Daily Archives: April 12, 2017

Quantum fields may keep us safe from the weird physics within event horizons

NASA/JPL-Caltech

By Leah Crane

Break out the censors black bars for naked singularities. Quantum effects could be obscuring these impossible predictions of general relativity, new calculations show.

Albert Einsteins classical equations of general relativity do a fairly good job of describing gravity and space-time. But when it comes to the most extreme objects, such as black holes, general relativity runs into problems.

Among those is the prediction of naked singularities: theoretical points in space-time where gravity becomes infinitely large, but without the signature blackness of real black holes. Black holes are cloaked by an event horizon, a boundary within which the gravitational force of a singularity is so strong that light cannot escape. Naked singularities have no such cloak.

But naked singularities streaking through space would be a problem for physics as we know it. Physics is founded on the assumption that you can predict the evolution of systems based on some set of initial conditions. But near a naked singularity, which is basically an abrupt puncture in space-time, that predictive power collapses. It produces an area rife with paradoxes, where anything could happen without warning.

That is an issue for the universe as we know it. We live in a rather classically predictable world and we dont see infinities everywhere, says Marc Casals at the Brazilian Center for Research in Physics in Rio de Janeiro.

This same problem is thought to arise in certain regions of regular black holes too, but their event horizons protect us, making sure we can never observe the infinity of a singularity or the implosion of our ability to describe sequences of events.

Physicists believe that although there are these bizarre solutions to Einsteins equations, once we add all the complications, these weird properties will disappear, says Ivan Agullo at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. But actually proving that is very difficult.

Now, new calculations by Casals and his colleagues show that quantum effects may force naked singularities to clothe themselves in event horizons just like normal black holes.

If, by some evil means, somebody created a naked singularity, it would quickly cease to exist, says Casals. These quantum fields would very quickly turn the naked singularity into a black hole. His teams calculations show that including quantum fields also eliminates the regions in black holes where physics breaks down.

While this still allows singularities to exist within event horizons, it protects the universe outside them from their weird physical effects. We dont smooth them out, but at least we shield them, says Casals.

But these calculations come with a caveat: although we live in a four-dimensional world, they apply to a simpler universe with only three dimensions, two of space and one of time.

Usually what happens in two-plus-one dimensions is a good guide to what would happen in the real world, so it certainly gives a springboard or a point of reference for explorations in the real world, says Robert Mann at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.

It is also a step towards understanding how gravity and general relativity, which operate on huge scales, interact with the quantum nature of matter, which is most evident in small systems. Many physicists hope that the two will eventually be combined into a single theory of quantum gravity.

There is this belief that quantum gravity will solve these undesirable features of classical space-time, says Casals. Our calculations show that this may be true.

Journal reference: Physical Review Letters, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.131102

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Quantum effects cloak impossible singularities with black holes ... - New Scientist

April 10, 2017 Rob Farber

Containers are an extremely mobile, safe and reproducible computing infrastructure that is now ready for production HPC computing. In particular, the freely available Singularity container framework has been designed specifically for HPC computing. The barrier to entry is low and the software is free.

At the recent Intel HPC Developer Conference, Gregory Kurtzer (Singularity project lead and LBNL staff member) and Krishna Muriki (Computer Systems Engineer at LBNL) provided a beginning and advanced tutorial on Singularity. One of Kurtzers key takeaways: setting up workflows in under a day is commonplace with Singularity.

Many people have heard about code modernization and are familiar with how it addresses scaling and performance challenges, but code modernization also implies modifying applications so they are mobile and have the ability to deliver reproducible science across systems and software versions both now and in the future.

The proof of the pudding lies in the tasting, which is highlighted by the global acceptance of Singularity at HPC centers around the world on large systems. Following are a few large-scale examples:

Figure 1: Partial list of organizations. (Full list available here.)

Singularity was designed so that applications which run in a container have the same distance to the host kernel and hardware as natively running applications as shown below.

Figure 2: Singularity preserves the nearness of native applications to the OS

This translates to performance, jitter reduction, and the ability to directly utilize GPUs and communications fabrics such as InfiniBand and Intel Omni-Path Architecture (Intel OPA).

Intel supports Singularity containers on HPC products and provides Application Notes showing how to import large, complex HPC applications such as NWChem into Singularity containers so they can run on Intel processors and Intel OPA. Intel recommends that users run like on like container images that match the same kernel and OS distribution to the Intel OPA-basic release. They state, Other combinations may work, but there is no support implied. (Source Intel Application Note J57474-1.0 page 9.)

Figure 3: Identifying compute nodes for containers (Source Intel)

Unlike Docker (currently the most well-known enterprise container system) and other container systems, Singularity preserves the security of the host HPC system and does not represent a breach of security. Plus Singularity includes MPI an essential part of HPC computing.

Succinctly, if a user wants to be root inside a Singularity container, they must first be root on the system outside the container. A user with root access can view and change any file on the system either inadvertently or maliciously. Thus, HPC security models tightly control root access and forbid non-authorized people (e.g. general users) from gaining root access. Due to the design of Docker and other enterprise container systems that utilize root-level user-writable daemons and other security-permeable design features, HPC systems managers have to isolate the both HPC networks and user access to data before these containers can be allowed on the system.

Succinctly, if a user wants to be root inside a Singularity container, they must first be root on the system outside the container Singularity Permissions, Access, and Privilege

The ramifications are far-reaching and precludes access to InfiniBand and Intel OPA high performance and optimized storage platforms as well as locally mounted file-systems. Thus a typical Docker solution uses a virtual cluster within the physical machine. Unfortunately, virtual machines introduce jitter, which can degrade HPC application performance by a factor of 4x or more. (See the paper, The Case of the Missing Supercomputer Performance for more information about the impact of even tiny amounts of jitter on HPC applications.) Network isolation, jitter, and other issues explain why Kurtzer tells people that Docker and other enterprise container systems, Remove High Performance from HPC.

Further, MPI is included in Singularity where it is omitted in enterprise container systems. In particular Kurtzer notes that Docker has, No reasonable support or timeline for MPI. Current estimates are that MPI support in Docker is at least two years out. Succinctly, Kurtzer observes that HPC is not a use case for Docker or other enterprise container systems like runC and RKT. Kurtzer created Singularity in part because, Patches to help make Docker/runC/RKT a better solution for HPC have been submitted, but most have not been accepted!

Patches to help make Docker/runC/RKT a better solution for HPC have been submitted, but most have not been accepted! Gregory Kurtzer (Singularity project lead and LBNL staff member).

This explains why Kurtzer created Singularity to address enterprise design omissions (security, performance, and MPI) plus other issues. The lack of these features in currently popular container systems also provides the reason for HPC users to evaluate and adopt Singularity on their HPC systems.

Please see the security documents for more information about the Singularity security model.

Singularity is also used to perform HPC in the cloud on AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and other cloud providers. This makes it possible to develop a research workflow on a laboratory or a laboratory server, then bundle it to run on a departmental cluster, on a leadership class supercomputer, or in the cloud.

Singularity containers can be built to include all of the programs, libraries, data and scripts such that an entire workflow can be contained and either archived or distributed for others to replicate no matter what version of Linux they are running. Singularity also runs on Mac and Windows systems.

Singularity also blurs the line between container and host such that local directories can exist within the container. Applications within the container have full and direct access to these files, which enables arbitrary and persistent workflow configurations. Meanwhile, users can get results reported to their local file-system.

Containers can also be bundled so they contain commercial code. Essentially, the container can be installed using a certified version of the operating system. The Singularity documentation then states, The application environment, libraries, and certified stack would all continue to run exactly as it is intended inside the container.

The advantage of containers is that legacy workflows will continue running far into the future. This is a double-edged sword because workflows will continue working as-is far into the future, which puts the onus is on the maintainers of the containerized workflow to ensure the code stays current rather than becoming fossilized. Still, even ancient containers can be exhumed to provide result validation.

Users are finding that they deploy an application on an HPC cluster with an installed workload manager such as Slurm, HTCondor or Torque code with little effort and similar performance to workflows in other container systems. Kurtzer tells people, Setting up workflows in under a day is commonplace with Singularity

Setting up workflows in under a day is commonplace with Singularity Greg Kurtzer

The National Institute of Health wrote, Weve had many users ask for programs like TensorFlow and OpenCV3 that are difficult or impossible to install with our current OS. Many users have also been asking for Docker to create portable reproducible data analysis pipelines. Singularity allows us to provide this functionality to our users in a secure environment. Our admins have found it easy and intuitive to use Singularity. Some of our staff have even begun to install tricky applications into Singularity containers and write wrapper scripts and module files that make the Singularity environment transparent to the end user. (Source: Singularity Registry download file)

Nextflow wrote a detailed blog about their work to containerize a bioinformatics pipeline at the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG). Their benchmarks show that there isnt any significant difference in the execution times between Docker and Singularity. (Source: The Nextflow blog, More fun with containers in HPC.)

Figure 4: Docker vs. Singularity runtimes (time in minutes. Reprinted courtesy NextFlow)

The February 2017 Intel Application Note, Building Containers for Intel Omni-Path Fabrics using Docker and Singularity shows how to configure and run Singularity on Intel OPA fabrics. They provide a specific example of building and running NWChem in a Singularity container and note in the conclusion:

When comparing the container technologies, we found Singularity to be a viable alternative to Docker for running MPI applications in our test HPC cluster environment. Singularity interfaces with the MPI mechanisms installed on the host machines and can be used with external resource managers. It is also possible to run Singularity directly as a normal user without needing root permissions to run certain tasks.

This same Application Note also shows how to convert a Docker container into a Singularity container.

Gorgolewski et. al. wrote in PLOS Computational Biology, Previous containerized data processing solutions were limited to single user environments and not compatible with most multi-tenant High Performance Computing systems. BIDS Apps overcome this limitation by taking advantage of the Singularity container technology. As a proof of concept, this work is accompanied by 22 ready to use BIDS Apps, packaging a diverse set of commonly used neuroimaging algorithms.

Carlos Eduardo Arango Gutierrez at the Universidad del Valle says that Singularity helps them, in reducing development, deployment and optimization effort in our objective of building a large-scale, organized and self-managed cluster, offering a distro and vendor neutral environment for the development of heterogeneous HPC applications.

Lai Wei-Hwa at roboco.com notes that, Finally, a solution for Dockers security holes. In particular, they find the following advantages:

Containers are a new concept for the scientific and HPC communities. For security, mobility, and reproducibility reasons, developers are strongly encouraged to look into a container solution like Singularity.

Categories: Control, HPC

Tags: Containers, Docker, Singularity

From Mainframes to Deep Learning Clusters: IBMs Speech Journey Risk or Reward: First Nvidia DGX-1 Boxes Hit the Cloud

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Singularity Containers for HPC, Reproducibility, and Mobility - The Next Platform

Ashes of the Singularity: Escalationa game about carefully lining up thousands of robotic units and then smashing them together in an explosion tiny lasershas been given a massive update.

It was released last November as an expansion to Stardock's Ashes of the Singularity, which was a solid RTS, and the two were rolled into a single package earlier this year. Yesterday, the developers released an update that matches up to the game's grand scale: as well as being packed-full of much needed bug fixes and UI improvements, the 2.2 patch adds three new maps and a host of new features.

Chief among them is the new replay feature, which players have been demanding for a while. You can watch the footage from any game you've played to work out where you went wrong (or just relive the glory of stomping on your opponent), as well as watch videos of the top players to pick up some tips.

The new maps in the update are: Manannan, a 12-player Terran map aimed at free-for-all games; Brighid, an eight-player Arctic map to be played in two teams of four; and Aenghus, a ten-player desert map that is again aimed at the free-for-all mode. The maps were one of the weakest aspects of the original game, so let's hope these three are better.

And if that wasn't enough, the update introduces mod support, allowing fans to tweak game files, create maps and dream up new scenarios to do battle in. We eagerly await the results.

There are literally hundreds of other changes under the hood, most of which change the way that individual ships handle. It's a dizzying amount of detail that is bound to change the way you play, so if you're interested head over to the forum and read the post from Derek Paxton, Stardocks Vice President of Entertainment.

If you want to try the game for the first time, this update provides the perfect excuse. It's on Steam for 29.99/$39.99.

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Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation gets replay feature and three new maps - PC Gamer

Noida-based online lingerie brand Clovia has raised $4 million from existingand new investors including Singularity Ventures and Ravi Dhariwal, former CEO of media house Bennett, Coleman & Co.

Clovia will utilise the funds for marketing,product and technology development, and expanding sales channels.

Owned by Purple Panda Fashion, Clovia in 2015 had raised funds from IvyCap Ventures. In 2013, it had raised seed fund from Zurich-based Mountain Partners AG.

Clovia claims to have 1.5 million visitors amonth on its website, with nearly 80 percent of its sales happening through its website and app on mobile. Clovia offers nearly 200 styles per month with best working capital ratios in the industry.

Pankaj Vermani, Co-founder and CEO of Clovia,said:

We are excited to learn from experiences of the likes of Ravi, which has developed some of the biggest consumer businesses in the country.

Founded in 2013, Clovia was established to address the under-serviced intimate wear segment in India, and now designs and manufactures its own products. Using smart technology/analytics, it monitors the sales trends and patterns on its website and manages its inventory accordingly, thus reducing operational costs. The company claims to ship more than 250,000 units per month.

I am delighted to partner with Clovia and impressed by the exponential strides they have made in the fashion space, Dhariwal said, adding I am impressed by Clovias good growth potential, and with the way they have amalgamated technology and fashion and disrupted the lingerie industry.

As reported by VCCEdge, Clovias net sales stood at Rs 30 crore in FY16 compared to Rs 18.6 crore in FY15. However, the net losses increased to Rs 9.5 crore in FY16 from Rs 1.7 crore in FY15.

Website: Clovia

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Noida-based lingerie brand Clovia raises $4M from Singularity Ventures, others - YourStory.com

When I heard the folks responsible for my beloved sci-fi RTS Sins of a Solar Empire were at it again with another massive RTS inAshes of the Singularity: Escalation, I had to check the game out. While the original game launched earlier in 2016, Escalation came later that year as an upgraded, standalone expansion that adds lotsof things to the game. Now that the definitive version is out, I dove right into this gargantuan strategy game.

Ashes of the Singularity Publisher: Stardock Developer:Oxide Games Platform:PC Release Date: November 10th, 2016 Players: 1-16 Price: $39.99(Review Copy Received)

Ashes of the Singularity is thegame Microsoft literally used to show off DirectX 12, as it was the first game released to support it. The game is a sight to behold, most especially if you have a rig that can handlemax settings.

The game has the potential to show tens of thousands of units on screen at the same time while also featuring a crazy number of light sources (each smoke cloud or projectile has its own light source). All of the animations, simulations, light sources, and more are rendered at any distance.

Each ship has its own turrets that all fire individually, and line of sight is a direct factor in gameplay as well. Say youre trying to down an enemy capital ship if they have a bunch of smaller frigates blocking your line of sight, theyll eat the collateral damage before their leader does.

Ashes is such a ridiculously technically apt game Ive even recommended friends with high-end rigs buy it just to run the benchmark for tests. The engine Oxide Games have built runs beautifully and makes the game a true joy to play.

One of the things Ashesdoesnt do well visually is identify its various ships and units well. I found myself constantly re-reading tooltips while trying to build well-balanced armies. I kept envisioning ifthey had better audio cues, more striking coloring, something to make them stand out more.

There are four resources in the game: metal, radiocatives, Quanta, and Turinium. While metal and radioactives are needed to supply your burgeoning war machine, Quanta grants you access to upgrades and orbital abilities.

Turinium is gathered over time via control points and eventually leads to an overall victory, regardless of the other resources. The game has a big focus on capturing these Turinium points, without control and a direct line to your home base, you wont get resources from expansions.

This is a catch 22 in that youre forced to expand and capture more Turinium generators than the other players, or wipe them out via military expansion. Either way, you need to capture more Turinium nodes to expand your economy, otherwise youll fall behind in production.

I was ok with focusing on expansion and building massive armies to slug at each other as thats usually my style in strategy games however if you crave a more twitch-y, micromanaged approach you might not enjoy Ashes. The overall feeling of conquering planets for your faction is fun.

The meta units your armies become comprised of help you handle the massive scale the battles evolve into. Instead of controlling smaller groups of units, youll control separate armies and queue up actions accordingly. Ill admit this was a little weird at first, but eventually it became really fun. I will say that sometimes meta units or armies would randomly disband, or feel a bit unwieldy.

This expansion goes bigger and bolder with an increase to 16 players, more units, structures, and maps, UI tweaks, and more. Its basically the solid, polished base of the original game cranked up to 11, and its a blast for slow-burner, massive scale RTS fans.

The game has an ethereal soundtrack that compliments its post-human storyline. Id say the soundtrack is superb, however its sometimes lost in the chaos of explosions, lasers, and what have you. Tracks range from choral, heavily science-fiction inspired pieces to enticing battle themes.

The sound effects themselves are quite good, pending how close you get to the action. Youll hear the roaring explosions come after your bombers make a pass over your enemies, or possibly a wide barrage of lasers and projectiles as two armies collide.

Its all quite excellent as it coalesces together, making a cavalcade of destructive noises that you wont really hear in many other strategy games. The music nicely fits the games massive scale, to put it simply. My favorite tracks are usually the exploratory, ambient tunes which expand your imagination.

There is so much thought put into the post-human story in Ashes of the Singularity its overwhelming. The original game featured two episodes focusing on a war between the Post-Human Coalition and the Substrate.

Escalation is basically the third episode, focusing on the runaway AI Haalee and her Substrate. Without giving too much away of the story, much of the games technologies are based on theoretical quantum abilities like quantum communication, and manipulating atoms on distant planets.

Post-humans entered a cloud-like matrix of consciousness, enabling them to expand their computational brainpower by acquiring more Turinium. Coming from this, Turinium is basically the main currency for both the THC and the Substrate, and one they directly battle over.

While the story itself is fascinating to a sci-fi aficionado like myself, the actual in-game story is presented via planet-based missions smattered with bits of dialogue. Youll encounter other post-humans, and chase after enemies together.

Ashes of the Singularity: Escalationis everything that made the base game so great, but expanded upon and refined into an even better game. The user interface changes are great, the new units, structures, and upgrades are welcome, and overall the game is a lot of fun to play.

If youre looking for a mashup of Supreme Commander and Sins of a Solar Empire, Id say look no further. There are many systems, both technical and from a gameplay perspective, which all bring this massive strategy game together and make you a true commander of armies.

Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation wasreviewed on PCusing a digitalcopy provided by Stardock.You can find additional information about Niche Gamers review/ethics policy here.

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Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation Review A Massive, Bold, Engaging RTS - Niche Gamer