Big Data Rains Down on Seattle

By Nicole Hemsoth

October 20, 2011

The running theme for SC11 will be data-intensive science, with a large number of presentations and sessions focused on the problems and new developments spawned by “big data” and technical or scientific computing.

According to John Johnson, conference thrust chair and association division director at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, “Data is a huge challenge in science today…the rapid advancements in data collection and generation are challenging traditional methods of storing, managing and analyzing the information.” He says that this year the supercomputing community is “being called upon to rise to the data challenge and develop methods for dealing with the exponential growth of data and strategies for analyzing and storing large data sets.”

With this theme in mind, we wanted to call your attention to some select sessions and special events at SC11 for those who are exploring data-intensive computing. As Johnson noted, the main issues are analysis, management and storage of large data sets, thus we’ll organize our “must see” elements for the show along those lines with the addition of visualization as another important topic for data-intensive scientific computing.

This year’s emphasis is in line with the announcement of the Graph 500 list, which will be presented on Tuesday afternoon. This will showcase the top of the line systems (according to the benchmark, anyway) for data-intensive computing applications. The organizers hope the session that follows will provide a discussion opportunity that will focus on evolution of the benchmark and the future of data-intensive science. The session can be found here and more information about this notable list can be found at the Graph 500 site.

In advance of the topical breakdown, however, it is worth mentioning that there is a thorough introduction to data intensive computing that runs for the first half of the morning on Monday. This session, presented by Robert Grossman from the University of Chicago and Collin Bennett from the Open Data Group will offer the “big picture” of data intensive computing by touching on utility clouds (Amazon) and data clouds, as provided by Hadoop. They will also provide an introduction to managing scientific datasets using distributed file systems like Hadoop and NoSQL databases like HBase. This will be in addition to parallel programming frameworks, including MapReduce, Hadoop steams and related techniques. It’s a lot to achieve in one short morning but the presents hope to illustrate the role of these and other tools for managing large datasets. If Monday morning is free and you want an initial big data deep dive, this is probably the best session early in the conference.

Analysis

The Second SC Workshop on Petascale Data Analytics: Challenges and Opportunities workshop, which runs all day on Monday will provide a dense overview on the growth of data intensive applications (and dataset sizes) and show how trends like cloud computing are becoming a way to handle the peak loads and large data demands of emerging applications. This workshop will be hosted by researchers from Oak Ridge National Lab and the University of Minnesota.

Another day-long workshop on Monday focused on data-intensive computing will be presented by Ian Taylor from Cardiff University and Johan Montagnat from CNRS. This event, which is the sixth Workshop on Workflows in Support of Large-Scale Science will focus on the “many facets of data-intensive workflow management systems, ranging from job execution to service management and the coordination of data, service and job dependencies.” The presenters hope to cover a range of related issues throughout the day, including data intensive workflows representation and enactment; designing workflow composition interfaces; workflow mapping techniques that may optimize the execution of the workflow; workflow enactment engines that need to deal with failures in the application and execution environment; and a number of computer science problems related to scientific workflows such as semantic technologies, compiler methods, fault detection and tolerance.

More analysis-related sessions of note include:

Semantic Graph Database Processing

Evaluating NoSQL for Enterprise Applications

Using Semantic Web Technologies on HPC Clouds

Management

There are a number of deeper, specialized sessions on management of big data, but a few do offer some promise for the non-specialist in terms of the tools that are the focus of the session. For instance, Monday’s “Big Data Means Your Metadata Must Work” touches on the range of tools uses to capture and use metadata using real-world examples. The presenters hope to provide attendees with a better sense of the many metadata tools that are available and how can be used to help share big data.

Other management-related sessions to note include:

Parallel Index and Query for Large Scale Data Analysis

Hadoop Acceleration Through Network Levitated Merge

Open source file systems – Transitioning from Petascale to Exascale

I/O Streaming Evaluation of Batch Queries for Data-Intensive Computational Turbulence

Storage

With estimates predicting that data growth will surpass Moore’s Law to 1.8 zettabytes by the end of this year and file-based data growing 75 times what it is now over the course of the next decade, the storage piece of the data-intensive computing puzzle is among the most important.

There are a number of presentations during the show, including one from Nick Kirsh of EMC/Isilon, called “Big Data, Big Opportunity: Maximizing the Value of Data in HPC Environments.” Kirsh plans to present “real-life implementations in which scale-out storage dramatically accelerated data and server performance, speeding time-to-results in critical HPC projects to extract maximum value from HPC data.” He also plans to address how implementing scale-storage can work toward eradicating the bottlenecks that HPC users with large datasets encounter.

Other storage-related sessions to note include:

The Sixth Parallel Data Storage Workshop (all-day event)

Terascala – Enabling Fast, Easy to Manage Storage Appliances

Visualization

One of the highlights this year will be the Scientific Visualization Showcase, which will demonstrate how visualization is being used to model everything from the beginning of the universe to jet engines. While this range of presentations is guaranteed to be great eye candy, there are a relatively large number of visualization presentations this year.

Visualization events outside of the showcase include a workshop on ultrascale visualization presented by Kwan Liu Ma from the University of California, Davis and Michael Papka from Argonne National Lab. The workshop, which runs from 9:00-5:30 on Sunday before the conference kickoff, will address new ways to become capable of exploiting petascale data to its fullest with exascale datasets on the horizon. The two will spend Sunday addressing “the latest and greatest research innovations in large data visualization and how these innovations impact scientific supercomputing and the discovery process.”

A number of the instructional sessions will touch on various elements of large-scale data analysis and visualization, including a tutorial for using the open source visualization and analysis application ParaView, which allows users to visualize large data sets in parallel. Outside of the more application-specific tutorial, the presenters plan to provide more general guidance about visualizing the massive simulations that run on supercomputers—and do a walk through of installation and set-up of ParaView.

Other visualization-related sessions to note include:

Large-Scale Data Visualization for Data-Intensive and High-Dimensional Scientific Data Analysis

World-highest Resolution Global Atmospheric Model and Its Performance on the Earth Simulator

These lists certainly don’t do justice to the wide range of sessions to choose from across the data-intensive computing spectrum and didn’t even begin to touch on the many sessions with clear HPC/big data cross-over appeal. Still, we look forward to see you all in Seattle this year—stop by our booth to share insights you’ve gleaned from these and other presentations, won’t you?

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, code-named Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from its predecessors, including the red-hot H100 and A100 GPUs. Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. While Nvidia may not spring to mind when thinking of the quant Read more…

2024 Winter Classic: Meet the HPE Mentors

March 18, 2024

The latest installment of the 2024 Winter Classic Studio Update Show features our interview with the HPE mentor team who introduced our student teams to the joys (and potential sorrows) of the HPL (LINPACK) and accompany Read more…

Houston We Have a Solution: Addressing the HPC and Tech Talent Gap

March 15, 2024

Generations of Houstonian teachers, counselors, and parents have either worked in the aerospace industry or know people who do - the prospect of entering the field was normalized for boys in 1969 when the Apollo 11 missi Read more…

Apple Buys DarwinAI Deepening its AI Push According to Report

March 14, 2024

Apple has purchased Canadian AI startup DarwinAI according to a Bloomberg report today. Apparently the deal was done early this year but still hasn’t been publicly announced according to the report. Apple is preparing Read more…

Survey of Rapid Training Methods for Neural Networks

March 14, 2024

Artificial neural networks are computing systems with interconnected layers that process and learn from data. During training, neural networks utilize optimization algorithms to iteratively refine their parameters until Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, code-named Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Houston We Have a Solution: Addressing the HPC and Tech Talent Gap

March 15, 2024

Generations of Houstonian teachers, counselors, and parents have either worked in the aerospace industry or know people who do - the prospect of entering the fi Read more…

Survey of Rapid Training Methods for Neural Networks

March 14, 2024

Artificial neural networks are computing systems with interconnected layers that process and learn from data. During training, neural networks utilize optimizat Read more…

PASQAL Issues Roadmap to 10,000 Qubits in 2026 and Fault Tolerance in 2028

March 13, 2024

Paris-based PASQAL, a developer of neutral atom-based quantum computers, yesterday issued a roadmap for delivering systems with 10,000 physical qubits in 2026 a Read more…

India Is an AI Powerhouse Waiting to Happen, but Challenges Await

March 12, 2024

The Indian government is pushing full speed ahead to make the country an attractive technology base, especially in the hot fields of AI and semiconductors, but Read more…

Charles Tahan Exits National Quantum Coordination Office

March 12, 2024

(March 1, 2024) My first official day at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) was June 15, 2020, during the depths of the COVID-19 loc Read more…

AI Bias In the Spotlight On International Women’s Day

March 11, 2024

What impact does AI bias have on women and girls? What can people do to increase female participation in the AI field? These are some of the questions the tech Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Analyst Panel Says Take the Quantum Computing Plunge Now…

November 27, 2023

Should you start exploring quantum computing? Yes, said a panel of analysts convened at Tabor Communications HPC and AI on Wall Street conference earlier this y Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Training of 1-Trillion Parameter Scientific AI Begins

November 13, 2023

A US national lab has started training a massive AI brain that could ultimately become the must-have computing resource for scientific researchers. Argonne N Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire