Things do go wrong. I was recently on a train journey from Liverpool to London. Normally a two-hour direct service, a flooded line resulted in a five-hour excursion, by which time the meeting had finished without me.At the time, with frequent information announcements, passable WiFi (paid), free drinks proactively distributed (water only), food available (paid), and most importantly, electricity sockets, the five hours passed with less distress than I might have expected in hindsight. The lesson is that when things go wrong, what matters is how they are dealt with.
While there is always a lot of buzz about the latest HPC hardware architecture developments or exascale programming methods and tools, everyone agrees that in the end the only thing that counts are the results and societal impact produced by the technology. Results and impacts are coming from the scientific and industrial applications running on HPC systems. The application space is diverse ranging from astrophysics (A) to zymology (Z). So the question arises of how to effectively fund development and optimization of HPC applications to make them suitable for current petascale and future exascale systems.
Back in February, the US Department of Energys High Performance Computing for Manufacturing program (HPC4Mfg) announced its first awards for advancing industry manufacturing projects using national lab supercomputing resources and expertise.
By Andrew Jones; High Performance Computing (HPC) is a vocal sport. We are always lobbying for something. Or giving talks at conferences. Or writing blogs. But sometimes we need a bit of help to translate what HPC people say into what they really mean
Dhabaleswar K. (DK) Panda, Ohio State UniversityPower is considered the major impediment in designing the next-generation exascale systems. In recent years, the TOP500 and Green500 lists have been focusing on both performance and power consumption. To address the power challenge, researchers and engineers are proposing solutions along multiple directions including: 1) exploring revolutionary architectures that compute at near threshold voltage (NTV) to minimize leakage power; 2) developing user-controlled mechanisms to control power (power levers) such as dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS), and core-idling; 3) increasing the efficiency of cooling subsystems; 4) extending the job scheduler and resource management schemes …
By Dona Crawford; Last July, President Obama issued an executive order that created a coordinated federal strategy for HPC research, development, and deployment called the U.S. National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI). This bold, necessary step toward building the next generation of supercomputers has inaugurated a new era for U.S. high performance computing (HPC).
By Cynthia R. McIntyre; This is an exciting period as emerging and frontier market economies (as defined by the financial sector) adopt advanced technologies for economic competitiveness, societal benefit, and scientific discovery. Most notably, these economies are evaluating and acquiring advanced information and communication technologies as competitive platforms for socio-economic benefit.
By John West; Given the impact of HPC, it is important that we do everything we can to ensure that we are including the best solutions possible in the technologies that we build, and for that we need to be sure we are asking the broadest sampling of people for their best ideas.
By Sharan Kalwani; One of the main reasons I got into computing, admittedly a long time ago, was the potential that I personally saw in using this unbelievably powerful new tool towards addressing the needs of the society we live in.
By John West; I have chosen to work in HPC because the work we do makes the world a better place. As SC has illustrated effectively over the past two years, #hpcmatters.
