A featured paper in the December 5th 2014 issue of Science demonstrates - for the first time - a computational method to successfully a priori predict pressure-dependent chemical reaction rates. In short, this work provides an accurate means of treating pressure dependence, which is required to accurately predict the aggregate reaction rate. Unlike previous models that rely on … [Read more...]
Apache Spark Claims 10x to 100x Faster than Hadoop MapReduce
Apache Spark is a fast and general-purpose cluster computing system that claims 10x to 100x performance improvements over Hadoop. It runs "everywhere" from standalone to EC2 and runs on Hadoop, Mesos, standalone, or in the cloud. Spark runs provides high-level APIs in Java, Scala and Python, and an optimized engine that supports general execution graphs. It also supports … [Read more...]
Free eBook – Optimizing HPC Applications with Intel Cluster Tools
Amazon is offering a free Kindle edition of the book, “Optimizing HPC Applications with Intel Cluster Tools" by Alexander Supalov, Andrey Semin, Michael Klemm, and Christopher Dahnken. Table of Contents Foreword by Bronis de Supinski, CTO, Livermore Computing, LLNL Introduction Chapter 1: No Time to Read this Book? Chapter 2: Overview of Platform … [Read more...]
Successful Farber SC14 Tutorial “From ‘Hello World’ to ExaScale Computing Using x86, GPUs and Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessors”
The Rob Farber SC14 tutorial “From ‘Hello World’ to Exascale Using x86, GPUs and Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessors” (tut106s1) went smoothly and was highly successful. The requests we received from our students at the tutorial to teach this, or a similar class in the US and around the world from the UK to India are a clear measure of our success. In particular, ours is the only class … [Read more...]
Springer and Simula Join Forces to Provide Free eBooks on Computing
The folks at Scientific Computing let us know that Simula SpringerBriefs on Computing has introduced a new open access ebook series on the essentials of computing science that aims to provide introductions to select research in computing. The series presents both a state-of-the-art disciplinary overview and raises essential critical questions in the field. Published by … [Read more...]
Get Your Visualizations Viewed By Millions Via The CADENS Call
Would you like visualizations of your data to be seen by millions of people around the world? Researchers who are interested in collaborating on this project can submit information on their data and/or visualizations at: http://go.illinois.edu/cadens. Initial submissions should be provided by Dec 21, 2014. Qualifying research generates, analyzes, or visualizes data and … [Read more...]
Automatically Caption Images With Neural Networks and Vector Space Math
Imagine a magic algorithm that can create captions that accurately describe an image. The Google authors of, "Show and Tell: A Neural Image Caption Generator" claim to have created a machine-learning algorithm that approaches human-accuracy. If true, the value is clear as conventional text-based search methods can include relevant images as well as text. machine-translation … [Read more...]
Outsourcing Media And Entertainment To The Nimbix Cloud
With the outsourcing of animation to the cloud, virtual reality becoming a web service, and hints of HPC becoming cloud-friendly, it is worth looking at how companies are rising to address these markets. One example is the Dallas, Texas company Nimbix that bills itself as, "a pure high performance computing (HPC) cloud" that provides turnkey end user HPC applications in … [Read more...]
AMD and Pathscale Join OpenACC Standards Committee
AMD and Pathscale announced at SC14 that they have joined the OpenACC standards committee. OpenACC provides an efficient and performance-portable path for developing massively parallel programs across a wide range of accelerators, including GPUs, many core coprocessors and multi-core CPUs. OpenACC has been gaining traction for parallel programming. Such a move appears … [Read more...]
Gary Grider Sees End Of Parallel File Systems Before He Reaches Retirement Age
HPC storage luminary Gary Grider, noted in his talk at the SC14 Seagate HPC User Group meeting, "The Future of Supercomputing" that he funded the development of the Lustre file-system (which can stream a data at a TB/s), and he believes it is possible we will see the end of such file-systems before he reaches retirement age. Instead, Gary sees object based storage similar to … [Read more...]