For the first time in years, the USA Leads the TOP500 Supercomputers

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team reviews the latest TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers.

The TOP500 celebrates its 25^th anniversary with a major shakeup at the top of the list. For the first time since November 2012, the US claims the most powerful supercomputer in the world, leading a significant turnover in which four of the five top systems were either new or substantially upgraded.

Highlights:

#1 is Summit, an IBM-built supercomputer now running at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), captured the number one spot with a performance of 122.3 petaflops on High Performance Linpack (HPL), the benchmark used to rank the TOP500 list. Summit has 4,356 nodes, each one equipped with two 22-core Power9 CPUs, and six NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. The nodes are linked together with a Mellanox dual-rail EDR InfiniBand network.

#2 is Sunway TaihuLight, a system developed by China’s National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC) and installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, drops to number two after leading the list for the past two years. Its HPL mark of 93 petaflops has remained unchanged since it came online in June 2016.

#3 is Sierra, a new system at the DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory took the number three spot, delivering 71.6 petaflops on HPL. Built by IBM, Sierra’s architecture is quite similar to that of Summit, with each of its 4,320 nodes powered by two Power9 CPUs plus four NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs and using the same Mellanox EDR InfiniBand as the system interconnect.

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Preview of ISC 2018 Student Cluster Competition & Ancillary Events

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team previews the ISC 2018 Student Cluster Competition.

"Now in its seventh year, the ISC-HPCAC Student Cluster Competition enables international STEM teams to take part in a real-time contest focused on advancing STEM disciplines and HPC skills development at ISC 2018 from June 25-27. To take home top honors, twelve teams will have the opportunity to showcase systems of their own design, adhering to strict power constraints and achieve the highest performance across a series of standard HPC benchmarks and applications."



After that, Rich describes a number of ancillary events have been scheduled in Frankfurt.

Events in chronological order:

• HP-CAST will take place June 22-23 at the Frankfurt Marriott. HP-CAST is an organization of HPE customers and partners who provide input to HP to increase the capabilities of HP solutions for large-scale, scientific and technical computing.
• The Dell EMC HPC Community will get together for a half-day meeting on Sunday, June 24 at the Frankfurt Marriott.
• DDN User Group will be held on Monday, June 25 from 9:00am - 12:30am at the Movenpick Hotel.
• D-Wave Systems will host a seminar on Quantum Computing on Monday, June 25 starting at 2:00pm at the Frankfurt Marriott.
• Intel Special Session: Dr. Raj Hazra, Corporate Vice President at Intel, will discuss AI & HPC emerging technologies that will accelerate discovery and innovation at 6:00 pm Monday, June 25 in the Panarama 2 room at the Frankfurt Messe.
• The Hyperion Research  Breakfast Briefing will take place on Tuesday, June 26 at 7:45am at the Grandhotel Hessischer Hof.
• Univa will host a Breakfast Seminar on Cloud HPC on Wednesday, June 27 at 8:00am at the Frankfurt Marriott.
• The Women in HPC network is running a half day workshop on Thursday, June 28.

After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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A Closer Look at the new Summit Supercomputer

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the new 200 Petaflop Summit supercomputer that was unveiled this week at ORNL. Powered by IBM POWER9 processors, 27,648 NVIDIA GPUs, and Mellanox InfiniBand, the Summit supercomputer is also the first Exaop AI system on the planet.

This massive machine, powered by 27,648 of our Volta GPUs, can perform more than three exaops, or three billion billion calculations per second,” writes Ian Buck on the NVIDIA blog. “That’s more than 100 times faster than Titan, previously the fastest U.S. supercomputer, completed just five years ago. And 95 percent of that computing power comes from GPUs. Built for the U.S. Department of Energy, this is a machine designed to tackle the grand challenges of our time. It will accelerate the work of the world’s best scientists in high-energy physics, materials discovery, healthcare, and more, with the ability to crank 200 petaflops of computing power to high precision scientific simulations.

After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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A Look at the new NVIDIA HGX-2 Reference Platform for HPC & AI

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the new NVIDIA HGX-2 Reference Platform for HPC & AI.
"The HGX-2 cloud server platform supports multi-precision computing, supporting high-precision calculations using FP64 and FP32 for scientific computing and simulations, while also enabling FP16 and Int8 for AI training and inference. This unprecedented versatility meets the requirements of the growing number of applications that combine HPC with AI. HGX-2 is a part of the larger family of NVIDIA GPU-Accelerated Server Platforms, an ecosystem of qualified server classes addressing a broad array of AI, HPC and accelerated computing workloads with optimal performance."

After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

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