Equivalent to the 8th largest system in the world, Perth Australia's DownUnder GeoSolutions (DUG) has purchased a large Intel Xeon Phi equipped supercomputer from SGI for Oil and Gas applications. This system augments TF/s capable workstations also equipped with Intel Xeon Phi devices. DownUnder notes that all their software has been rewritten to use coprocessors with 6x - 10x … [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...]
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...]
Virtual Reality As A Web Service Goes Live
A number of companies are now experimenting with providing virtual reality via the web. The results are exciting and demonstrate the potential in this new technology for a host of applications from cinematic experiences to gaming and urban planning. MozVR by Mozilla is designed to be a “native VR” Web experience, made from the ground up for virtual reality. As one of the … [Read more...]
MultiOS Gaming, Media, and OpenCL Using XenGT Virtual Machines On Shared Intel GPUs
At last, a full (opensource!) GPU virtualization solution that allows virtualized guest operating systems to "own" a shared Intel GPU yet allows applications to run with near-native performance! This means games, both DRM and free media, plus OpenCL applications can run in separate guest operating systems on a single Intel GPU system (convenient for users) or in a shared cloud … [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...]
Seismic Changes in the Animation Industry
TechEnablement caught up with DreamWorks CTO Lincoln Wallen after his plenary invited talk at SC14. We had the opportunity to ask Lincoln about our observation of seismic changes happening within the animation industry as technology enables small and mid-sized businesses to create studio quality animated characters for television, augmented reality, and eventually for movies … [Read more...]
Inside The IBM NVIDIA Volta plus NVlink 2017 Delivery for $325M DOE Procurements
The U.S. Department of Energy unveiled plans to build two GPU-accelerated leadership class supercomputers (Summit at ORNL and Sierra at LLNL) in a combined $325M USD procurement to be installed in 2017 that will be based on next-generation IBM POWER servers incorporating NVIDIA® Volta GPU accelerators plus NVLink™ high-speed GPU interconnect technology. The announcement by U.S. … [Read more...]
Game Changers at SC14 – Obsidian and Landsvirkjun
TechEnablement has identified two game-changing "must watch" SC14 attendees: (1) Obsidian Strategics and (2) Iceland's Landsvirkjun National Power Company. In combination, these two organizations have the potential to convert the worlds hunger for HPC and the Internet from climate destroying coal to renewable energy. As Jeff Goodell observed, "coal was supposed to be the engine … [Read more...]