November 23, 2016

Graphics chipmaker Nvidia made a strong showing at SC16 in Salt Lake City last week. Most prominent wins were achieving the number one spot on the Green500 list Read more…

November 22, 2016

At first blush, and maybe second blush too, Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s (HPE) purchase of SGI seems like an unambiguous win-win. SGI’s advanced shared memory technology, its popular UV product line (Hanna), deep vertical market expertise, and services-led go-to-market capability all give HPE a leg up in its drive to remake itself. Bear in mind HPE came into existence just a year ago with the split of Hewlett-Packard. The computer landscape, including HPC, is shifting with still unclear consequences. One wonders who’s next on the deal block following Dell’s recent merger with EMC. Read more…

November 18, 2016

After an intense four-day flurry of activity (and a cold snap that brought some actual snow flurries), the SC16 show floor closed yesterday (Thursday) and the a Read more…

November 18, 2016

Tucked in a back section of the SC16 exhibit hall, quantum computing pioneer D-Wave has been talking up its new 2000-qubit processor announced in September. Forget for a moment the criticism sometimes aimed at D-Wave. This small Canadian company has sold several machines including, for example, ones to Lockheed and NASA, and has worked with Google on mapping machine learning problems to quantum computing. In July Los Alamos National Laboratory took possession of a 1000-quibit D-Wave 2X system that LANL ordered a year ago around the time of SC15. Read more…

November 18, 2016

Due to the overwhelmingly positive responses we've received about the SC16 Twitter Roundup, we've decided to extend it one more day. We hope everyone had a grea Read more…

November 17, 2016

As SC16 winds down, we present our final Twitter Roundup for the event. We hope everyone enjoyed themselves in Salt Lake City and gets home safely. Be sure to Read more…

November 16, 2016

In virtually every way, precision medicine (PM) is a poster child for the HPC Matters mantra and was a good choice for the Monday panel opening SC16 (HPC Impacts on Precision Medicine: Life’s Future – The Next Frontier in Healthcare). PM’s tantalizing promise is to touch all of us, not just writ large but individually – effectively fighting disease, enhancing health and lifestyle, extending life, and necessarily contributing to basic science along the way. All of this can only done with HPC. Read more…

November 16, 2016

The highly anticipated SC16 Twitter Roundup is finally here! In celebration of the event, we’re bringing you a list of some of the top SC16 tweets that were t Read more…

November 16, 2016

The rapid growth in technology that can be trained, that infers, that continually learns from information contained in enormous data sets, all the while generating strong ROI on strategic initiatives, dominated ICD’s annual HPC market report presented yesterday at SC16 in Salt Lake City. Read more…

November 16, 2016

Last year at SC15 Intel announced a fellowship program in partnership with ACM SIGHPC aimed at increasing the participation of under-represented groups – w Read more…

November 15, 2016

The highly anticipated SC16 Twitter Roundup is finally here! In celebration of the event, we’re bringing you a list of some of the top SC16 tweets that were t Read more…

November 15, 2016

Intel made a flurry of announcements at SC16 today. Artificial intelligence figured prominently with new offerings and portfolio details. Here are a few highlights. Read more…

November 15, 2016

A lot can change in ten years. We might move houses or change jobs. Our kids get older (and so do we). If we’re lucky we make new friends, and we’re sad whe Read more…

November 14, 2016

The 48th edition of the TOP500 list is fresh off the presses and while there is no new number one system, as previously teased by China, there are a number of n Read more…

November 14, 2016

Last year at SC15, IBM offered its vision of an accelerator-assisted computing paradigm enabled by the OpenPOWER ecosystem of diverse partners and focused on cognitive computing as the key application driver. Read more…

November 14, 2016

The highly anticipated SC16 Twitter Roundup is finally here! In celebration of the event, we're bringing you a list of some of the top SC16 tweets that were twe Read more…

November 11, 2016

The rapid emergence of AI and machine learning within the HPC and advance scale computing industries looks to be a dominant topic – from vendor product announ Read more…

November 11, 2016

Forward looking thinkers and programs are setting the course of the nation and internationally towards the acclaimed achievement of exascale computing. The value to important application domains from multi-physics simulation to societal data analytics and the wide range of problems encompassed hardly needs explaining to this community. Read more…

November 10, 2016

On Monday at SC16 the 1st International Workshop on Post-Moore Era Supercomputing (PMES) will dive into the world of tomorrow. On Wednesday it will be followed by a distinguished panel, Post Moore’s Era Supercomputing in 20 Years, digging into some of the ideas explored at the workshop. These kinds of sessions are always fun and considering the panel participants, this one should be fascinating. Read more…

November 10, 2016

It was 23 years ago this November when a small NASA project, whimsically called “Beowulf,” was initiated to find a new way of achieving order of magnitude i Read more…

November 10, 2016

Perhaps stealing a bit of OpenHPC’s SC16 thunder, ARM announced today that ARMv8-A will be the first alternative architecture with OpenHPC support and part of Read more…

November 9, 2016

The programming language Fortran has been in existence since 1957, and a large percentage of software that runs on HPC systems worldwide is written, at least in part, in Fortran. Since it has been in existence for so long, and so many scientists and engineers learned it early in their careers and have utilized it extensively, much of this code is not up to modern standards of software development. Read more…

November 9, 2016

In this Q&A, University of Edinburgh researcher Nick Brown discusses an upcoming SC BoF, titled "HPC Outreach: Promoting Supercomputing to the Next Generation." The BoF, organized by Brown and two of his colleagues, focuses not only on outreach to different groups of people, but also some of the questions around diversity and ways to best design activities that are inclusive to all. Read more…

November 9, 2016

Co-design has long been a vibrant discussion point in the HPC community. The need to coordinate development across hardware, software, and system architecture i Read more…

November 8, 2016

In September, the Center for Advanced Technology Evaluation (CENATE) at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) took possession of NVIDIA’s DGX-1 GPU-bas Read more…

November 8, 2016

Diversity has always been important to the SC Conference and this year they have taken their actions further with the creation of the Diverse HPC Workforce Committee. In this contributed Q&A, Kim McMahon asks SC16 Chair John West and Trish Damkroger, Chair of the Diverse HPC Workforce committee about their respective roles and what motivates them to volunteer for this effort. Read more…

November 8, 2016

Ahead of next week’s SC16 conference, high end storage vendor DataDirect Networks today announced a raft of product line updates, including a new burst buffer Read more…

November 7, 2016

When Dr. John D. McCalpin introduced the STREAM benchmark in 1991, it had already become become clear that peak arithmetic rate was not an adequate measure of HPC system performance for many applications. Since then, CPU performance has continued to outpace memory performance measures, leading to the processor-memory speed gap, known as the memory wall. In an invited talk at SC16, McCalpin will trace the history of changing “balances” between computation, memory latency, and memory bandwidth and will explore the impact to the next-generation of HPC systems. Read more…

November 7, 2016

In advance of the SC16 expo in Salt Lake City next week, the OpenACC standards group today welcomed newest member NSSC-Wuxi and highlighted a number of important developments for the directives-based programming standard. Ahead of the announcement, HPCwire spoke with Michael Wolfe, technical director of OpenACC, and Duncan Poole, OpenACC president and director of platform alliances for accelerated computing at Nvidia. Read more…

November 4, 2016

Kicking off SC this year is what promises to be a fascinating panel – HPC Impacts on Precision Medicine: Life’s Future–The Next Frontier in Healthcare. In this pre-SC16 Q&A, Steve Conway, research VP in IDC's High Performance Computing group and moderator of the panel, sets the stage. HPC, of course, has been transforming life sciences and medicine for nearly two decades. Read more…

November 3, 2016

In this guest commentary, veteran HPC professional Stephen Perrenod makes the case that entrepreneurship is at the heart of HPC’s success and critical to HPC’s future as a driving force of the digital economy. Read more…

October 24, 2016

At SC15 last year the announcement of OpenHPC – the nascent effort to develop a standardized HPC stack to ease HPC deployment – drew a mix of enthusiasm and wariness; the latter in part because of Intel’s prominence in the group. There was general agreement that creating an open source, plug-and-play HPC stack was a good idea. Read more…

October 20, 2016

The latest scientific evidence indicates that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate and that so-called dark energy is the driver behind this growth. Even though it comprises roughly two-thirds of the universe, not much is known about dark energy because it cannot be directly observed. Read more…

October 19, 2016

The effort to attack cancer with HPC resources has been growing for years. Indeed, it’s accurate to say the sequencing of the human genome was as much a tour Read more…