Data-Intensive Computing to Simulate the Brain

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Understanding how the human brain works will take more than brains. Along with the planet’s smartest scientific minds, it will take never-before-achieved computing capabilities. The science and technology required to decode the human brain is a scientific final frontier …  and Professor Dr. Dirk Pleiter is on the front lines. The theoretical physics professor and research group leader at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) in Jülich, Germany, is part of the Human Brain Project (HBP), a 10-year-long European research initiative tasked with creating a working simulation of the brain. “Understanding the human brain is one of the greatest challenges facing 21st century science,” states the HBP’s report to the European Commission. “If ... [ Read More ]

AI Meets HPC at ISC 2017

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Running astrophysics applications with 200,000 MPI tasks … diagnosing and treating autism spectrum disorders … researching the secure nature of the Advanced Encryption Standard algorithm. Those are among the many research dreams that HPC professionals talked about at the Cray booth at ISC High Performance 2017 in Frankfurt, Germany last week. Cray’s mission is to help customers realize their most challenging data science and research goals, and at ISC we took the next step with the introduction of the Cray® Urika®-XC analytics software suite, which embodies the convergence of supercomputing and analytics. With the new Urika-XC software suite, users can now run analytics, graph and AI workloads simultaneously on the same system, ... [ Read More ]

Bio-IT World 2017: Life Sciences Embrace Cloud

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Hope you had a chance to attend the 16th annual, three-day Boston Bio-IT World Conference & Expo this year. Competitions included: Best Practices awards announcements and the Benjamin Franklin Award, and the show planners named the 2017 Best of Show winners. Tracks for the conference included: data and storage management, cloud computing, networking hardware, bioinformatics, next-gen sequencing informatics, data security and more. Face to face As many times as I’ve walked Bio-IT’s exhibit hall floor, the excitement of seeing in person someone I’ve been interacting with via email and phone – in some cases for years – and hearing their thoughts still pumps me up. True, social media has diminished the impact of conferences, but the ... [ Read More ]

Cray’s New Urika-XC Suite: the Convergence of Supercomputing and Analytics

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Cray today announced the launch of the Cray® Urika®-XC analytics software suite, which brings 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. With the Urika-XC software suite, analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads can run alongside scientific modeling and simulations on XC supercomputers, eliminating costly and time-consuming movement of data between systems. Cray XC customers will be able to run ... [ Read More ]

Data Analytics Rule at Spark Summit West 2017

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Spark Summit West is always well attended, and this year was no exception. Data engineers, data scientists, programmers, architects and technology enthusiasts descended on San Francisco’s Moscone Center earlier this month to learn all about the latest developments with Apache Spark™ and its massive ecosystem. Complexity of analytics use cases and data science was a dominant theme throughout this year’s event. The keynote by the CEO and co-founder of Databricks, Ali Ghodsi, highlighted some of the challenges with implementing large-scale analytics projects. Ghodsi discussed how the continued growth of Apache Spark has resulted in myriad innovative uses cases, from churn analytics to genome sequencing. These applications are difficult to ... [ Read More ]