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Articles by Rob Farber
How MCR Memory Can More Than Double HPC And AI Performance
Intel recently demonstrated a new type of DIMM memory technology called Multiplexer Combined Rank (MCR), also referred to as MRDIMMs, that provides up to 2.3X better performance for HPC workloads and up to a 2X better on AI inference workloads in comparison to 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors, based on internal Intel analysis.
AI Produces Data-driven OpenFOAM Speedup
Data-driven physics models are gaining traction in the Modeling and Simulation community because of their speed relative to conventional simulations (e.g., minutes rather than hours) and their ability to approximate highly complex and coupled physics phenomena.
AI-Accelerated Technology Investment Guidelines for HPC
When planning an AI or HPC investment, applications are where the rubber meets the road and ultimately determine the benefits of any hardware investment. In addition, anyone concerned about computational performance must now consider the ubiquity of hardware accelerators and the necessity of using them to realize high application performance.
Chiplets will revolutionize the HPC sector
Kurt Lender (Intel IO technology solution team strategist) summarizes the impact of chiplet technology by stating, “There is a reasonable expectation that HPC procurements over the next 10 years will leverage chiplet technology to better support their scientific workloads.” This expectation is reflected by other industry leaders, such as AMD’s Lisa Su (CEO, AMD) who answered “yes” when asked if she envisions HPC procurements over the next 10 years specifying custom chiplet designed...
DAOS Performance Expands Beyond Intel Optane and Into the Google Cloud
Distributed Asynchronous Object Storage (DAOS) continues to define high storage performance while transitioning into the cloud and beyond current Intel Optane storage technology devices. Google’s work on DAOS in the cloud, for example, helps users realize the benefits of HPC in the cloud. This includes the flexibility to create and tear down entire HPC clusters within minutes.
Fusion Plasma Simulation Software Couples Tokamak Core to Edge Physics
The development of a whole device model (WDM) for a fusion reactor is critical for the science of magnetically confined fusion plasmas.
ECP Brings a Host of Hardware-accelerated and GPU-friendly Optimizations to the MPICH Library
Message Passing Interface (MPI) has been the communications backbone for distributed high-performance computing (HPC) scientific applications since its introduction in the 1990s. MPI is still essential to scientific computing because modern HPC workloads are too demanding for any single computational node to handle alone. Instead, scientific applications are distributed across many computational nodes.
Open unified agnostic software environment in HPC and AI
Register Debate Welcome to the latest Register Debate in which writers discuss technology topics, and you the reader choose the winning argument. The format is simple: we propose a motion, the arguments for the motion will run this Monday and Wednesday, and the arguments against on Tuesday and Thursday. During the week you can cast your vote on which side you support using the poll embedded below, choosing whether you're in favour or against the motion.
How High Bandwidth Memory Will Break Performance Bottlenecks
Intel recently announced that High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) will be available on select “Sapphire Rapids” Xeon SP processors and will provide the CPU backbone for the “Aurora” exascale supercomputer to be sited at Argonne National Laboratory. Paired with Intel’s Xe HPC (codenamed “Ponte Vecchio”) compute GPUs running in a unified CPU/GPU memory environment, Aurora will deliver more than an exaflop/s of double-precision performance.
ECP: Modernizing Workflow Analysis to Assist in Supercomputer Procurements
It is well known in the high-performance computing (HPC) community that many (perhaps most) HPC workloads exhibit dynamic performance envelopes that can stress the memory, compute, network, and storage capabilities of modern supercomputers.
Verifying the Universe with Exascale Computers
The ExaSky project, one of the critical Earth and Space Science applications being solved by the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Exascale Computing Project (ECP), is preparing to use the nation’s forthcoming exascale supercomputers.
LLVM Holds the Keys to Exascale Computing
The recent proliferation of new hardware technologies has galvanized the high-performance computing (HPC) community and created the ability to deliver the nation’s forthcoming exascale-capable supercomputers and data centers. It has also made LLVM-based compiler technology the default gatekeeper to these new systems.
ECP Leads the Way to Cross-Platform Tested and Verified Compilers for HPC and Exascale Architectures
The Exascale Computing Project (ECP) is working to combine two key technologies, LLVM and continuous integration (CI), to ensure that current and future compilers are stable and performant on high-performance computing (HPC) and exascale computer systems. The proliferation of new machine architectures has made the continuous testing and verification of software (hence the “continuous” in CI) an essential part of US Department of Energy DOE supercomputing.
EQSIM: Exascale Computing Project Moves Needle on Earthquake Risk Assessment
As part of the US Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP), the Earthquake Simulation (EQSIM) application development team is creating a computational tool set and workflow for earthquake hazard and risk assessment that moves beyond the traditional empirically based techniques which are dependent on historical earthquake data.
Exascale Computing Project Presents TAU, a Profiler for Exascale
Programmers cannot blindly guess which sections of their code might bottleneck performance. This problem is worsened when codes run across the variety of hardware platforms supported by the Exascale Computing Project (ECP). A section of code that runs well on one system might be a bottleneck on another system.
BioTeam Leverages TACC Fat Nodes To Get Around I/O Bottlenecks
BioTeam, the famous HPC consulting practice, is using the quad-socket large memory nodes at the Texas Advanced Computing Center to speed alignment and HMM (Hidden Markov Model) inference workflows to find biological “synonyms” in biological databases like GenBank.
Visualization and FS Use Cases Show Value of Large Memory Fat Nodes on Frontera
Frontera, the world’s largest academic supercomputer housed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), is big both in terms of number of computational nodes and the capabilities of the large memory “fat” compute nodes. A couple of recent use cases demonstrate how academic researchers are using the quad-socket, 112-core, 2.1TB persistent memory to support Frontera’s large memory nodes to advance a wide variety of research topics including visualization and file systems.
Boosting Memory Capacity And Performance While Saving Megawatts
Antonio Peña, senior researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, and his team in Spain have demonstrated how – without code modification – large data centers can increase application performance while saving megawatts of power per day plus run 100X to 10,000X larger AI inference jobs that can handle encrypted data. “Our team is investigating how HPC applications and production computing environments can expand beyond the power and capacity limits of current DRAM technology,” says Peña.
The cornerstone is laid - NVIDIA acquires ARM
The rumors are true. NVIDIA just announced that it will acquire ARM for for $40 Billion. The cornerstone is laid. NVIDIA a strong contender to become the world’s premier technology company NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun “Jensen” Huang said during a media conference this evening (Sept. 13, 2020), that the view is to build the 10s of trillions to 100s of trillions of computers that will be needed in the future. The merger will “turn ARM into a world class data center CPU”.
Intel Speeds NAMD by 1.8x: Saves Xeon Processor Users Millions of Compute Hours
Potentially saving datacenters millions of CPU node hours, Intel and the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (UIUC) have collaborated to develop AVX-512 optimizations for the NAMD scalable molecular dynamics code. These optimizations will be incorporated into release 2.15 with patches available for earlier versions.
Farewell to a Familiar HPC Friend
Rich Brueckner was a friend and colleague who will be missed by the HPC community – myself included. He is a fallen comrade to those in media, and a recognized and influential voice to his audience. We all recognize that Rich raised the bar in reporting and life. His passing on May 18, 2020 means that we will no longer have the pleasure of stopping by to chat with Rich at various trade shows.
Cooling for Maximal High-bandwidth Processor Performance and a Bellwether Cluster Deployment
Heat and the impact of high processor memory bandwidth are key factors that must be considered when procuring a cluster that can realize the full potential of the latest generation of high memory bandwidth processors. System designers must address this dilemma as CPU vendors are now competing over memory bandwidth to achieve leadership application performance.
Python Delivers Big On Complex Unlabeled Data
A collaboration of researchers from the University of California Davis, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, and Intel are working together on the DisCo project to extract insight from complex unlabeled data. DisCo is short for the Discovery of Coherent Structures, and it discovers the inherent structures in unlabeled data, which, given the nature of high-dimensional data, requires innovative clustering methods and a powerful system like the Cori supercomputer at NERSC.
Using Bayesian Inference To Reverse Engineer Decades Of HPC
A collaboration including the University of Oxford, University of British Columbia, Intel, New York University, CERN, and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center is working to make it practical to incorporate of Bayesian inference into scientific simulators.
Urgent HPC Can Burst Affordably To The Cloud
One of the benefits of the public cloud is that it allows HPC centers to experiment and push the limits of scalability in a way they could never do if they had to requisition, budget, and install machinery on premises. For a fairly modest sum – at least compared to acquiring a large cluster – they can do their experiments and perhaps help us all make better economic decisions about when, where, and how we run HPC workloads.
CloudyCluster Helps Students Build Bright Futures in HPC
Looking for a future in HPC, some students literally taught themselves Python in a day while competing in the Cloud HPC Hackathon (also known as the Omnibond CloudyCluster competition) at Supercomputing 2019 in Denver, Colorado. This is, by itself, the very definition of motivation and shows the thirst students have for the technical knowledge they can use to gain internships and qualify for well-paying technology jobs.
CPU Vendors Compete Over Memory Bandwidth to Achieve Leadership in Real-World Application Performance
By Rob Farber Now is a great time to be procuring systems as vendors are finally addressing the memory bandwidth bottleneck. Succinctly, memory performance dominates the performance envelope of modern devices be they CPUs or GPUs. [i] It does not matter if the hardware is running HPC, AI, or High-Performance Data Analytic (HPC-AI-HPDA) applications, or if those applications are running locally or in the cloud.
Cloudy Supercomputers Join the HPC Petascale Club
Living in the future, as we do now, you no longer have to expend huge amounts of capital to build a petaflops-scale supercomputer. You can rent it on a public cloud and do the big job a lot faster – provided that the job can scale, of course.
Supercomputer Advances Material Science in South Korea
Once the celebrations are over and the world-class supercomputer is installed and operational, it becomes imperative to deliver on the promised value of such a significant computational asset.
Preparing for the Arrival of Aurora with CPU-based Interactive Visualization
In preparation for the arrival of Aurora, slated to be the first U.S. exascale supercomputer, Argonne National Laboratory is actively working to make techniques such as in situ and in transit visualization and analysis available to their user community plus the HPC community at large.
Transforming HPC Research with AI Approaches
Recognizing that the most important application of machine learning in HPC is to replace production numerical simulation models with machine learning approximations, one European organization is pushing these frontiers with innovative AI HPC research. SURFsara is part of SURF, the collaborative ICT organization for higher education and research in the Netherlands.
Researchers Use Blue Waters to Study Interactions Between Musculoskeletal Systems and Environments
Sept. 21, 2018 — Take a dead fish, tie it to a string, and put it in a tank of water. Then, slowly start moving the water through the tank, swirling it faster and faster. No, it’s not a mysterious rising from the dead. Instead, this “zombie” fish is due to the interaction between the fish’s body and the water as it flows around him. Very similar to how wind can pick up and make a flag on a flagpole move, water can create movement in a fish, regardless of whether it is alive.
Russian and American Scientists Achieve 50% Increase in Data Transmission Speed
As high-performance computing becomes increasingly data-intensive and the demand for shorter turnaround times grows, data transfer speed becomes an ever more important bottleneck. Now, in an article published in IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, researchers from Samsara University and the University of Missouri have announced the development of an algorithm that increases data transmission speeds in powerful data processing centers by up to one and half times.
IBM to Brand Rescale’s HPC-in-Cloud Platform
HPC (or big compute)-in-the-cloud platform provider Rescale has formalized the work it’s been doing in partnership with public cloud vendors by announcing its Powered by Rescale program – with IBM as its first named partner – essentially an OEM turnkey capability supporting access to HPC hardware, software and administration capabilities under the partner’s label.
Democratization of HPC Part1: Simulation Sheds Light on Building Dispute
This is the first of three articles demonstrating the growing acceptance of High Performance Computing especially in new user communities and application areas. Major reasons for this trend are the ongoing improvements in user-friendly simulation software, the continuous performance improvement of HPC servers, and the easy and affordable access to HPC resources in the cloud.
Summit Supercomputer is Already Making its Mark on Science
Summit, now the fastest supercomputer in the world, is quickly making its mark in science – five of the six finalists just announced for the prestigious 2018 Gordon Bell Prize used Summit in their work. That’s impressive given that Summit only began full operation in early summer.
Ampere Announces Availability of eMAG for Hyperscale Cloud Computing and Unveils Multi-Generation Roadmap
“We have made tremendous progress since our launch eight months ago, continuing to execute on our first and second generation products. More importantly, we are ahead of schedule on building out a robust, multi-product roadmap that meets the performance and features demanded by the cloud computing ecosystem,” said Renee James, chairman and CEO of Ampere.
Equus Compute Solutions Introduces the WHITEBOX OPEN R2660 Servers
Sept. 20, 2018 — Equus Compute Solutions announces the release of its WHITEBOX OPEN R2660 and R2660 NVME servers, part of the Equus portfolio of custom cost-optimized open-hardware server and storage platforms. Incorporating dual Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs and new open-hardware features, the R2660 servers are high-performance compute solutions for demanding applications such as content delivery, cloud services, business applications, and virtualization.
ANSYS 19.2 Delivers Faster Problem-Solving Capabilities Across the Entire Portfolio
PITTSBURGH, Sept. 18, 2018 — From innovative fluids meshing technology to improved workflows for safety analysis to an innovative system coupling engine, the newly released ANSYS 19.2 enables customers to solve their most difficult product development challenges faster than ever.
Czech Republic's ŠKODA Auto to Expand Datacenter to 15 PFlops
Sept. 20, 2018 — ŠKODA AUTO is expanding the data centre at its headquarters in Mladá Boleslav into the largest privately owned computing and data storage centre in the Czech Republic. Once the expansion is completed, the data centre will have a computing capacity of 15 petaFLOPS [Ed. note: precision not specified], which equates to 15 quadrillion computing operations per second. Thus, it is capable of extremely challenging high-performance computing (HPC).
Spack, a Lab-Developed 'App Store for Supercomputers,' Becoming Standard-Bearer
Sept. 20, 2018 — Spack, a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory-developed open source package manager optimized for high performance computing (HPC), is making waves throughout the HPC community, including internationally, as evidenced by a recent tour of European HPC facilities by the tool’s developers. Despite its niche status, Spack (short for Supercomputer PACKage manager), is one of the most popular pieces of software the Lab has ever released to the GitHub open source community.
Supermicro Introduces AI Inference-Optimized GPU Server with up to 20 NVIDIA Tesla T4 Accelerators in 4U
SAN JOSE, Calif., Sept. 20, 2018 — Super Micro Computer, Inc., a global leader in enterprise computing, storage, networking solutions and green computing technology, today is introducing the latest additions to its extensive line of GPU-optimized servers. Artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly becoming one of the most crucial components to business success now and in the foreseeable future.
Migration Tools Needed to Shift ML to Production
The confluence of accelerators like cloud GPUs along with the ability to handle data-rich HPC workloads will help push more machine learning projects into production, concludes a new study that also stresses the importance of cloud migration and accompanying tools. The survey released this week by workload management specialist Univa Corp. confirms the rush to machine learning. However, it also found a lack of workloads in production.
Clouds Over the Ocean – a Healthcare Perspective - HPCwire
Advances in precision medicine, genomics, and imaging; the widespread adoption of electronic health records; and the proliferation of medical Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile devices are resulting in an explosion of structured and unstructured healthcare-related data. Industry analysts expect that by 2020, the amount of medical data in the world will double every 73 days. And a typical healthcare consumer in the developed countries will generate 1,200 terabytes of data in a lifetime.
Maximizing Data Center Productivity with Application Workload Analysis
Improving productivity and increasing the number of simulation iterations can have a profound impact on the quantity and quality of your scientific breakthroughs. Learn how to profile your application workload and build a future high performance computing (HPC) data center with NVIDIA GPUs to maximize your scientific throughput.
Hybrid and Dedicated Clouds to Help Drive Growth for Machine Learning Over Coming Years
CHICAGO, Sept. 19, 2018 — Machine learning (ML) is poised for explosive growth over the next two years with an increasing number of projects moving into production by 2020, based on a recent survey of more than 344 technology and IT professionals titled “The Future of Machine Learning,” conducted by technology marketing organization, Dimensional Research.
Cadence Achieves AWS Industrial Software Competency Status for Its Cloud-Hosted Design Solution
MUNICH, Sept. 19, 2018 — Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CDNS) today announced that its Cloud-Hosted Design Solution has undergone rigorous technical validation and achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Industrial Software Competency status. This recognizes the Cadence solution has demonstrated technical proficiency and proven customer success with electronic systems and semiconductor companies.
Quobyte Outlines Keys to Building Scalable Storage
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Sept. 18, 2018 — Hyperscale data centers need enormous capacities for high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, big data analytics, containerized infrastructures, and other challenging modern workloads. Environments with billions of files and hundreds of petabytes delivering 24/7 applications all require large, complex, future-capable storage installations.
Kyoto University ACCMS Implements Fine-grained Power Management
Data center power management is a ubiquitous challenge and in few places is it more so than at Kyoto University Academic Center for Computing and Media Studies (ACCMS)) where power consumption limits were imposed following the devastating 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami.
Japan’s Railway Technical Research Institute Boosts Research With New Cray XC50 Supercomputer
SEATTLE, Sept. 19, 2018 — Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. today announced that it has delivered and installed a Cray XC50 supercomputer and a ClusterStor L300 storage system at Railway Technical Research Institute (RTRI), the research and development arm for Japan Railways Group.
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