SC15 Invited Talk Spotlight: Dr. Yutaka Ishikawa Presents System Software in Post K Supercomputer

The K computer manufactured by Fujitsu, currently installed at the RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe, Japan.

The next flagship supercomputer in Japan, replacement of K supercomputer, is being designed toward general operation in 2020. Compute nodes, based on a many core architecture, connected by a 6-D mesh/torus network is considered. A three level hierarchical storage system is taken into account.

Co-kernel approach for HPC OS: Separation of system and process activities.

A heterogeneous operating system, Linux and a light-weight kernel, is designed to build suitable environments for applications. It cannot be possible without co-design of applications that the system software is designed to make maximum utilization of compute and storage resources.

After a brief introduction of the post K supercomputer architecture, the design issues of the system software will be presented in this Talk. Two big-data applications, genome processing and meteorological and global environmental predictions will be sketched out as target applications in the system software design. Then, it will be presented how these applications' demands affect the system software.

Dr. Yutaka Ishikawa

Speaker Background:    
Dr. Yutaka Ishikawa is the project leader of post K supercomputer development. From 1987 to 2001, he was a member of AIST (former Electrotechnical Laboratory), METI. From 1993 to 2001, he was the chief of Parallel and Distributed System Software Laboratory at Real World Computing Partnership.

He led development of cluster system software called SCore, which was used in several large PC cluster systems around 2004.

From 2002 to 2014, he was a professor at the University Tokyo. He led the project to design a commodity-based supercomputer called T2K open supercomputer.

As a result, three universities (Tsukuba, Tokyo, and Kyoto), obtained each supercomputer based on the specification in 2008. He has been involved in the design of the post T2K machine since 2013, which will be operational in 2020.   

SC15 Panel Line-Up for Nov. 18th

Supercomputing and Big Data: From Collision to Convergence

As data intensive science emerges, the need for high performance computing (HPC) to converge capacity and capabilities with Big Data becomes more apparent and urgent. Capacity requirements have stemmed from science data processing and the creation of large scale data products (e.g., earth observations, Large Hadron Collider, square-kilometer array antenna) and simulation model output (e.g., flight mission plans, weather and climate models).

Capacity growth is further amplified by the need for more rapidly ingesting, analyzing, and visualizing voluminous data to improve understanding of known physical processes, discover new phenomena, and compare results.

• How does HPC need to change in order to meet these Big Data needs?
• What can HPC and Big Data communities learn from each other?
• What impact will this have on conventional workflows, architectures, and tools?

An invited international panel of experts will examine these disruptive technologies and consider their long-term impacts and research directions.

Moderator/Panelist Details:

• George O. Strawn (Moderator) - Networking and Information Technology Research and Development National Coordination Office
• David Bader - Georgia Institute of Technology
• Ian Foster - University of Chicago
• Bruce Hendrickson - Sandia National Laboratories
• Randy Bryant - Executive Office of the President, Office of Science and Technology Policy
• George Biros - The University of Texas at Austin
• Andrew W. Moore - Carnegie Mellon University

Mentoring Undergraduates Through Competition

SC14 Group Photo of the SCC Teams

The next generation of HPC talent will face significant challenges to create software ecosystems and optimally use the next generation of HPC systems. The rapid advances in HPC make it difficult for academic institutions to keep pace.

The Student Cluster Competition (SCC), now in its ninth year, was created to address this issue by immersing students into all aspects of HPC. This panel will examine the impact of the SCC on the students and schools that have participated.

Representatives from five institutions from around the world will talk about their experiences with the SCC with regards to their students' career paths, integration with curriculum and academic HPC computing centers.

The panel will further discuss whether "extracurricular" activities, such as the SCC, provide sufficient return on investment and what activities could change or replace the competition to meet these goals more effectively.

Moderator/Panelist Details:

• Brent Gorda (Moderator) - Intel Corporation
• Jerry Chou - Tsinghua University
• Rebecca Hartman-Baker - Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
• Doug Smith - University of Colorado Boulder
• Xuanhua Shi - Huazhong University of Science and Technology
• Stephen Lien Harrell - Purdue University 

 

Programming Models for Parallel Architectures and Requirements for Pre-Exascale

Relying on domain scientists to provide programmer intervention to develop applications to emerging exascale platforms is a real challenge. A scientist prefers to express mathematics of the science, not describe the parallelism of the implementing algorithms.

Do we expect too much of the scientist to code for high parallel performance given the immense capabilities of the platform. This ignores that the scientist may have a mandate to code for a new architecture, and yet preserve portability in their code.

This panel will bring together user experience, programming model, architecture experts to discuss the pressing needs in finding the path forward to port scientific codes to such a platform. We hope to discuss the evolving programming stack, application-level requirements, and address the hierarchical nature of large systems in terms of different cores, memory levels, power consumption and the pragmatic advances of near term technology.

Moderator/Panelist Details:

• Fernanda Foertter (Moderator) - Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• Barbara Chapman - University of Houston
• Steve Oberlin - NVIDIA Corporation
• Satoshi Matsuoka - Tokyo Institute of Technology
• Jack Wells - Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• Si Hammond - Sandia National Laboratories

SC15 Invited Talk Spotlight: The Power of Visual Analytics - Unlocking the Value of Big Data

Visual Exploration of Network Traffic for Host and Server Monitoring: The screenshot shows the hourly amount of network traffic for thousands of hosts in a large computer network for 24 hours. The different nested circles represent the topological subnet hierarchy of the network. Each filled circle represents a whole subnet or when zoomed in single hosts. Each circle consists of 24 segments, while each colored segment visualizes the number of bytes transferred in the respective hour.

Never before has data been generated and collected at such high volumes as it is today. As the volumes of multidimensional data available to businesses, scientists, and the public increase, their effective use becomes more challenging. Visual analytics seeks to provide people with effective ways to understand and analyze large multidimensional data sets, while also enabling them to act upon their findings immediately.

Visualization of Large-Scale Distributed Network Attacks:  This picture illustrates attacks from the Internet to computers located in a large computer network (brute force SSH attacks).  The background represents the network structure with computer systems as rectangles. External hosts are shown as colored circles on the outside.  The splines represent the connections between attackers and computers within the network.  This reveals a network scan (from top) and a distributed attack (from bottom) originating from hundreds of hosts working together in an attempt to break into specific computer systems.

It integrates the analytic capabilities of the computer and the abilities of the human analyst, allowing novel discoveries and empowering individuals to take control of the analytical process.

This talk presents the potential of visual analytics and discusses the role of automated versus interactive visual techniques in dealing with big data. A variety of application examples ranging from news analysis over network security to SC performance analysis illustrate not only the exiting potential of visual analysis techniques, but also their limitations.

Speaker background:       

Dr. Daniel A. Keim

Dr. Daniel A. Keim is professor and head of the Information Visualization and Data Analysis Research Group in the Computer Science Department of the University of Konstanz, Germany. He has been actively involved in data analysis and information visualization research for more than 20 years and developed a number of novel visual analysis techniques for very large data sets.

He has been program co-chair of the IEEE InfoVis and IEEE VAST as well as the ACM SIGKDD conference, and he is member of the IEEE VAST as well as EuroVis steering committees. He is coordinator of the German Science Foundation funded Strategic Research Initiative "Scalable Visual Analytics" and has been scientific coordinator of the European Commission funded Coordination Action "Visual Analytics - Mastering the Information Age (VisMaster)".

Dr. Keim received his Ph.D. and habilitation degrees in computer science from the University of Munich. Before joining the University of Konstanz, Dr. Keim was associate professor at the University of Halle, Germany, and Senior Technology Consultant at AT&T Shannon Research Labs, NJ, USA.

Brief Q&A with SC15 Exhibits Chair Trey Breckenridge

SC15 Exhibits Chair Trey Breckenridge

The following is a brief Q&A with SC15 Exhibits Chair Trey Breckenridge, Director of High Performance Computing at the Mississippi State University (MSU), High Performance Computing Collaboratory (HPC2).  He has over 22 years of professional experience in high performance computing and computer support. 

His hobbies include aviation, hunting, and golf. He is a former commander of the Civil Air Patrol's Golden Triangle Composite Squadron and currently holds the Director of Flight Operations and Director of Information Technology positions for the Mississippi Wing. He is also an active member of the local branch of the Rotary Club.

How many exhibitors this year/or total # of exhibit space?
We are expecting another sold-out Exhibition this year as we are running ahead in terms of booth space served by the industry and we are tracking ahead in terms of quantity of companies participating. We are expecting approximately 350 exhibiting organizations. The only reason we won't set a record is because we simply won't have any physical space left.

The Exhibition will feature leading companies from at least 25 countries and 60 first-time exhibitors.

How does this compare to previous SC's at this point in the calendar year?
We are tracking ahead in nearly every category as compared to any previous year. What this means is the attendee will see a full breadth of the industry represented in the Exhibition. Nowhere else will they find the industry’s leading companies demonstrating the latest innovations in HPC, networking, storage, and related areas.  No other event provides such extensive, targeted opportunities for in-depth interaction with the leading companies in the field.

What is the country breakdown and how many are first-time exhibitors?
The Exhibition is truly global as we have exhibiting organizations from 25 countries with more than one-third being located outside the United States. We are also seeing new companies being represented and we are expecting 60 or more to make their debut at SC15.

What type of synergy is there between the Research exhibitors and the Industry exhibitors?

The SC exhibit floor balances corporate exhibits with a showcase for innovative applications of high performance computing, networking, and storage from research institutions – universities, national laboratories, and nonprofit research centers.  These scientists and engineers display the latest advances in computational modeling, imaging, visual analysis, and data technologies, often partnering with industry exhibitors to showcase how particular products can achieve new research discoveries.

Breckenridge suggests building a strategy for maximizing time on the exhibit floor.

Any tips on how to best plan your time on the exhibit floor?
Know which booths you want to visit in advance by reviewing the online exhibitor list. Which vendors will help you the most? Where are they located on the exhibit floor? Review the list of presenters at the Exhibitor Forum. If possible, set up advance appointments to meet some of the exhibitors. You may also want to determine a logical route of getting around the Exhibition.

Austin is considered by many as one of the United States' technology hubs.

Why is Austin such a great SC location?
Austin is also known as  the "Silicon Hills" of the United States and is home to a diverse group of technology companies as well as some leading academic institutions.  Plus, its eclectic blend of culture, music, and beautiful geography further add to its attraction. And, it is a very welcoming city and they highly value our exhibitors and our attendees.


How did you get started as a volunteer with SC?
My first exposure to SC was in 1995 as an exhibitor.  At that conference, I provided technical support for the Mississippi State University booth as well as for MSU’s participation in the SC’95 Global Information Infrastructure (GII) testbed where we showcased an interactive, 3-D scientific visualization and virtual reality capability utilizing an experimental, high-performance wide-area network. That effort provided me with an opportunity to work with numerous SC volunteers in Exhibits, SCinet, and the Technical Program. 

The experience had an incredibly positive impact on me, both professionally and personally, and set into motion a strong desire to be more involved with the conference.  In 2006 I was given an opportunity to participate as a committee volunteer and I’ve continued to volunteer since then.

What past positions have you held and what keeps you coming back as a volunteer? 
In 2006, I began my committee involvement as a member of the security team within the Infrastructure group.  Since then I’ve held the positions of Security Chair, Space Chair, Deputy Infrastructure Chair, Infrastructure Co-chair, SCinet Chair, Executive Director to the General Chair, and of course, this year I am the Exhibits Chair.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the work and challenges associated with each of these roles, and my involvement with SC has allowed me to meet and work with a lot of great people from the supercomputing community - many of which I now consider to be personal friends.  But what brings me back as a volunteer year-after-year is the reward of seeing the result of the hard work from the volunteers and the success of each SC conference.

Given your long successful track record in the industry, what advice do you have for someone who is just starting out?
You should not start off with a narrow focus; be as broad as you can and explore complementary areas.  With the rapid integration of complex technologies, the additional knowledge gained by understanding those complementary areas will be a huge advantage down the road.   I would also suggest finding a mentor who you can emulate and learn from - the SC Mentor-Protégé Program is a good place to start.  I’ve had three in my professional career and owe any success that I’ve had to them.