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...

After Erich Strohmaier presented his analysis on the new edition of the TOP500, Satoshi Matsuoka from the Tokyo Institute of Technology shared his insights about exascale with the audience. About ten years ago, workshops were initiated on exascale and it was said that exascale would be reachable by 2020. If we consider the projected performance development, is it possible to have exaflop power by 2020? The energy efficiency might be 50 GFlops/W in late 2020 but even that still remains to be seen. Read further...

Lenovo has completed the delivery and implementation of the world's largest, next-generation Intel-based supercomputer at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). The 11.1 petaFLOP supercomputer called MareNostrum 4, will be housed in the world's "most beautiful data centre" at the Chapel Torre Girona at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain, and will be used to power diverse science from human genome research, bioinformatics and biomechanics to weather forecasting and atmospheric composition. This new system, which will continue to grow over time, is listed at #13 on the latest TOP500 list that was released on June 19 at ISC17. Read further...

The Workflows and Distributed Computing team at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center has launched a new release, version 2.1 - codename Bougainvillea, of the programming environment COMPSs. This version of COMPSs, available from today, updates the result of the team's work in the last years on the provision of a set of tools that helps developers to program and execute their applications efficiently on distributed computational infrastructures such as clusters, grids and Clouds. COMPSs is a task based programming model known for notably improving the performance of large scale applications by automatically parallelizing their execution. Read further...

Fujitsu Limited and Fujitsu Taiwan Limited will build a new supercomputer system for Taiwan's National Center for High-performance Computing, National Applied Research Laboratories (NCHC) that will have the highest performance in the country at the time it commences operations, scheduled for May 2018. The new system will serve as the core platform for research and development in Taiwan, fostering the development and growth of Taiwan's overall industries and economy. Read further...

At the International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt, The Weather Company, an IBM Business, has launched a plan to improve weather prediction globally via a new collaboration with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), a federally funded research and development center for the atmosphere and Earth's geospace systems. Read further...

The High Performance Conjugate Gradients (HPCG) Benchmark list has been announced at ISC'17. This is the seventh list produced for the emerging benchmark designed to complement the traditional High Performance LINPACK (HPL) benchmark used as the official metric for ranking the TOP 500 systems. The first HPCG list was announced at ISC'14 three years ago, containing only 15 entries. Release twice a year, the number of entries has steadily increased. The current list contains 110 entries as HPCG continues to gain traction in the HPC community. Read further...

On June 19, the K computer took the first place for the second consecutive time in the HPCG benchmark, a new index developed to create a more realistic view of supercomputer performance compared to the commonly used LINPACK benchmark. This success, which surpasses the second place achieved in 2014 and 2015, was made possible by subsequent improvements of the performance of the system and applications. Read further...

At the International Supercomputing Conference 2017, IBM Business Partner and OpenPOWER Foundation member, E4 Computer Engineering, an Italian technology provider of leading-edge solutions for HPC, data analytics and AI, announced that D.A.V.I.D.E. - Development for an Added Value Infrastructure Designed in Europe, a multi-node cluster powered by IBM POWER8 processor technology with NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU accelerators and NVIDIA NVLink interconnect technology, entered the prestigious TOP500 list. Read further...

As new digital economies continue to rise across industries from biomedicine research to autonomous driving, generating a plethora of data, there is a great demand for high-performance computing (HPC) to advance systems for scalability and agility to support optimal data use in compute, storage, memory, network and security. At the 2017 International Supercomputing Conference (ISC 17), Intel demonstrated that to manage these diverse workloads efficiently, HPC systems will need to evolve to enable new levels of performance, scalability, memory bandwidth and I/O capabilities. Intel discussed how new approaches to HPC system design and flexible delivery models are enabling users to get more value from HPC than ever before. Read further...

At ISC17, Dell EMC has signed an agreement to further democratize and advance HPC, as well as additions to its Ready Solutions portfolio that will help customers further optimize their HPC projects. Working with leading researchers and innovators worldwide, Dell EMC HPC solutions empower customers to make critical advances in industries such as research, life sciences and manufacturing. Read further...