Primeur Live! from ISC17 in Frankfurt - overview Primeur magazine did report extensively from the major supercomputing conference ISC'17 in Frankfurt. A list of the issues we did publish. Read further...

The Tuesday morning session at ISC17 on Quantum Annealing and its Applications for Simulation in Science and Industry was chaired by Kristel Michielsen from the Jülich Supercomputing Centre. She also gave the first presentation of this session in which she provided an introduction to quantum annealing. The problems of interest for new computing technologies are optimization problems. They include scheduling, trading, flight and train scheduling, production planning, image processing, and so on. The challenge is to find the best option among a finite set of feasible solutions and to minimize the cost function. Kristel Michielsen explained to the audience how to find the minimum energy state of a physical system. Read further...

During the Quantum Annealing session on Tuesday morning at ISC17, Christian Seidel from Volkswagen asked the audience whether there is a real-world problem that could be addressed with a quantum computer. Indeed there is, namely traffic flow optimisation. Everybody is familiar with traffic jam and nobody likes it. He showed the audience how you can maximize traffic flow using the D-Wave quantum annealer. The team at Volkswagen consists among others of Gabriele Compostella and Florian Neukart. Read further...

Mellanox Technologies Ltd., a supplier of high-performance, end-to-end interconnect solutions for data centre servers and storage systems, has signed a strategic collaboration with HPE to enable the industry's most efficient high-performance computing and machine learning data centres, based on the innovative technologies from both companies. The mutual solutions will enable customers to leverage the InfiniBand and Gen-Z open standards to maximize their return on investment for current and future data centres and applications. Read further...

Super Micro Computer Inc., a global expert in compute, storage and networking technologies including green computing, has introduced its latest X11 generation High-Performance Computing (HPC) solutions at the International Supercomputing Conference being held from June 18 to 22 at Messe Frankfurt, Booth D-1130. Read further...

Cray Inc. has launched the Cray Urika-XC analytics software suite, bringing graph analytics, deep learning, and robust Big Data analytics tools to the company's flagship line of Cray XC supercomputers. The Cray Urika-XC analytics software suite empowers data scientists to make breakthrough discoveries previously hidden within massive datasets, and achieve faster time-to-insight while leveraging the scale and performance of Cray XC supercomputers. Read further...

Hyperion Research, which is known as the former IDC HPC team, has issued the newest recipients of the HPC Innovation Excellence Award at ISC17 in Frankfurt, Germany. The programme's main objectives are to showcase return on investment (ROI) and success stories involving HPC; to help other users better understand the benefits of adopting HPC; and to help justify HPC investments, including for small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs). Read further...

InfiniBand solutions accelerate the majority of the new TOP500 systems deployed in 2017, two and half times more systems than OmniPath and nearly three times more versus other proprietary interconnect products. InfiniBand accelerates 60 percent of the total HPC systems on the list and 48 percent of the Petaflop infrastructures, an increase from 45 percent as reported in the November 2016 TOP500 list. Moreover, InfiniBand solutions connect world-leading Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning platforms, including the newly listed platform from Facebook. This demonstrates the strong adoption of InfiniBand and its leading market share in high-performance computing and artificial intelligence. Mellanox continues to connect the fastest supercomputer on the list, delivering highest scalability, performance and efficiency. Mellanox Ethernet solutions also connect several of the 10 Gigabit Ethernet, all of the 40 Gigabit Ethernet systems and the first 100 Gigabit Ethernet system. Read further...

Univa, a data centre workload optimization company, has contributed its Universal Resource Broker (URB) technology to the open source community. The Universal Resource Broker is a software solution that allows distributed application frameworks written for Apache Mesos to run seamlessly on Univa Grid Engine. Making URB available as an open-source project opens the door to continued innovation, enabling community contributors to build adapters to additional workload managers and application frameworks. In addition to open sourcing the project, Univa is extending URB to support Kubernetes clusters as well. Read further...

CoolIT Systems Inc., a global expert in efficient liquid cooling technologies for HPC, Cloud and Enterprise markets, is returning to the International Supercomputing Conference - High Performance (ISC17) in Frankfurt as a Bronze Sponsor and Exhibitor for the sixth consecutive year. ISC17 will feature a large range of HPC vendors, universities and research organisations gathering from around the world during June 19-21, 2017. CoolIT will be showcasing a range of new liquid cooling innovations including new server solutions for Dell EMC and Hewlett Packard Enterprise plus a full range of liquid cooling infrastructure products. Read further...

Cavium Inc., a provider of semiconductor products that enable secure and intelligent processing for enterprise, data centre, Cloud, wired and wireless networking, will showcase ThunderX-based server platforms and software for high-performance computing (HPC) at ISC 2017. The conference will take place in Frankfurt Germany at the Messe Frankfurt, June 18-22. Exhibition dates are June 19-21. Read further...

Penguin Computing, a provider of high-performance computing, enterprise data centre and Cloud solutions, has made available its Tundra Extreme Scale (ES) server platforms based on Cavium Inc., second generation ARMv8-based ThunderX2 processors. Tundra ES Valkre servers powered by ThunderX2 processors are now available for public order, and a standard 19" rack mount models will ship in 3rd Calendar Quarter 2017. Read further...

CoolIT Systems Inc., a world expert in energy efficient liquid cooling solutions for HPC, Cloud and Enterprise markets, has signed a collaboration with Dell EMC to provide a factory-installed Direct Contact Liquid Cooling solution to address power and cooling challenges for a wide range of customers, especially in verticals such as High Performance Computing (HPC) and High Frequency Trading. Read further...

Inspur has unveiled GX4, a new flexible and high scalability AI accelerating box at ISC 2017. The GX4 is able to achieve the decoupling co-processor resources including CPU and GPU, Xeon Phi and FPGA, expand the computing power on demand, and provide highly flexible support to various AI applications in GPU-accelerated computing. This is another innovative effort followed by the release of the ultra-high density AI supercomputer AGX-2 last month at GTC 2017 held in San Jose, California, United States. Read further...

Inspur and Intel made a joint announcement at ISC 2017 that they would comprehensively enhance the Knights Landing Evaluation and Escalation Programme - KEEP Programme - to build the world's first Knight's Mill (KNM) Infrastructure Experience Platform by the end of the year 2017. Both companies also revealed that the application channels towards worldwide deep-learning and HPC users would open at the first quarter of next year. Read further...

DataDirect Networks (DDN) has launched a series of performance and reliability innovations across its storage appliances, aimed at meeting the growing demand for storage performance, simplicity and reliability at scale in a new era of data-centric computing. Infinite Memory Engine (IME) and Storage Fusion Architecture (SFA) product lines now feature significant new data protection and performance improvements that allow DDN customers to deploy a complete suite of storage services across even the most demanding emerging IoT, deep learning and technical HPC environments. Read further...

Penguin Computing, a provider of high performance computing, enterprise data centre and Cloud solutions, has launchedFrostByte with ThinkParQ BeeGFS, the latest member of the family of software-defined storage solutions. FrostByte is Penguin Computing's scalable storage solution for HPC clusters, high-performance enterprise applications and data intensive analytics. Read further...