Disrupt Forward: Announcing the Beowulf Foundation
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- Written by Douglas Eadline
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From the self reference department
The Beowulf Foundation was announced by Douglas Eadline and Lara Kisielewska at the SC 2021 Beowulf Bash in St Louis. The idea for a “Foundation” emerged from the continued discussion amongst the Beowulf community about the supporting the “Beowulf Ethos,” that began with the Beowulf Project at NASA using commodity hardware and open source software to build high-performance systems at low cost. Initially considered an anomaly, the “wrong ideas” demonstrated by the Beowulf Project changed the face of modern supercomputing.
The goal of the Beowulf Foundation is not to relive the past, but to support the “wrong” ideas of the future that may lead to further breakthroughs in high performance computing. As stated by Eadline:
Open, Scalable, and Portable 3D Data Visualization
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- Written by Number Six
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A new open source, portable, and scalable 3D visualization standard is in the works. Announced by Khronos Group ANARI (Analytic Rendering Interface) 1.0 Provisional Specification for scientific visualization and scalable 3D Data visualization. ANARI will enable users to quickly and easily build a scene description and create 3D images. Most importantly, ANARI doesn’t specify the rendering details; the rendering gets left to the backend engine which provides a simplified way to develop a visualization application with cross-vendor portability including ray tracing. From the announcement:
"The scientific visualization ecosystem includes key visualization application vendors such as VMD, VTK/ParaView, and VisIt that have actively participated in ANARI’s design. There are also early ANARI implementations in development by AMD, Intel and NVIDIA that will provide access to their Radeon ProRender, OSPRay, and VisRTX rendering engines respectively".
The specification is provisional and a full version 1 should be released soon (there is an open SDK available). There is also a good (and short) Overview Video that explains the benefits of ANARI.
Scale Up Your HPC Job Interviews
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- Written by Alex McKee
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Give your HPC resume a performance boost by creating a Resume Profile
If your job search was a parallel program, then your resume would be the code that outputs interviews. You wouldn’t want to scale up your job count until your code is optimized and bug free, right?
An inefficient resume can cause you a lot of wasted time, extending your job search out for several months. Sure, brute forcing your job search by sending out 100’s of resumes will typically land you a job, eventually. But it’s likely that you will burn-out before then, or get into a “I’ll take anything I can get” mindset.
So what can you do to optimize your resume to increase your interview rate?
There are several ways, but one stands out in my book as the most important, and that is adding a resume profile at the top of your resume.
Intersect360 Updated HPC Forecast Available
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- Written by Number Six
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Updated Forcaset Intersect360
HPC and hyperscale analyst Addison Snell from Intersect360 Research gave a presentation on August 6, 2020. The entire presentation and slides are available on Intersect 360 webpage (Thanks i360).
If you are curious how HPC may play out in the COVID-19 pandemic, watch the presentation (including questions at the end). Slides are also helpful, but Addison provides good context . For the impatient, here are the conclusions:
- Demand for high-performance computing endures. HPC is a long-term, stable growth market.
- Regardless of COVID-19, dynamics were shifting toward:
- Increase in cloud computing, or other cloud-like deployments
- Increase in government spending
- COVID-19 accelerates both of these trends
- HPC vendors should expect purchases to be delayed in 2020, followed by a boom year in 2021 as sales cycles come back in. However, not all lost revenue is recaptured.
- There is significant risk in this forecast. Two significant factors are:
- How long COVID-19 persists as an economic damper.
- The health of HPC vendors and their ability to ride out the market instability.
Hadoop Is Not a Toaster
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- Written by Douglas Eadline
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From the "Here comes the cluestick" department
Apache Hadoop has been in the press lately. Some of the content has not been positive and, often times, reflects a misunderstanding of how Hadoop relates to data processing. Indeed, we seem to be in the Trough of Disillusionment in the Technology Hype Cycle. In my opinion, many of these recent "insights" seem to come from the belief that Hadoop is some kind of toaster. For the record, Hadoop can make great toast and as it traveled up the hype curve, market exuberance thought good tasting toast could do anything. Turns out, these days, people want something to go along with their toast. What happened to the great toast?
Nothing happened to the toast. It turns out that Hadoop may have started out as a toaster, but now it is quite a bit more. Hadoop has evolved into a full kitchen. To understand modern Hadoop technology, one must understand that just like kitchen that is designed to prepare food for consumption, Hadoop is designed as a platform to prepare data for analysis and insights.
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