HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING Oiling the


wheels of HPC


Robert Roe reports on new technology and 30 years of the US supercomputing conference at SC18 in Dallas


optimised to run specific codes across the 48-hour completion. This year the Tsinghua University from


As the HPC industry descended on Dallas, Texas for this year’s instalment of the US supercomputing conference SC18, there was significant enthusiasm for the future of the industry – which is making gains through the rise in the use of AI. ‘From our volunteers to our exhibitors


to our students and attendees – SC18 was inspirational,’ said SC18 general chair Ralph McEldowney. ‘Whether it was in technical sessions or on the exhibit floor, SC18 inspired people with the best in research, technology, and information sharing.’ SC18 highlighted progress in HPC,


the rise of AI technology and several new HPC technologies on display during the exhibition. AMD’s 2018 resurgence continued at SC18 announcing new CPU and GPU products alongside a number of contract wins for large-scale HPC systems. The US strengthened its position in the Top500 after regaining the top spot in June this year. And finally the SC cluster competition saw the Chinese Tsinghua University take the top spot in the overall category of the competition in Dallas.


Chinese students take top honours The Student Cluster Competition (SCC) was first held in 2007 to provide high- performance computing experience to undergraduate and high school students. Today the student teams are comprised on six students and at least one advisor. Hardware is donated by vendor partners and the student teams design and build clusters, which need to be configured and


8 Scientific Computing World December 2018/January 2019


China took the top spot overall. The Linpack crown was taken by Nanyang Technological University in Singapore with a score of 56.51 Teraflops. The HPCG was also won by Tsinghua University with a score of 1,985.97 Gigaflops. As the competition limits teams to 3,000 watts of power for their HPC cluster, most teams opt to use GPU technology. For example, Tsinghua University used eight Nvidia V100 GPUs in their competition entry.


In a blog post from Nvidia, Bu-sung


Lee, team leader and faculty adviser at Nanyang University stated: ‘If you don’t have GPUs, best of luck. It’s essential.’ However, it was not all new technology


at SC this year. There was also reflection on the past as this year marks the 30th anniversary of the annual international conference of high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis. It celebrates the contributions of researchers, scientists and HPC users who have helped to advance this industry over the last 30 years.


New technology on the show floor AMD has had a particularly strong 12 months, from plucky outsider to a growing force within the HPC industry. The launch of the Epyc processors gave the company a good start but along with new products at SC18 the company also announced several new contracts for AMD-based HPC systems. These systems provide the groundwork


for stronger adoption of AMD in the HPC ecosystem as these new systems provide real benchmarking opportunities to give


potential users an idea of how these systems work at scale in real production environments. AMD announced that The US


Department of Energy’s NERSC, Cray and HAAS F1 Racing and The High- Performance Computing Center of the University of Stuttgart (HLRS) will all be using AMD Epyc processors for their upcoming systems. AMD also pushed its technologies into the cloud with announcements around the deployment of Epyc processors in MicrosoftAzure. ‘It’s been a fantastic year in the


supercomputing space as we further expanded the ecosystem for AMD Epyc processors while securing multiple wins that leverage the benefits AMD Epyc


“It’s been a fantastic year in the supercomputing space as we further expanded the ecosystem for AMD Epyc processors while securing multiple wins that leverage the benefits AMD Epyc processors have on HPC workloads”


@scwmagazine | www.scientific-computing.com


Dibrova/Shutterstock.com


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28