Blue Waters Announces Four Webinars for October and November

October 10, 2019

Oct. 10 — The National Center for Supercomputing Applications’ (NCSA) Blue Waters project offers a webinar series that addresses Data AnalyticsPetascale ComputingScientific Software EcosystemsScientific VisualizationScientific WorkflowsSoftware Engineering and Workforce Development and Inclusion.

Over the next two months, we will offer the following four new webinars:

The webinars are free to attend and open to the public. Registration is required to receive reminders of webinar dates and invitations to join the Slack channel to pose questions to the presenters. Abstracts for each webinar are below.

MAKING CONTAINERS EASIER WITH HPC CONTAINER MAKER
(Scott McMillan, NVIDIA)

Containers make it possible for scientists and engineers to easily use portable and reproducible software environments. However, if the desired application is not already available from a container registry, generating a custom container image from scratch can be challenging for users accustomed to a bare metal software environment. HPC Container Maker (HPCCM) is an open source project to address these challenges. HPCCM provides a high level, configurable Python recipe format for deploying HPC components into container images according to best practices. HPCCM recipes are more portable and powerful than native container specification formats, easier to create, and produce smaller, well-constructed container images.

E4S: EXTREME-SCALE SCIENTIFIC SOFTWARE STACK
(Sameer Shende, University of Oregon)

The DOE Exascale Computing Project (ECP) Software Technology focus area is developing an HPC software ecosystem that will enable the efficient and performant execution of exascale applications. Through the Extreme-scale Scientific Software Stack (E4S), it is developing a comprehensive and coherent software stack that will enable application developers to productively write highly parallel applications that can portably target diverse exascale architectures. E4S provides both source builds through the Spack platform and a set of containers that feature a broad collection of HPC software packages. E4S exists to accelerate the development, deployment, and use of HPC software, lowering the barriers for HPC users. It provides container images, build manifests, and turn-key, from-source builds of popular HPC software packages developed as Software Development Kits (SDKs). This effort includes a broad range of areas including programming models and runtimes (MPICH, Kokkos, RAJA, OpenMPI), development tools (TAU, HPCToolkit, PAPI), math libraries (PETSc, Trilinos), data and visualization tools (Adios, HDF5, Paraview), and compilers (LLVM), all available through the Spack package manager. It will describe the community engagements and interactions that led to the many artifacts produced by E4S. It will introduce the E4S containers is installed on Blue Waters (NCSA) using Shifter and this talk will demonstrate its usage.

SPACK: A PACKAGE MANAGER FOR HPC
(Todd Gamblin, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)

Spack is an open-source package manager for HPC. Its simple, templated Python DSL allows the same package to be built in many configurations, with different compilers, flags, dependencies, and dependency versions. Spack allows HPC end users to automatically build any of over 3,000 community-maintained packages, software developers to easily manage large applications with hundreds of dependencies, and HPC facility administrators to deploy software stacks for all of their users.

This talk will give a technical overview of Spack, as well as a brief rundown of recent developments, the longer-term Spack road map, and activities within the U.S. Exascale Computing Project (ECP).

INTRODUCTION TO NVIDIA NSIGHT COMPUTE – A CUDA KERNEL PROFILER
(Magnus Strengert, NVIDIA)

Understanding and optimizing the runtime behavior of your code can be a challenging effort but is often rewarded with significant performance gains. NVIDIA Nsight Compute is a CUDA kernel profiler that provides detailed performance data and offers guidance for optimizing your CUDA kernels. You’ll learn about how to collect a wide range of performance data for your CUDA kernels, how automatic rules help in detecting common performance pitfalls and offering guidance through the profile reports, how to quickly compare profiling results to evaluate the effects of your code changes, and how to customize the tool to fit best to your optimization workflow.

About the Blue Waters Webinars

To foster productive discussions during the live webcasts, participants are encouraged to use dedicated channels within the ncsa-bw Slack team to pose questions to the presenters as well as share information with other participants.

The video recordings of each webinar are made publicly available on YouTube, and PDFs of the slides are made available for download. Links to the YouTube videos and slides are posted at https://bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu/webinars.

We welcome offers to present additional topics, as well as suggestions for additional topics. Please email your comments to [email protected].

This seminar series is organized and supported by the Blue Waters project funded by the National Science Foundation.

About NCSA

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign provides supercomputing and advanced digital resources for the nation’s science enterprise. At NCSA, University of Illinois faculty, staff, students, and collaborators from around the globe use advanced digital resources to address research grand challenges for the benefit of science and society. NCSA has been advancing one third of the Fortune 50® for more than 30 years by bringing industry, researchers, and students together to solve grand challenges at rapid speed and scale.


Source: NCSA

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

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…

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