaled to obtain 15PF performance on the Cori supercomputer at NERSC. Cori Phase II features over 9600 KNL processors. It can significantly impact how we do computing and what computing can do for us. In this talk, I will discuss some of the application-level opportunities and system-level challenges that lie at the heart of this intersection of traditional high performance computing with emerging data-intensive computing.

Dr. Pradeep Dubey is an Intel Fellow and Director of Parallel Computing Lab (PCL), part of Intel Labs. His research focus is computer architectures to efficiently handle new compute- and data-intensive application paradigms for the future computing environment. He previously worked at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center, and Broadcom Corporation. He has made contributions to the design, architecture, and application-performance of various microprocessors, including IBM Power PC, Intel i386, i486, Pentium Xeon, and the Xeon Phi line of processors. He holds over 36 patents, has published more than 100 technical papers, won the Intel Achievement Award in 2012 for Breakthrough Parallel Computing Research, and was honored with Purdue University’s 2014 Outstanding Electrical and Computer Engineer Award. Dr. Dubey received a PhD in electrical engineering from Purdue University. He is a Fellow of IEEE.

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Twelve Days of Christmas Rants from Dan Olds

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Sun, 24 Dec 2017 10:22:00 -0800

In this podcast, Dan Olds from Radio Free HPC offers up his rant-filled rendition of the 12 Days of Christmas. "To all of our listeners, we wish you a very happy Holiday Season!"

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Goodbye Net Neutrality

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Mon, 18 Dec 2017 08:14:00 -0800

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the FCC's move to abolish Net Neutrality regulations put in place during the Obama administration. Dan thinks this is a good move to remove unnecessary regulations, but rest of the crew is worried about where this will lead the future of the Internet.

Net neutrality is the principle that Internet service providers must treat all data on the Internet the same, and not discriminate or charge differently by user, content, website, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or method of communication. For instance, under these principles, internet service providers are unable to intentionally block, slow down or charge money for specific websites and online content.

After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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Podcast: The New Ellexus Container Checker

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Thu, 14 Dec 2017 08:01:00 -0800

In this podcast, Dr. Rosemary Francis describes the new Ellexus Container Checker, a pioneering cloud-based tool that provides visibility into the inner workings of Docker containers.

Container Checker will help people using cloud platforms to quickly detect problems within their containers before they are let loose on the cloud to potentially waste time and compute spend. Estimates suggest that up to 45% of cloud spend is wasted due in part to unknown application activity and unsuitable storage decisions, which is what we want to help businesses tackle.”

Container Checker is the first tool aimed directly at the cloud market from Ellexus, the I/O profiling company. The software provider has seven years’ experience in providing dependency analysis and performance tools in big-compute environments. Ellexus Container Checker brings this expertise to a much wider audience and will enable organizations of all sizes in many sectors to scale rapidly.

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Infinite Memory Engine: HPC in the FLASH Era

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Tue, 26 Sep 2017 14:20:00 -0700

In this RichReport slidecast, James Coomer from DDN presents: "DDN’s Infinite Memory Engine (IME) is a scale-out, flash-native, software-defined, storage cache that streamlines the data path for application IO. IME interfaces directly to applications and secures IO via a data path that eliminates file system bottlenecks. With IME, architects can realize true flash-cache economics with a storage architecture that separates capacity from performance." James Coomer’s career has been spent entirely in High Performance Computing. James began with a PhD in Theoretical Physics working on the fastest machines in Europe performing large scale atomic simulations. Subsequently James has occupied the breadth of technical roles in HPC including back line support, installation, consultancy, training, and latterly pre-sales and design in organisations including Sun Microsystems, Streamline Computing and Dell. James enjoys daily direct contact with customers across all sectors in HPC and presents widely on HPC topics. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * Subscribe to RSS Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter

A Closer Look at the 95 Petaflop Tianhe-2A Supercomputer

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Mon, 25 Sep 2017 12:46:00 -0700

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at China's massive upgrade of the Tianhe-2A supercomputer to 95 Petaflops peak performance. As detailed in a new 21-page report by Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee, the upgrade should nearly double the performance of the system, which is currently ranked at #2 on TOP500 with 33.86 Petaflops on the Linpack benchmark.

The upgraded system, dubbed Tianhe -2A, should be completed in the coming months. Details about the system upgrade were presented at the conference opening session. While the current system derives much of its performance from Intel Knights Corner co-processors, the new system swaps these PCI devices out for custom-made 4-way MATRIX-2000 boards, with each chip providing 2.46 Teraflops of peak performance.

After that, we do our Catch of the Week:
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A Look at Optalysis Optical Processing

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Thu, 21 Sep 2017 08:38:00 -0700

In this RichReport slidecast, Dr. Nick New from Optalysis describes how the company's optical processing technology delivers accelerated performance for FFTs and Bioinformatics.

Our prototype is on track to achieve game-changing improvements to process times over current methods whilst providing high levels of accuracy that are associated with the best software processes.”

Earlier this week, the company raised $3.95 million U.S. dollars from angel investors. Optalysys will use the funds to manufacture the first commercially available high-performance computing processor based on its patented optical processing technology.

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How Volta GPUs will Power Next-Gen HPC and AI

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Fri, 12 May 2017 08:59:00 -0700

In this podcast, Marc Hamilton from Nvidia describes how the new Volta GPUs will power the next generation of systems for HPC and AI. Download the MP3

ASC17 Student Cluster Competition Results

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Mon, 8 May 2017 08:57:00 -0700

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team reviews the results from the ASC17 Student Cluster Competition finals in Wuxi, China. In the end, Tsinghua University won the overall competition, beating 20 teams from around the world.

"As the world's largest supercomputing competition, ASC17 received applications from 230 universities around the world, 20 of which got through to the final round held this week at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi after the qualifying rounds. During the final round, the university student teams were required to independently design a supercomputing system under the precondition of a limited 3000W power consumption. They also had to operate and optimize standard international benchmark tests and a variety of cutting-edge scientific and engineering applications including AI-based transport prediction, genetic assembly, and material science. Moreover, they were required to complete high-resolution maritime simulation on the world's fastest supercomputer, Sunway TaihuLight.

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Bull eXascale Interconnect (BXI)

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Fri, 5 May 2017 12:57:00 -0700

In this podcast, Jean-Pierre Panziera from Atos presents: BXI - Bull eXascale Interconnect.

"Exascale entails an explosion of performance, of the number of nodes/cores, of data volume and data movement. At such a scale, optimizing the network that is the backbone of the system becomes a major contributor to global performance. The interconnect is going to be a key enabling technology for exascale systems. This is why one of the cornerstones of Bull’s exascale program is the development of our own new-generation interconnect. The Bull eXascale Interconnect or BXI introduces a paradigm shift in terms of performance, scalability, efficiency, reliability and quality of service for extreme workloads."

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It's Time to ROCm!

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Thu, 15 Sep 2016 08:39:00 -0700

In this podcast, Senior AMD Fellow Ben Sander presents: It's Time to ROCm!

AMD has been away from the HPC space for a while, but now they are coming back in a big way with an open software approach to GPU computing. The Radeon Open Compute Platform (ROCm) was born from the Boltzmann Initiative announced last year at SC15. Now available on GitHub, the ROCm Platform bringing a rich foundation to advanced computing by better integrating the CPU and GPU to solve real-world problems.

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Micron’s Steve Pawlowski on the Latest Memory Trends for HPC

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Tue, 12 Jul 2016 10:56:00 -0700

In this podcast from ISC 2016 in Frankfurt, Steve Pawlowski from Micron discusses the latest memory technology trends for high performance computing.

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Introducing the New IBM Platform HPC Suites

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Thu, 28 Apr 2016 07:49:00 -0700

In this podcast, Gabor Samu from IBM describes the newly available IBM Platform LSF Suites for Workgroups and HPC. Designed to make it much easier to "kick the tires" on LSF, the new suites can help you configure install, maintain, and job manage HPC clusters with a single download. “The new IBM Platform LSF Suites are packages that include more than IBM Platform LSF, they provide additional functionalities designed to simplify HPC for users, administrators and the IT organization.” Watch the video presentation.

Interconnect Your Future with InfiniBand

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Mon, 18 Apr 2016 16:54:00 -0700

In this slidecast, Gilad Shainer from Mellanox describes the advantages of InfiniBand and the company's off-loading network architecture for HPC.

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Making MPI More Awesome with MPI Sessions

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Wed, 9 Mar 2016 10:34:00 -0800

In this podcast, Jeff Squyres from Cisco Systems presents: How to make MPI Awesome - MPI Sessions. As a proposal for future versions of the MPI Standard, MPI Sessions could become a powerful tool tool to improve system resiliency as we move towards exascale.

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Top 10 Ways Intel is Driving HPC Democratization

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Wed, 23 Dec 2015 16:39:00 -0800

In this podcast, James Reinders from Intel describes how Intel will continue to drive HPC democratization in 2016.

Seagate Beefs Up ClusterStor at SC15

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Mon, 7 Dec 2015 15:25:00 -0800

In this podcast from SC15, Larry Jones from Seagate provides an overview of the company’s revamped HPC storage product line, including a new 10,000 RPM ClusterStor hard disk drive tailor-made for the HPC market. Watch the video presentation.

Mellanox Announces Switch IB2 at SC15

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Mon, 7 Dec 2015 15:24:00 -0800

In this podcast, Gilad Shainer from Mellanox provides an overview of new products for the SC15 conference. Watch the video presentation.

New Micron Persistent Memory & NVDIMM

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Mon, 7 Dec 2015 15:22:00 -0800

In this podcast, Ryan Baxter from Micron describes the company’s new NVDIMM persistent memory products. Today Micron announced the production of 8GB DDR4 NVDIMM, the company’s first commercially available solution in the persistent memory category. Persistent memory delivers a unique balance of latency, bandwidth, capacity and cost, delivering ultra-fast DRAM-like access to critical data and allowing system designers to better manage overall costs. With persistent memory, system architects are no longer forced to sacrifice latency and bandwidth when accessing critical data that must be preserved. Watch the video presentation.

How to Buy a Supercomputer – Lessons Learned

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Mon, 7 Dec 2015 15:21:00 -0800

In this podcast, Andrew Jones from NAG discusses the lessons learned from over 40 supercomputing procurements. NAG has announced plans to launch an impartial HPC technology intelligence and analysis subscription service at SC15. “Developed in partnership with Red Oak Consulting, the NAG HPC Technology Intelligence Service will deliver technology insight and risk-reduction to help HPC buyers and users make better decisions and optimize their HPC investments.” Watch the video presentation.

Dell Workshop on Large Genomic Data sets Comes to La Jolla Sept. 15

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Sat, 12 Sep 2015 13:06:00 -0700

In this podcast, David Bump from Dell describes an upcoming Workshop on large genomic data sets coming to La Jolla, California on Sept. 15, 2015. The Workshop Title is: Enabling Discovery and Product Innovation with Dell HPC and Big Data Solutions.

Please join us for this one day workshop featuring presentations from Dell, Appistry, UNC Chapel Hill, Arizona State University, and TGen who all will share their cutting-edge results and best practices for helping labs process, manage, and analyze large genomic data sets. You will also hear from Intel and Nvidia on their latest HPC/Big Data technology innovations.

Dell is planning a series of these workshops, so be sure to reach out to your sales rep if you want to bring one of these informative events to your town. Register now * Download the MP3 * Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter

Broad Institute Maps Cancer Genes with Cycle Computing

overheardinpdx@gmail.com (Rich Brueckner) — Tue, 8 Sep 2015 07:10:00 -0700

In this podcast, Jason Stowe from Cycle Computing describes how the Broad Institute is mapping cancer genes with CycleCloud.

According to Stowe, Cycle Computing recently ran a 50,000+ core workload for the Broad Institute with low-cost Preemptible VMs on the Google Compute Engine, performing three decades of cancer research computations in a single afternoon.