ISC 2016Frankfurt, Germany | June 20-23, 2016

A recap through the OpenPOWER lens

During Day 1 of International

Supercomputing 2016, presenters

emphasized the importance of

collaboration across the entire HPC

infrastructure in order to drive

performance.

Our belief is that we need to

do what makes sense for our

customers, and they’re telling

us they want open,

collaborative partnerships

between vendors, and no

single technology vendor

can solve their problems.SumitGupta

VP, High Performance

Computing & Data Analytics

IBM

Coupling the most powerful CPU

with the most powerful GPU is a

really powerful story, but you

have to compile for it. We’re

making porting to OpenPOWER

plus GPUs easy with PGI.

Doug Miles

Director of PGI Compilers

NVIDIA

And OpenPOWER

members were at

the forefront of

the conversation,

demonstrating

how they each

bring their best-in-

breed solutions to

our HPC-focused

ecosystem.

You can’t do

HPC without

visualization. Marc Hamilton

VP, Solutions Architecture and Engineering

NVIDIA

ConnectX-5 is not only the

fastest, it's the smartest adapter

yet, advancing in-network

computing with new features

like MPI offload.GiladShainer

Vice President, Marketing

Mellanox

We’re creating one of the

largest R&D

organizations, pushing

storage even further.

Andreas Krause

Head of Product Line Management & Strategy for Active

Archive and Cloud

HGST

Many of the presenters

focused on cutting-edge

technology, like artificial

intelligence, that wouldn’t

be possible without the

might of an entire, open

ecosystem behind it.

AI is the new

electricity.Andrew Ng, Baidu

Today, given a single short

utterance in Mandarin, we

can transcribe at a level of

accuracy greater than a

single human transcribing

the same speech.Dr. Andrew Ng,

Chief Scientist

Baidu

AI and HPC give us superpowers. We

can help blind people see, build self-

driving cars, and fight crime. I hope all of

us will take our superpowers and do

what’s best for humanity.

Dr. Andrew Ng,

Chief Scientist

Baidu

The advantages of the

OpenPOWER

architecture were

clear.

We’re an agnostic company, so our goal

is to ID the best platform for a given

code. We’ve found that Power can be

exploited for a broad range of

applications, especially memory

intensive ones.

Simone Tinti

VP of Development and Operations

E4 Computer Engineering

We saw in benchmarks that

POWER8 has better memory

bandwidth. A lot of applications

require high memory bandwidth

so this suits our needs.Andre Tattar

Student

University of Tartu

During Day 2 at

ISC 2016, we

learned about

the importance

of HPC for all

types of

organizations.

$673 in revenue per dollar of

HPC investment

per dollar of HPC investment$44

$3.9M

of profits/cost savings

per new innovation

of HPC investment

HPC offers massive ROI potential:

And the

importance of the

HPC community

and all its

members in

addressing global

problems.

This community is charged more

than any other for responsibly

charting our future course and the

preservation of the planet. Women

are in it for the long haul - we play an

extremely important role in this.

Carolyn Coke Reed Devany

President

Data Vortex Technologies

But challenges,

like the

availability of

HPC resources

and the need for

specialized

hardware,

remain.

There is currently a discrepancy between the

requests of compute cycles by scientists, with

the computing resources available.

It adds up to core hours of

lost science.

By bolstering existing nodes with GPU

acceleration, we can alleviate this.

200B

Dr. Peter Messmer

Senior Developer Technology Engineer

NVIDIA

Traditionally the HPC community dealt

mostly with weather and climate, but with

environmental computing we must think

about exposure and vulnerability of the

population with extreme events, which

introduces the complexity of disparate

data at different scales and the noisy data

of human behavior. It's a different type of

computing problem that requires

heterogeneous and specialized

architectures.

WilcoHazeleger

Netherlands eScienceCenter

It's about efficiency - it's nice to

have a supercomputer, but at

humanoid robot scale it's not

possible. There's a need for

specialized hardware.

Dr. TamimAsfour

KIT

But the OpenPOWER

Foundation and its

members are taking the

reins to address these

issues.

We’re building systems for the

cognitive era. Systems that

perform traditional simulation

and augment human intelligence.

We have the HPC systems that

can make both possible.

Brett Newman

HPC Group

IBM

Minsky came together through

the combined efforts of IBM,

NVIDIA, Mellanox and Wistron.

Eliminating the PCIe bottleneck

with NVLink will allow GPUs to

reach new levels of application

performance.

Steve Fields

Chief Engineer Power Systems

IBM

This makes it the world’s best

system for HPC and clustered

analytics.

We're excited to start showcasing

OpenPOWER. Our biggest interest is a gateway

into a GPU platform with NVIDIA using P100

and NVLink, which gives us the ability to handle

larger workload sizes. Not having that interface

in our x86 machines was a bottleneck for our

customers.

William Wu

Senior Product Manager

Penguin Computing

We see a major

opportunity working with

OpenPOWER for the next

generation of high output

nodes, especially in HPC.

Working with IBM allows

us to enable other

OpenPOWER members in

adopting Asetek liquid

cooling in the data center

and for HPC.

Larry Vertal

Asetek

And with the

right tools in

place, it’s only a

matter of time

before we reach

a brand new

frontier of

computing.

Everyone is talking about deep

learning. It’s a reinvention of

existing algorithms and

approaches driven by the

availability of Big Data and

accelerators. Carlo Nardone

Senior Solution Architect, EMEA

NVIDIA

As ISC 2016 continues on,

more and more OpenPOWER

discussions are fostering

more and more innovations

in HPC.

During the third

and final day of

ISC, we learned

about the role that

our OpenPOWER

members play in

Industry, and what

they can enable

for businesses.

Customers need choice, and

Samsung works with ecosystems

like OpenPOWER so HPC users

have the ability to choose between

implementation options, and

aren’t locked into single source

solutions.Thomas Arenz

Director of Strategic Marketing, EMEA

Samsung Semiconductor

These systems thrive by

getting data into the

hardware, and our goal as a

systems provider is to feed

the beast.Scott Soutter

Product Manager HPC Systems,

IBM

50%Caffe-AlexNet

savings

55%

60%

NAMD

savings

MILC

GPUs lower the cost of HPC

Marc Hamilton

NVIDIA

savings

The combination of POWER8's

processing strengths,

OpenPOWER technology, and

SoftLayer's flexibility allows clients

to rapidly deploy Linux workloads

on bare metal systems.

Brad Brech

Power Systems Distinguished Engineer

IBM

Including the growing

convergence of high

performance

computing and high

performance data

analytics.

Hadoop’s infrastructure is

similar to what we’re doing in

HPC, but it’s doing high

performance data analytics for

industry.

Jan Wender

HPC Services and Software, Team Leader

Atos

But the growth of

cognitive

computing, deep

learning, and

machine learning

remained a key

driver of

conversations.

The ability to choose from

platforms, runtimes and

deployment models

allows the creation of

purposeful architectures

that will define digital and

cognitive success.

CalistaRedmond

President

OpenPOWER Foundation

We believe

OpenPOWER will be

very important for the

future of cognitive

computing.

Alessandro Curioni

Vice President, Europe and Director

IBM Research

We mean for cognitive

computing to be a

revolution, and for a

revolution you need an

ecosystem.

Alessandro Curioni

Vice President, Europe and Director

IBM Research

When you have your data you start

training your deep learning

network. It’s an iterative process

that takes a long time and you

need powerful hardware.

JeroenBedorf

Senior System Architect

Minds.ai

The biggest application of

supercomputing will not be in dense

matrix floating point operations or large

data processing for pattern recognition,

it will in fact be symbolic computing,

the creation of machines that think.

More importantly, machines that

understand.

Thomas Sterling

Professor of Intelligent Systems Engineering

Indiana University

But as we continue to ask

more and more questions

about our world, and the

problems keep changing,

even greater challenges

for HPC are on the

horizon that will need

technologies we haven’t

even dreamt of… yet.

118

10billion

The years that it will

take an Exaflop

supercomputer to

solve a binary

optimization problem

with 512 variables.

Rupak Biswas

Director of Exploration Technology Directorate

NASA Ames Research Center

This concludes our coverage of ISC 2016. Please be sure to follow us on Twitter at @OpenPOWERorg

and share our coverage with your colleagues in the HPC industry.

Until next year: Auf Wiedersehen!