Bright Computing Powers HPC Cluster at Oldenburg University

Bright Computing Powers HPC Cluster at Oldenburg University

By Unknown   03:57   No comments:

Today Bright Computing announced that Oldenburg University in Germany has once again chosen to renew its license agreement with Bright Computing.

Oldenburg first became a Bright Computing customer in 2011, choosing Bright Cluster Manager to administer its small HPC environment. In recent years the Oldenburg HPC system has grown to a considerable 600-node cluster to provide an increasing amount of compute power to various departments within the university. With a small IT team and limited administration resources available, when it came time to upgrade the university’s IT hardware, the IT Services team at Oldenburg took the decision to continue using the Bright infrastructure management technology to overarch the HPC environment.

“There were three compelling reasons for Oldenburg to choose to reinvest with Bright,” said Dr. Stefan Harfst, Oldenburg University. “Firstly, Bright helps you to get your HPC environment up and running very quickly. Secondly, Bright makes it incredibly easy to manage your HPC environment which takes a lot of pressure of the IT Services team. Thirdly, Bright is a very robust and reliable, so our team is free to focus on other tasks.”

During the evaluation process, Oldenburg considered a number of independent infrastructure management technologies, as well as some open source software. However, the IT Services team chose Bright for its superior set of features and functionality, acknowledging that investing in a tool rather than deploying freeware was easily justifiable.

Haroon Ibrahim, Account Director for Oldenburg at Bright Computing, added; “By Standardising on Bright, Oldenburg is no longer tied to a single hardware vendor and can now install any hardware it likes. Added to this, Bright will enable Oldenburg to continue to scale its cluster, and in the future expand into new areas such as big data.”

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Nor-Tech Introduces Portable HPC Clusters for the Oil & Gas Industry

Nor-Tech Introduces Portable HPC Clusters for the Oil & Gas Industry

By Unknown   03:51   No comments:

Oct. 11 — Nor-Tech (Northern Computer Technologies), the leading provider of HPC clusters and high performance workstations, just introduced the first portable HPC cluster for the oil and gas industry with a price point starting at $20,000. 

Nor-Tech designed the cluster with the understanding that the oil and gas industry is looking for providers:

• With deep FEA/CFD/CAE experience and an engineering staff that understands the concepts and challenges.
• With knowledge of all software integration options and assurance of agnostic recommendations.
• That have the willingness to listen to clients, the ability to understand their needs, and the ability to incorporate those needs into the design.
• That can deliver a superior cost/performance ratio and a competitive total cost of ownership.
• That have an excellent reputation within the HPC community, and
• That offer a strong product lineup backed by quality service and prompt support.

Nor-Tech President and CEO David Bollig said, “Many businesses in the oil and gas industry in particular have been putting off upgrading from a workstation to a cluster even though they know it will dramatically reduce modeling time. Part of the reason is the price and the other part is the anticipated disruption. We’ve been working with clients in just this situation for many years and have perfected the transition process. Our goal is to have clients up and running with their new cluster within a couple hours of delivery. We also back that up with no wait time support.”

Nor-Tech’s cluster was developed with dual goals of mitigating risk and maximizing the speed of obtaining accurate, actionable results at a price within reach of even the smallest oil and gas companies. The cluster aggregates, processes, and interprets a terabyte or more of data originating in simulations, surveys, historical geological sources, etc.

Often, as organizations need more processing power than a single workstation can provide, they will add another workstation. It seems like a cost-saving strategy at first, but as they continue to add workstations, they soon exceed the price of a single cluster—which would also have about 3x the processing power.

“We always recommend the most cost-effective solution for the long term,” Bollig said. “So we do offer high end workstations that may make more sense for start-ups still struggling with desktops.”

About Nor-Tech

2016 HPCwire award finalist, Nor-Tech is renowned throughout the scientific, academic, and business communities for easy to deploy turnkey clusters and expert, no wait time support. All of Nor-Tech’s technology is made by Nor-Tech in Minnesota and supported by Nor-Tech around the world. In addition to HPC clusters, Nor-Tech’s custom technology includes workstations, desktops, and servers for a range of applications including CAE, CFD, and FEA. Nor-Tech engineers average 20+ years of experience and are responsible for significant high performance computing innovations. The company has been in business since 1998 and is headquartered in Burnsville, Minn. just outside of Minneapolis. To contact Nor-Tech call 952-808-1000/toll free: 877-808-1010 or visit http://www.nor-tech.com. For more information on Nor-Tech’s clusters visit: http://www.nor-tech.com/solutions/hpc.

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TYAN HPC Platforms Add Support for NVIDIA Tesla P100, P40 and P4 GPUs

TYAN HPC Platforms Add Support for NVIDIA Tesla P100, P40 and P4 GPUs

By Unknown   23:00   No comments:

TAIPEI, Taiwan, Sept. 21 — TYAN, an industry-leading server platform design manufacturer and subsidiary of MiTAC Computing Technology Corporation, announces support and availability of the NVIDIA Tesla P100, P40 and P4 GPU accelerators with the new NVIDIA Pascal architecture. Incorporating NVIDIA’s state-of-the-art technologies allows TYAN to offer the exceptional performance and data-intensive applications features to HPC users.

“Real-time, intelligent applications are transforming our world, thus our customers need an efficient compute platform to deliver responsive and cost-effective AI,” said Danny Hsu, Vice President of MiTAC Computing Technology Corporation’s TYAN Business Unit. “TYAN is pleased to work with NVIDIA to market FT77C-B7079 and TA80-B7071 servers with P100, P40 and P4 to market. The TYAN NVIDIA-based server platforms allow hyper-scale customers to deploy accurate, responsive AI solutions, and to reduce inference latency up to 45x. The high throughput and best in class efficiency of Pascal GPUs make it possible to process exploding volumes of data to offer cost effective, accurate AI applications.”

“The NVIDIA Pascal architecture is the computing engine for modern data centers. Powered by Pascal, Tesla GPUs offer massive leaps in performance and efficiency required by the ever increasing demand of AI applications,” said Roy Kim, Tesla Product Lead at NVIDIA. “We’re partnering with TYAN to deliver the accelerated solutions customers need to deploy HPC applications and AI services.”

TYAN HPC platforms with support for NVIDIA Tesla P100, P40, P4

4U/8 GPGPU FT77C-B7079 – Support up to 2x Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3/v4 (Broadwell-EP) processors, 24x DDR4 DIMM slots, 1x PCI-E x8 mezzanine slot for high-speed I/O option, 10x 3.5″/2.5″ hot-swap SATA 6Gb/s HDDs/SSDs, dual-port 10GbE/GbE LOM, and (2+1) 3,200W redundant power supplies with 80-Plus Platinum rated.

2U/4 GPGPU TA80-B7071 – Support up to 2x Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3/v4 (Broadwell-EP) processors, 16x DDR4 DIMM slots, 1x PCI-E x8 slot for high-speed I/O option, 8x 2.5″ hot-swap SAS or SATA 6Gb/s plus 2x 2.5″ internal SATA 6Gb/s HDDs/SSDs, dual-port 10GbE/GbE LOM, and (1+1) 1,600W redundant power supplies with 80-Plus Platinum rated.

About TYAN

TYAN, a leading server brand of MiTAC Computing Technology Corporation under the MiTAC Holdings Corporation (TSE:3706), designs, manufactures and markets advanced x86 and x86-64 server/workstation board and system products. The products are sold to OEMs, VARs, System Integrators and Resellers worldwide for a wide range of applications. TYAN enable customers to be technology leaders by providing scalable, highly-integrated and reliable products such as appliances for cloud service providers (CSP) and high-performance computing and server/workstation used in CAD, DCC, E&P and HPC markets. For more information, visit MiTAC Holdings Corporation’s website at http://www.mic-holdings.com  or TYAN’s website at http://www.tyan.com

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ARM announces safety-first IoT processor for robots and cars

ARM announces safety-first IoT processor for robots and cars

By Unknown   23:07   No comments:

The Cortex R52 is coming to a robot near you - ARM announces safety-first IoT processor for robots and cars

MICROPROCESSOR DESIGNER ARM has announced a new chip for real-time safety-critical applications when humans come into contact with machines.

The Cortex R-52 has been five years in development and is engineered to meet new safety standards as ARM takes aim at the growing market of large-scale smart devices, such as surgical robots and self-driving cars.

Chip manufacturers see the safety-critical processor as an important growth market as the IoT moves more into the consumer realm. Intel scooped up Yogitech in April, an IoT startup focused on boosting the security credentials of chips used in robots, self-driving cars and other autonomous devices.

The new ARM chip can switch between tasks 14 times faster than its predecessor, the Cortex R-5, according to John Ronco, vice president of product marketing at ARM, who said that the design has already been commercially licensed to semiconductor firm STMicroelectronics.

Safety-critical chips are vital in situations where autonomous or semi-autonomous machines could cause injury or death in the event of a fault or a hack.

Vehicles are becoming increasingly dependent on software to optimise performance and make autonomous decisions, but one of the key problems holding back developments such as driverless cars is concern over how easily they can be hacked and the consequences of software bugs.

ARM claimed that the Cortex R-52 "delivers the highest level of integrated capability for functional safety" of any ARM chip so far.

"Cortex-R52 implements hardware to simplify the integration of increasingly complex real-time software environments while providing the robust separation of software necessary to protect safety-critical code," ARM said on its website.

"As the first ARMv8-R processor, Cortex-R52 introduces an extra privilege level which provides support for a hypervisor."

ARM unveiled the Cortex-A73 processor and Mali G71 CPU in May which it said will power the majority of virtual reality-ready smartphones in 2017.

Formerly the UK's biggest technology firm, ARM was recently acquired by Japan's SoftBank Group for £23.3bn. μ

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ARM launches safety-centric Cortex-R52 processor

ARM launches safety-centric Cortex-R52 processor

By Unknown   03:30   No comments:

Cambridge-based and Japanese-owned chip designer ARM has announced the launch of its first ARMv8-R architecture IP, the ARM Cortex-R52, designed specifically to address functional safety in autonomous vehicle and other safety-critical applications.

 
ARM has announced the launch of the Cortex-R52 processor, its first to use the ARMv8-R architecture, with a focus on safety-critical tasks such as autonomous vehicles.
 

Based around an extension of the 64-bit ARMv8 microarchitecture, ARMv8-R introduces extensions for one simple purpose: to improve safety. The design introduces a hardware-enforced separation of software tasks, whereby a software hypervisor polices the execution and resource allocation to ensure that safety-critical code is run in a completely isolated environment away from any other code. The result, ARM claims, is a significant boost in security, a reduction in the amount of code that needs to go through safety certification, and the ability to run complex software without losing support for deterministic real-time operating system (RTOS) operation.

'The Cortex-R52 is the first processor built on the ARMv8-R architecture and it was designed from the ground up to address functional safety,' explained James McNiven, ARM's general manager for CPU and media processing groups, of the launch. 'We are helping partners to meet particular market opportunities, especially in fully autonomous vehicles and robotics systems where specific functionality is required for safety-critical tasks. By documenting the strict development process, fault modelling and supporting software isolation, ARM is enabling a faster route to market for partners addressing these applications.'

The first licensee for the Cortex-R52 design is STMicroelectronics, which is to build the part for its customers as a replacement for the older safety-centric Cortex-R5. Those looking to upgrade will, the company has claimed, see a 35 percent increase in performance as a result. 'The Cortex-R52 supports our Smart Driving vision by enabling a new range of high-performance, power-efficient SoCs for any in-vehicle application demanding real-time operation and the highest levels of functional safety, including powertrain, chassis and ADAS,' claimed Fabio Marchiò at STMicroelectronics. 'The Cortex-R52's ability to compartmentalise software provides our users with the best solution for safety without loss of determinism. Its virtualisation support simplifies the consolidation of applications and functions into a single processor, delivering a shorter integration time.'

Thus far, no company has stepped forward to suggest when the first devices based around the Cortex-R52 design will hit the open market.

ARM has announced the launch of the Cortex-R52 processor, its first to use the ARMv8-R architecture, with a focus on safety-critical tasks such as autonomous vehicles.

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