Since 1987 – Covering the Fastest Computers in the World and the People Who Run Them
Since 1987 – Covering the Fastest Computers in the World and the People Who Run Them
August 1, 2022
Here’s a look at how HPC, AI, and other technologies are being used throughout the world by organizations to enhance healthcare research, drug development, public health, and patient outcomes.
The ability to gather, process, and analyze data from genomics, bioinformatics, microscopy, medical imaging, and other areas in the life sciences has been supercharged with HPC systems and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. Researchers can sequence vast quantities of DNA data faster than ever before with supercomputer resources and use AI to identify patterns and make predictions. They can now use these available and affordable technologies to study genes and proteins, to predict health events, automate imaging analysis, and generate ideas for improving healthcare delivery. Here’s a look at how HPC, AI, and other technologies are being used throughout the world by organizations to enhance healthcare research, drug development, public health, and patient outcomes.
The COVID-19 pandemic has provided a test case for the ability of HPC to accelerate genomic sequencing as scientists around the world seek to track, understand, and combat the SARS-CoV-2 virus. In England, researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute have tracked the spread and mutations of the virus by sequencing over 300,000 coronavirus genomes. The institute’s HPC cluster has 38,000 cores of compute, 23.5 petabytes of file systems, and a 30-petabyte virtualized storage repository, all supported by a 60 Gbps network backbone. It’s complemented with an OpenStack private cloud with more compute and storage resources.
With HPC architectures and the use of machine learning and AI constantly evolving, the institute has worked with companies like Dell Technologies to build their HPC environment. Genomic sequencing data is stored for computational analysis on Dell PowerScale scale-out storage. Researchers use the data to determine the relatedness of different viruses and help identify chains of transmission, super-spreader events, and fast-growing variants.
A similar collaboration for genomic research between the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas and Dell Technologies spawned the Lonestar6 supercomputer, which can perform almost three quadrillion mathematical operations per second. It is being used by faculty members from throughout the University of Texas system at other universities for COVID-19 drug discovery and genomic research.
In another pandemic-related role for HPC, the staff at the Ohio Supercomputer Center at Ohio State University designed the COVID-19 Analytics and Targeted Surveillance System (CATS) to help school administrators decide whether it was safe to bring students back to classrooms or if fully remote or hybrid learning should be used instead. Supported by a HPC system with Dell PowerEdge servers with Intel® Xeon® processors, CATS serves 21 school districts and 238,000 students and tracks data like school nurse visits, student and teacher absences, and other metrics to watch for outbreaks and inform decision making. Sixteen different dashboards are used daily by thousands of people to provide the rationale for decisions like closing or opening schools or specific buildings on campuses.
In yet another use of HPC for COVID-19 research, Swansea University in Wales has built an open platform for mathematical modeling of disease transmission. It provides comparisons of multiple models to help researchers determine demographic, socioeconomic, and clinical risk factors for COVID-19 infection, morbidity, and mortality, among other uses. Supercomputer resources at two hubs, built by Dell Technologies and Atos, contain more than 13,000 cores, tens of terabytes of memory, and hundreds of terabytes of high-performance storage, all interconnected by low-latency, high-bandwidth networking.
The Cineca Consortium is a national supercomputing facility in Italy that supports public and industry research institutions with HPC resources. Among Cineca’s 4000 projects is the Human Brain Project, which, in conjunction with 90 European research institutes, aspires to be the world’s most detailed model of the brain. A dedicated supercomputer has been built for the project with HPC technology from Dell and Intel.
To-date, researchers participating in the Human Brain Project have used HPC to explore brain mechanisms behind cognition, learning, and plasticity. Their research has led to more than 1,400 journal articles, a new treatment for spinal cord injuries, a brain prosthesis for the blind, and better modeling and understanding of epilepsy and autism.
A collaboration among researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine, the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and Temple University, the [email protected] distributed computing project uses HPC to simulate how proteins impact a variety of diseases. To visualize protein dynamics on a molecular level requires enormous computational power and the project’s founders came up with an original HPC solution — harnessing the unused processing power of PCs from volunteers around the world. Each volunteer downloads an application that runs small parts of much larger simulations for the project. On the backend servers, algorithms put the separate parts together to create composite simulations.
Today this distributed HPC network has the equivalent of 2.4 exaflops of computational power, making it the first exascale computer. Teams from Dell Technologies and VMware are part of the legions of volunteers and the [email protected] client software resides on a VMware vSphere appliance. In December 2020, [email protected] was awarded the HPCwire Reader’s Choice Award for Best Use of HPC in Response to Societal Plights for its simulations of SARS-CoV-2 proteins.
For more on Dell Technologies for healthcare, life sciences, and HPC, please visit DellTechnologies.com/healthcare and DellTechnologies.com/hpc.
More Off The Wire
Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industy updates delivered to you every week!
July 29, 2022
Intel is welcoming new customers as it reimagines its future as a chip manufacturing powerhouse, but it will have to earn its stripes by proving it won’t repeat past fabrication mistakes that put the company in a tailspin, analysts said. The chipmaker this week signed up Mediatek as a new customer for its factories… Read more…
July 28, 2022
The U.S. House today passed the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, which authorizes $280 billion in funding to boost semiconductor research and production in the country. The passage of the bill paves the way for U.S. president Joe Biden to sign the legislation into law, which would officially open up funding… Read more…
July 28, 2022
The pitch for GE Research is easy, as Richard Arthur, senior director of computational methods research for GE Research, explained at the latest meeting of the DOE’s Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee (ASCAC): a third of the electrons in the world that flow through devices are generated on GE equipment; every two seconds… Read more…
July 28, 2022
Scientists have uncovered a new type of quantum cryptography that utilizes one of the same laws of physics used in building quantum computers: quantum entanglement. Quantum entanglement, or what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance,” refers to the phenomenon of two subatomic particles being linked to one another in an exclusive… Read more…
July 28, 2022
As it’s become clearer that hybrid quantum-classical computing solutions will likely be necessary to achieve practical quantum computing, there’s been an increasing emphasis on developing software platforms to build Read more…
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and AWS are joining forces to provide a training opportunity for emerging HPC tools and applications. RADIUSS (Rapid Application Development via an Institutional Universal Software Stack) is a broad suite of open-source software projects originating from LLNL. Read more…
Financial service organizations have large volumes of financial data that includes not only account balances or payment transactions but also information such as customer FICO scores, and credit history. Read more…
July 28, 2022
Tracking wildlife is much different — and harder — in water. Beyond the difficulties with visibility, fish are also buffeted by currents in a way that terrestrial animals are not, making it difficult to model their c Read more…
July 28, 2022
The U.S. House today passed the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, which authorizes $280 billion in funding to boost semiconductor research and production in the country. The passage of the bill paves the way for U.S. president Joe Biden to sign the legislation into law, which would officially open up funding… Read more…
July 28, 2022
The pitch for GE Research is easy, as Richard Arthur, senior director of computational methods research for GE Research, explained at the latest meeting of the DOE’s Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee (ASCAC): a third of the electrons in the world that flow through devices are generated on GE equipment; every two seconds… Read more…
July 28, 2022
Scientists have uncovered a new type of quantum cryptography that utilizes one of the same laws of physics used in building quantum computers: quantum entanglement. Quantum entanglement, or what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance,” refers to the phenomenon of two subatomic particles being linked to one another in an exclusive… Read more…
July 28, 2022
As it’s become clearer that hybrid quantum-classical computing solutions will likely be necessary to achieve practical quantum computing, there’s been an in Read more…
July 28, 2022
Tracking wildlife is much different — and harder — in water. Beyond the difficulties with visibility, fish are also buffeted by currents in a way that terre Read more…
July 27, 2022
Alloys like steel, bronze and copper have become fundamental materials for many aspects of human life and industry. But the needs of the modern world are ever-e Read more…
July 27, 2022
Graphics processors are taking on a new role beyond gaming and artificial intelligence – they are now serving as surrogate quantum computers until the real hardware arrives. The Jülich Supercomputing Centre is using GPUs and a software toolkit from Nvidia to emulate quantum computers and research… Read more…
July 26, 2022
In this regular feature, HPCwire highlights newly published research in the high-performance computing community and related domains. From parallel programmin Read more…
April 18, 2022
Getting a glimpse into Nvidia’s R&D has become a regular feature of the spring GTC conference with Bill Dally, chief scientist and senior vice president of research, providing an overview of Nvidia’s R&D organization and a few details on current priorities. This year, Dally focused mostly on AI tools that Nvidia is both developing and using in-house to improve… Read more…
May 11, 2022
Intel has shared more details on a new interconnect that is the foundation of the company’s long-term plan for x86, Arm and RISC-V architectures to co-exist in a single chip package. The semiconductor company is taking a modular approach to chip design with the option for customers to cram computing blocks such as CPUs, GPUs and AI accelerators inside a single chip package. Read more…
May 30, 2022
In April 2018, the U.S. Department of Energy announced plans to procure a trio of exascale supercomputers at a total cost of up to $1.8 billion dollars. Over the ensuing four years, many announcements were made, many deadlines were missed, and a pandemic threw the world into disarray. Now, at long last, HPE and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have announced that the first of those… Read more…
July 19, 2022
The U.S. Senate on Tuesday passed a major hurdle that will open up close to $52 billion in grants for the semiconductor industry to boost manufacturing, supply chain and research and development. U.S. senators voted 64-34 in favor of advancing the CHIPS Act, which sets the stage for the final consideration… Read more…
May 30, 2022
The 59th installment of the Top500 list, issued today from ISC 2022 in Hamburg, Germany, officially marks a new era in supercomputing with the debut of the first-ever exascale system on the list. Frontier, deployed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, achieved 1.102 exaflops in its fastest High Performance Linpack run, which was completed… Read more…
June 8, 2022
The first-ever appearance of a previously undetectable quantum excitation known as the axial Higgs mode – exciting in its own right – also holds promise for developing and manipulating higher temperature quantum materials… Read more…
June 21, 2022
Additional details of the architecture of the exascale El Capitan supercomputer were disclosed today by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL) Terri Read more…
April 21, 2022
PsiQuantum, founded in 2016 by four researchers with roots at Bristol University, Stanford University, and York University, is one of a few quantum computing startups that’s kept a moderately low PR profile. (That’s if you disregard the roughly $700 million in funding it has attracted.) The main reason is PsiQuantum has eschewed the clamorous public chase for… Read more…
July 1, 2022
HPCwire takes you inside the Frontier datacenter at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tenn., for an interview with Frontier Project Direc Read more…
June 15, 2022
AMD is getting personal with chips as it sets sail to make products more to the liking of its customers. The chipmaker detailed a modular chip future in which customers can mix and match non-AMD processors in a custom chip package. “We are focused on making it easier to implement chips with more flexibility,” said Mark Papermaster, chief technology officer at AMD during the analyst day meeting late last week. Read more…
May 31, 2022
Intel reiterated it is well on its way to merging its roadmap of high-performance CPUs and GPUs as it shifts over to newer manufacturing processes and packaging technologies in the coming years. The company is merging the CPU and GPU lineups into a chip (codenamed Falcon Shores) which Intel has dubbed an XPU. Falcon Shores… Read more…
June 16, 2022
The long-troubled, hotly anticipated MareNostrum 5 supercomputer finally has a vendor: Atos, which will be supplying a system that includes both Nvidia and Inte Read more…
April 6, 2022
MLCommons today released its latest MLPerf inferencing results, with another strong showing by Nvidia accelerators inside a diverse array of systems. Roughly fo Read more…
March 8, 2022
Just a couple of weeks ago, the Indian government promised that it had five HPC systems in the final stages of installation and would launch nine new supercomputers this year. Now, it appears to be making good on that promise: the country’s National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) has announced the deployment of “PARAM Ganga” petascale supercomputer at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)… Read more…
June 22, 2022
You may recall that efforts proposed in 2020 to remake the National Science Foundation (Endless Frontier Act) have since expanded and morphed into two gigantic bills, the America COMPETES Act in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act in the U.S. Senate. So far, efforts to reconcile the two pieces of legislation have snagged and recent reports… Read more…
June 10, 2022
Close to a decade ago, AMD was in turmoil. The company was playing second fiddle to Intel in PCs and datacenters, and its road to profitability hinged mostly on Read more…
© 2022 HPCwire. All Rights Reserved. A Tabor Communications Publication
HPCwire is a registered trademark of Tabor Communications, Inc. Use of this site is governed by our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Tabor Communications, Inc. is prohibited.

source