Supercomputing & Red Hat: What’s Happening at ISC 2017?

Twice a year the most prominent supercomputing sites in the world get to showcase their capabilities and compete for a Top500 spot. With Linux dominating the list, Red Hat is paying close attention to the latest changes that will be announced at International Supercomputing (ISC) show in Frankfurt, Germany between June 18 to June 22, 2017.

While supercomputers of the past were often proprietary, the trend of building them out of commodity components has dominated the landscape in the past two decades. But recently the definition of “commodity“ in HPC has been morphing. Traditional solutions are routinely augmented by various acceleration technologies, cache-coherent interconnects are becoming mainstream and boutique hardware and software technologies previously reserved for highly specialized solutions are being adopted by major HPC sites at scale.

Developing new and adapting existing highly scalable applications to take advantage of the new technological advances across multiple deployment domains is the greatest challenge facing HPC sites. This is where the operating system can provide

a unified interface to the underlying hardware and interconnects and serve as a foundation for modular and standardized application stacks that take advantage of enhanced system capabilities.

Life Across Architectures

In November 2016, we announced that Red Hat had joined the OpenHPC Project, bringing our expertise and leadership in the open source world to one of the leading open supercomputing communities. We continue to help drive open innovation and standardization in high-performance computing, and are eager to share some of our key advances and alternatives to bespoke HPC stacks in the booth H-722 at ISC from June 19 to June 21, 2017.

We’ll be showcasing the power and flexibility of Red Hat Enterprise Linux across multiple architectures, including ARM v8-A, x86 and POWER little endian, by way of the Game of Life. Adrian Reber created an intriguing demo that you could experience first hand in our booth or read about it in Adrian’s post.

Another great example of partner-driven collaboration is the advanced technology demonstration by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cavium, and Red Hat. Come to the booth and see how our efforts deliver inherent value to HPC users.

Open Source, Innovation and the Future of HPC

Historically, HPC workloads have had to rely on custom-built software stacks, most of which relied on proprietary software and overly-specialized hardware. Red Hat is bringing change to the supercomputing arena, from the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform tailored for HPC workloads to massively scalable, fully open cloud infrastructure, along with the management and automation technologies needed to keep these deployments running smoothly.

At ISC, be sure to check out demonstrations of:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for High Performance Computing
• Red Hat OpenStack Platform in HPC environments (and learn more about how Oak Ridge National Laboratory used Red Hat OpenStack Platform to make supercomputing more accessible)
• Red Hat Ceph Storage (and learn more about how Massachusetts Open Cloud supports big data analysis with Ceph storage)
• Red Hat CloudForms
• Ansible and Ansible Tower by Red Hat

Red Hat’s chief ARM architect Jon Masters will also be presenting on the future of high-performance computing and cache-coherent system interconnects during the show. Be sure to catch his presentation at booth M-210 in the exhibit hall at 4:50 p.m. on Monday, June 19, during the show.

See demos in our booth, discuss trends, challenges, and opportunities you're facing with our global team, claim your red fedora hat and enter to win a Raspberry Pi 3 running Fedora that we're raffling off at the end of each conference day.

We look forward to seeing you in Frankfurt!