SC15 General Chair Jackie Kern Previews the Conference and Exhibition

SC15 General Chair Jackie Kern

Following is a brief conversation with Jackie Kern, SC15 General Chair from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Since 2003, she has served as  a member of the SC planning committee and in 2007 she also served as SCinet Chair.  

At the University of Illinois, she is the Director of IT Shared Services where she represents her department on various campus IT initiatives and committees including leading the community in a consolidation of service effort and being the operations chair of the Data Center Shared Services co-location efforts on campus.   

In these efforts she oversees the development of standards, procedures and policies related to data centers, identifies IT resources needed for current and future projects, and markets the services to campus. 
  

Describe how the “HPC Transforms” conference theme came to be this year?
Over the last three decades, HPC has become increasingly important in manufacturing, weather forecasting, medicine, entertainment and many other facets of everyday life. You would be hard pressed to experience a “normal” day for the average citizen without encountering something that wasn’t impacted by HPC. 

Starting last year, the SC conference team launched a program called “HPC Matters” to highlight this impact. The program supports the creation of short videos that explore the use of HPC in improving daily life.

These videos are available at the SC15 video library. The program also supports public talks by industry luminaries, such as the SC HPC Matters Plenary.

For this year, we wanted to dive deeper into why it is important, and to do that we wanted to demonstrate how it transforms lives and the world around us.  We have put together these videos that demonstrate why it matters and how it transforms lives.

SC15 is returning to Austin, Texas for the first time since 2008 – what is it about Austin that makes it a good fit for the SC community?
Austin is fantastic because of the technology-centric community as well as the culture, food, people and music.  We feel this is a really good fit for our attendees and exhibitors. It gives them the right balance of fun and technical aptitude to spark the creativity, and offers a wide variety of opportunities to network and collaborate. And the city itself is also very warm and welcoming to our group.

The SC15 Mobile App.

For someone new to the community, what tips can you offer for tackling the immense Tech Program and the massive exhibition hall?
Plan ahead!  Quite frankly there is too much to see and do at an SC conference so you need to budget your time based on your areas of interests and priorities.  Your best bet is to get plugged into everything now – the website, blog, schedule, conference app, etc.

Start with the conference schedule on the website and go from there. Put a priority on not only learning, but also networking.  Some of the people you meet at an SC conference will impact your career for years to come.  The more people you meet the more opportunities you have to collaborate and get involved.  If you are new, go to one of the Information Booths – they are staffed by veteran attendees who are there to help you.

Also, you will want to download our enhanced mobile app and started getting organized for a very packed week in Austin.

This year's Exhibition is sold out and is expected to draw big crowds.

What are some of the top things you are looking forward to experiencing/attending at SC15? 
Very difficult question since there are so many great things to experience or participate in at an SC conference!  Some of the things that I’m looking forward to are the rich and dynamic Invited Talks, the HPC Matters Plenary with Intel’s Diane Bryant, and the Alan Alda Keynote. In addition we have an international Student Cluster Competition that is sure to be exciting.

Plus the show floor has more than 300 cutting-edge exhibitors and I love checking in with SCinet – the world’s fastest, custom-built computer network.  Then there is the incredibly robust Technical Program. Quite honestly, there is too much to list here.

SC student volunteers with Jeanine Cook, SC15 Student Programs Chair.

The student program went thru some modifications this year.  Can you explain what those were and how the changes have been received?
This year we merged every student program under one umbrella called Students@SC. This is an effort to make sure that we are encouraging the next generation of HPC professionals to be engaged in the community. It provides more opportunities for all the students that apply to be a part of SC. We encourage them to participate in many of the events, such as the Mentor-Protégé Program and Experiencing HPC for Undergraduates. 

We have arranged to bring in key people from across the community to speak about their experiences and encouraged the use of the community to continue to move HPC forward into a new and exciting era.  We are also focusing on diversity and making certain that all students are treated equal and offered the same opportunities for success. 

True success won’t be measured until after the conference once we see how it goes, but we are encouraged by those students who have applied to the program and their engagement thus far.  We are also working with an evaluation team to measure our success and will have those data points after SC15 is over.

Anything else knew this year that people should know about?
This year we have added an all-day track for Birds-of-a-Feather sessions.  There is so much demand for them and with the high volume of submissions, we are excited to introduce this all-day track.  Other exciting things are a much more robust mobile app and networking opportunities like the addition of Duckling – a new networking tool for conference attendees.

Intel's Diane Bryant - HPC Matters Plenary Speaker

What can people expect this year from the HPC Matters Plenary?
It will be amazing.  This year will feature Diane Bryant of Intel who was recently named by Fortune as one of the 51 most powerful women.   She will describe how next generation supercomputers are not only transforming HPC and the future of computing, but also society.  Plus, there is no fee to attend the session although a badge is required.  It is shaping up to be an entertaining session that is a must attend event for everyone - from novice to expert.

Describe the process and time involved for putting on such a big event.
Planning a conference of this quality and magnitude couldn't happen without a fantastic team behind me. Three years ago I was selected to be the SC15 General Chair and at that time I made a conscious choice to select the best of breed to make sure this event was spectacular.

Over the course of the last three years we have spent many phone calls, face-to-face meetings, site visits, and countless hours working towards providing the best possible experience for our attendees. One group in particular spends a considerable amount of time working towards providing the best and fastest computer network in the world for one week in November.

The SCinet team spends an enormous amount of volunteer time designing the custom network, gathering equipment donations from vendors, connecting equipment, working with providers to get connected to the right networks, and then sustaining the network for everyone at the conference.

In addition, our Technical Program team has worked diligently to evaluate the submissions and create a program that is second to none.  Truly it has been the most exciting, challenging, and rewarding three-year project of my career. I am honored to be a part of it.

What advice would you give someone looking to get involved in the SC volunteer community?
The SC community is always looking for dedicated volunteers. The best way to get involved is to come to one of the Information Booths at SC15.  We strive to have new faces as volunteers who are able to provide new perspectives and ideas to keep SC fresh and diverse. 

What needs to happen for you to judge SC15 as a successful event?
To me, the most important thing would be walking around the Austin Convention Center and witnessing the engagement in the collaboration that we expect to see at an SC Conference.  I hope attendees leave feeling that there is simply nowhere else on the planet that offers as much education, collaboration and networking as an SC Conference.  After all, we are attendees ourselves and that remains the ultimate goal!

HPC Matters Plenary Session with Diane Bryant to be Webcast

Intel's Diane Bryant

Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager, Data Center Group at Intel, will speak at the upcoming SC15 conference HPC Matters Plenary Session to discuss how next-generation supercomputers are transforming HPC and presenting exciting opportunities to advance scientific research and discovery to deliver far-reaching impacts on society.

Based on the interest in this session we are pleased to announce that Intel will sponsor a live webcast of the HPC Matters Plenary for those who are not able to attend in Austin. Please join us on Monday, November 16th, at 5:30 p.m central standard time at this website.

In Austin the session will be open to all SC attendees and located in Ballroom DEFG. A badge is required, but there is no fee to attend this Plenary. You can pick-up a complimentary badge in registration if needed. Seats are on a first-come basis.

To view the digital library containing short videos telling compelling stories of how HPC Matters, click here.

Previewing SC15 Diversity Committee Focused Events

Attendees are encouraged to participate in the SC15 Diversity Sessions.

The SC15 Diversity Committee is passionate about gaining insight from the SC community on how we can increase the diversity of our community by increasing the representation of under-represented groups. Please join the conversation at any or all of the following events at SC15 where we will be having an open dialog and collaborating on potential solutions.

Diversity and Innovation in HPC
12:15  – 1:15 p.m. Tuesday, November 17
Panel discussion featuring various community experts and collaborative engagement with SC attendees offering insight into historical diversity efforts and collectively identifying future opportunities.
Location: Intel Booth #1333
Organizers: Hosted by Intel Corporation

Women in HPC: Pathways and Roadblocks
10:30 a m. – 12 p.m. Wednesday, November 18
Birds-of-a-Feather discussion to understand what makes the STEM subfields so successful in attracting women, and how other subfields might emulate their success.
Location: Room 13B.
Organizers: Rebecca Hartman-Baker, Toni Collis

Women Impacting HPC Tech Session
 11:15 a.m. – 12 p.m. Thursday, November 19
Panel discussion featuring various woman within the HPC community who have positively impacted society with their discoveries. Panelist will share their technical career paths and actively engage with the audience.
Location: Intel Booth #1333
Organizers: Hosted by Intel Corporation

Women in HPC: Changing the Face of HPC
8:30 a.m. – 12 p.m Friday, November 20
Workshop and panel discussions bringing together leading women working in HPC and female early career researchers. Showcase HPC research on a broad range of topics, and discuss the importance of gender equality.
Location:Hilton Salon A
Organizers: Toni Collis, Barbara Chapman, Daniel Holmes, Lorna Smith, Alison Kennedy, Adrian Jackson, Julia Andrys, Jesmin Jahan Tithi, Rapela Regina Maphanga, Sunita Chandrasekaran, Rebecca Hartman-Baker

SC15 Releases Short Video on How HPC is Impacting Personalized Medical Treatments Especially in Children with Epilepsy

SC15 recently released this short video about how high performance computing (HPC) is making a difference in personalizing medical treatments as described by Dr. Chris R. Johnson, Founding Director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute.

One specific example he cites is the amazing impact HPC is having on children with epilepsy. According to Dr. Johnson, 15% or more of children with epilepsy cannot be treated effectively with current epilepsy drugs.  Thus, the only recourse for giving them a more normal life is via surgery.

Through the use of patient specific high resolution computer models of a child’s head the surgery is much more precise and less traumatic in part thru the use of high performance imaging and visualization.  The end result is a much higher quality of life for the child.

This is another chapter in a series of short videos focusing on why HPC is important and of critical value to society. It is part of a three-year SC "HPC Matters" campaign.  Click here to view the entire HPC Matters video library.

SC15 Student Cluster Competition Fires Things Up with Secret Sauce

SCC Secret Sauce

Salsa secreta. Geheime Sosse. Secret sauce. 紹兴. 沙茶.  

No matter how you say it, that extra special ingredient known only to you can sometimes make all the difference in the world. And that’s just what nine teams of students are hoping as they converge on Austin, Texas, to demonstrate their prowess in the SC15 Student Cluster Competition. This year’s competition will feature teams from the Australia, China, Colombia, Germany, Taiwan and the United States.

SC15 attendees are encouraged to drop by the Student Cluster Competition in the southwest corner of the first floor of the Austin Convention Center and get in on some of the secret sauce firing up the competition. Attendees who visit the competition and speak with at least four of the teams will get both inside information and the very own bottle of Student Cluster Competition Secret Sauce.

“We wanted to spice things up this year and since we are in Austin, what better way than by giving out bottles of secret sauce?” said SC15 Student Cluster Competition Chair Hai Ah Nam of Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The competition, which officially kicks off at 5 p.m. Monday, Nov. 16, pits the nine teams against each other in this high-energy event featuring young supercomputing talent from around the world competing to build and operate powerful cluster computers. In this real-time, non-stop, 48-hour competition, teams of undergraduate and/or high school students assemble small cluster computers on the SC15 exhibit floor and race to complete a real-world workload across a series of applications and impress HPC industry judges.

First held at SC07 in Reno, the Student Cluster Competition has proven so popular that it has been replicated in Europe, Africa and Asia.

“It’s a global event in every sense, from the teams to the appreciation by those watching, who understand they are seeing the future of HPC,” said Stephen Harrell of Purdue University, who has taken several Purdue teams to compete in the U.S. and Germany.

And those SC15 attendees who drop by the competition will be able to take home a small reminder of what fires up the competitive juices when students get together to show their stuff.

SC15 Invited Talk Spotlight: Revealing the Hidden Universe - Supercomputer Simulations of Black Hole Mergers

Numerical Relativity simulation of Binary Black Holes  by Campanelli et al, 2006.

Supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies power some of the most energetic phenomena in the Universe. Our understanding of these extremely powerful events and their observations has numerous exciting consequences for our understanding of galactic evolution, black hole demographics, plasmas in strong-field gravity, and general relativity.

Near black holes not only have gravity that is so extreme as to generate observable gravitational radiation, but also highly-relativistic gas flows around them can produce powerful electromagnetic signals as the gas is pulled by extreme gravitational forces, and it is believed to be responsible of the launching of the powerful observed jets across the entire universe. 

Simulation of Accretion Dynamics into a Binary Black Hole System by Scott Noble et al. 2014. The figure shows the rest mass density in the midplane of the black hole binary orbit. Insets are progressively zoomed. Black Dots are the Black Holes.

The mathematics involved in modeling these events is very sophisticated because one has to solve the equations of Einstein’s general relativity and magneto-hydrodynamics, all-together.  The problem also requires very advanced supercomputers running programs on tens of thousands of CPUs simultaneously, and the use of sophisticated techniques for data extraction and visualization. Petascale numerical simulation is therefore the only tool available to accurately model these systems.

This talk will review some of the new developments in the field of numerical relativity, and relativistic astrophysics that allow us to successfully simulate and visualize the innermost workings of these violent astrophysical phenomena. More images and material can be found in these links:

• Numerical Relativity   
• Magnetohydrodynamic Simulations
• YouTube Video 1
• YouTube Video 2
• YouTube Video 3

Speaker background:

Dr. Manuela Campanelli

Dr. Manuela Campanelli is a professor of Mathematics and Astrophysics at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She is the director of the Center for Computational Relativity and Gravitation. Campanelli was the recipient of the Marie Curie Fellowship (1998), the American Physical Society Fellowship (2009) and the RIT Trustee Award (2014). She was also the Chair of the APS Topical Group in Gravitation in 2013.

Dr. Campanelli has an extensive research experience on Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, astrophysics of black holes and gravitational waves. She is known for groundbreaking work on numerical simulations of binary black hole space times and for explorations of physical effects such as “super kicks” and spin-driven orbital dynamics.

In 2005, she was the lead author of a work that produced a breakthrough on binary black hole simulations. In 2007, she discovered that supermassive black holes can be ejected from most galaxies at speeds of up to 4000km/s. Her more current research focuses on computer simulations of merging supermassive black holes, and on magnetohydrodynamics simulations of their accretion disk and jet dynamics, in connection with both gravitational-wave and electromagnetic observations. She also participates in the LIGO scientific collaboration. The search for gravitational waves from binary black holes and binary neutron stars moved forward in September with the first observing run of the upgraded laser interferometer, Advanced LIGO gravitational wave detectors.

Dr. Campanelli’s research include numerous publications and invited presentations and reviews papers. One of her papers was recently highlighted by the APS as one of the landmark papers of the century  on the subject of general relativity, starting with a contribution from Einstein himself. Her work was highlighted by the American Physical Society’s Focus, New Scientist, Astronomy, and the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory’s LIGO Magazine. More info can be found by clicking here.

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 U.S. Under Secretary for Science and Energy Lynn Orr Presents the 2015 Quadrennial Technology Review

Click here to download the Quadrennial Technology Review.

The United States is in the midst of an energy revolution. Over the last decade, the United States has slashed net petroleum imports, dramatically increased shale gas production, scaled up wind and solar power, and cut the growth in electricity consumption to nearly zero through widespread efficiency measures.

Technology is helping to drive this revolution, enabled by years to decades of research and development that underpin these advances in the energy system.

The Department of Energy’s 2015 Quadrennial Technology Review (QTR) examines the status of the science and technology that are the foundation of our energy system, together with the research, development, demonstration, and deployment opportunities to advance them.

Advancing clean power technologies will be just one of many topics addressed.

This analysis is particularly instructive in the run up to the international climate negotiations taking place later this year at the 21st Conference of Parties, as technological advancements will be crucial to achieving global greenhouse gas emissions reductions.

During his presentation, Under Secretary for Science and Energy Lynn Orr will provide an overview of the highlights of the QTR report and discuss examples of promising research and development opportunities that can help the nation achieve a low-carbon economy.

Speaker Background:

Dr. Franklin (Lynn) Orr

Dr. Franklin (Lynn) Orr was sworn in as the Under Secretary for Science and Energy in December 2014. As the Under Secretary, Dr. Orr is the principal advisor to the Secretary and Deputy Secretary on clean energy technologies and science and energy research initiatives.

In this role, he oversees DOE’s offices of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Fossil Energy, Indian Energy Policy and Programs, Nuclear Energy, and Science.  In total, these programs steward the majority of DOE’s National Laboratories (13 of 17).

Prior to joining the Department of Energy, Dr. Orr was the Keleen and Carlton Beal Professor Emeritus in the Department of Energy Resources Engineering at Stanford University. He joined Stanford in 1985, serving in a number of roles including Dean of the School of Earth Sciences as well as the founding director of the Precourt Institute for Energy.

Dr. Orr holds a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and a B.S. from Stanford University, both in Chemical Engineering.

Berkeley Lab's Katherine Yelick Wins Ken Kennedy Award

UC Berkeley Professor to Receive ACM/IEEE-CS Kennedy Award at SC15

for Contributions to International Research Agenda

Katherine Yelick

ACM and IEEE Computer Society have named Katherine Yelick as the recipient of the 2015 ACM/IEEE Computer Society Ken Kennedy Award for innovative research contributions to parallel computing languages that have been used in both the research community and in production environments. She was also cited for her strategic leadership of the national research laboratories and for developing novel educational and mentoring tools. The award will be presented at SC 15: the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis November 17, in Austin, Texas.

Yelick’s work has improved the programmability of high performance computing (HPC) through innovations to parallel languages and runtime systems. Her contributions to compiler research and open source software were key to the success of a new parallel programming model known as partitioned global address space (PGAS), an important software innovation for developers facing the challenges of exascale computing. She developed new automatic performance tuning techniques and runtime systems that maximize performance across a wide variety of computer architectures.

Yelick has authored more than 170 technical papers and reports on parallel languages, compilers, algorithms, libraries, architecture and storage, and she has also trained more than 50 graduate students, postdocs and research undergraduate students. She has worked with interdisciplinary teams developing scientific applications ranging from simulations of chemistry, fusion, and blood flow in the heart to analysis problems in phylogenetics and genome assembly.

Yelick is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley since 1991 and Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 1996 where she is currently the Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences. In that role, Yelick oversees computing research and facility directions for the Lab, including both the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), where she served as director for five years. Her leadership at the national level has significantly influenced international scientific research on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy. 

An ACM Fellow, Yelick was named the 2013 Athena Lecturer by the ACM Council on Women (ACM-W). She is a member of the National Academies Computer Science and Telecommunications Board and previously served on the California Council on Science and Technology and the University of California Science and Technology Council. Yelick participated in the National Research Council report, “The Future of Computer Performance: Game Over or Next Level?” on opportunities and challenges for sustaining growth in computing performance. 

ACM and the Computer Society co-sponsor the Kennedy Award, which was established in 2009 to recognize substantial contributions to programmability and productivity in computing and significant community service or mentoring contributions. It was named for the late Ken Kennedy, founder of Rice University’s computer science program and a world expert on high performance computing. The Kennedy Award carries a US $5,000 honorarium endowed by ACM, the IEEE Computer Society and the SC Conference Steering Committee.

About ACM
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field’s challenges. ACM strengthens the computing profession’s collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.

About IEEE Computer Society
IEEE Computer Society is one of the world’s leading computing membership organizations and a trusted information and career-development source for a global workforce of technology leaders, including professors, researchers, software engineers, IT professionals, employers and students. IEEE Computer Society provides high-quality, state-of-the-art information on an on-demand basis. The Computer Society provides a wide range of forums for top minds to come together, including technical conferences, publications, a comprehensive digital library, unique training webinars and professional training. IEEE is the world's largest professional association for advancement of technology and the Computer Society is the largest society within IEEE.

About SC15
SC15 sponsored by ACM and IEEE-CS offers a complete technical education program and exhibition to showcase the many ways high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis lead to advances in scientific discovery, research, education and commerce. This premier international conference includes a globally attended technical program, workshops, tutorials, a world class exhibit area, demonstrations and opportunities for hands-on learning.

SC15 Releases Video Profiling the Importance of Supercomputing as Explained by IDC's Steve Conway

 

Click above to view the latest SC Conference video on the importance of HPC.

Steve Conway, Research Vice President in IDC's High Performance Computing group, provides a high-level overview of the importance supercomputers and cites specific examples where it is making a difference every day.

Mr. Conway plays a major role in directing and implementing HPC research related to the worldwide market for technical servers and supercomputers. A 25-year veteran of the HPC and IT industries, Mr. Conway authors key IDC studies, reports and white papers, helps organize and advance the HPC User Forum, and provides thought leadership and practical guidance for users, vendors and other members of the HPC community.

Before joining IDC, Mr. Conway was vice president of corporate communications and investor relations for Cray Inc. He was also a divisional leader for SGI and headed corporate communications and analyst relations for Cray Research and CompuServe Corporation. Mr. Conway had a 12-year career in university teaching and administration at Boston University and Harvard University.
 
Check back here for more videos on the value high performance computing and dynamic ways it is improving society and mark your calendars for the HPC Matters Plenary on November 16 in Austin, Texas.

SC15 Invited Talk Spotlight: Trends and Challenges in Computational Modeling of Giant Hydrocarbon Reservoirs

Multimodal visualization of giant oil and gas reservoir models.

Giant oil and gas reservoirs continue to play an important role in providing energy to the world. Nowadays, state of the art technologies are utilized to further explore and produce these reservoirs since a slight increase in the recovery amounts to discovering a mid-size reservoir somewhere else.

Mathematical modeling and numerical simulation play a major role in managing and predicting the behavior of these systems using large supercomputers. With the aid of evolving measurement technologies a vast amount of geoscience, fluid and dynamic data is now being collected.

Consequently, more and more high resolution, high fidelity numerical models are being constructed. However, certain challenges still remain in model construction and simulating the dynamic behavior of these reservoirs.

The benefits of fine-scale simulation are improved accuracy and a higher rate of oil recovery.

Challenges include determination of rock property variation between the wells, accurate location of faults, effective simulation of multi-component, multi-phase transient flow in fractures, complex wells, and rock matrix.

Computational challenges include effective parallelization of the simulator algorithms, cost-effective large-scale sparse linear solvers, discretization, handling multi-scale physics, complex well shapes, fractures, complaint software engineering with the rapidly evolving super computer architectures, and effective visualization of very large data sets.

This presentation will cover examples for the giant reservoir models using billion plus elements, model calibration to historical data, challenges, current status, and future trends in computational modeling in reservoir modeling.

Speaker background:

Dr. Ali H. Dogru

Dr. Ali H. Dogru is a Saudi Aramco Fellow and Chief Technologist of Computational Modeling Technology. Before joining Saudi Aramco in 1996 he worked for Core Labs Inc from 1979 to 1982 and then Mobil R&D from 1982 to 1996.

His academic experiences include University of Texas at Austin; Norwegian Institute of Technology; California Institute of Technology; University of Texas; and Istanbul Technical University. He is a visiting Scientist at Earth Sciences at MIT. He holds a PhD from The University of Texas.

He has 12 U.S. patents, is the recipient of the SPE’s John Franklin Carl award, SPE's Reservoir Description and Dynamics award, and a recipient of World Oil’s Innovative Thinker award. He has published extensively.

Getting to Know the Student Cluster Competition Teams

From left, the Technische Universität München team is: Michael Zellner, Gregor Matl, Felix Thimm, Daniel Gallenberger, Felix Spaeth, and Sharru Moeller.

The following is an interesting look at one of the nine Student Cluster Competition teams competing in Austin this November. Click here to learn more about some of the other teams.

For what reasons are you studying computer science?

• The joy of building something new combined with an interest in computers since childhood.
• Enjoyment in creating new things while using innovative computer systems.
• Enjoyment in trying to solve problems and a general interest in innovative computer systems.
• It really influences daily life and most of all, it is fascinating!

In what other events like this have you competed? Was that as a team or individually?  One student has previously competed in the German Federal Competition of Computer Science, which deals with algorithms in a rather theoretical way, and the International Olympics of Informatics (IOI), which also requires the algorithms implementations.

Of those two competitions, he won the first one and became a bronze medalist in the latter. He also competed in the (International Collegiate Programming Contest) ICPC on regional level (as a team) and other programming challenges like the Google Code Jam (Individually, advanced to top 500).
  
What training routine are you following to prepare for this year's SCC15 competition?
We are meeting every other week to discuss our progress with respect to the codes. Furthermore, we have the unique possibility to access the LRZ SuperMIC cluster.

Describe your team's distributed application responsibilities based on experience and interest:

• My primary role is the RepastHPC (Zombie) code because I have experience with OpenGL and Paraview.
• I am responsible for Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) and post-processing. WRF because I have a great experience with paraview and blender. My responsibly for WRF evolves from my interest in climatic simulations, which never stops challenging me.
• I'm mainly focusing on Trinity and Linpack. Further, I am focusing on system administration tasks with a special focus on tuning the overall system for maximum efficiency.
• My focus is on the MILC and the Trinity applications mainly because I'm interested in those algorithms.
• I am concentrating on the WRF and MILC codes.  

What have been some challenges preparing for the competition?

• Getting all of WRFs additional libraries to compile fine with the Intel compiler has proven to be a challenge. We're making progress, though
• Compiling the library's for the Repast Code with the Intel compiler for the Xeon Phi cluster.
• Developing the post-processing of the WRF code was quiet challenging. Trying not to give too much away yet, but this could possibly lead us to an advantage in the competition.
• So far the most challenging assignment is getting the programs to run on the LRZ SuperMIC.
• Installing all the Trinity plugins on the SuperMIC has been the hardest part up until now, but we now know those plugins structures and dependencies inside and out. 

Describes what has been relatively easy so far:

• The easiest part was getting the Zombie code running on my laptop. It just worked as described in the ReadMe.
• I must admit getting WRF to work was easy for there is very detailed documentation online
• Running the MILC application really was a piece of cake. It just works out of the box.

What architectural details can you share that will put fear into the hearts of your competitors?Our system will have multiple Xeon Phi coprocessor cards per node which will allow us to crunch huge amounts of data with high efficiency, especially with respect to power consumption.

What do you like about mysteries? How are your preparing for the mystery application?It is the unknown people fear most - that is what makes the mystery application the real challenge. Not knowing what preparation is necessary, but believing that we can do it is important. It gives us a chance to demonstrate the knowledge about our machine as well as the flexibility of our team.

We are preparing for the mystery application by trying to make applications from previous years Student Cluster Challenges. Further, we try to find other popular codes with interesting properties or system requirements through HPC-related news and conferences. By doing this, we get more experience in working with unknown applications in general.

Why do you want to win? What are you willing to do to win?Our advisors and sponsors expect us to do our best. We can't let them down! We are prepared for long hours in front of our available HPC systems to be able to utilize our final cluster setup as efficient as possible.

What are you planning to do after the competition is over?A few of us are going to stay in the United States a bit and will get to know Texas! Among other places, the plan is to visit the Houston Space Center. And, besides school, there are many more competitions waiting for us!

Mateo Valero Selected as Recipient of 2015 IEEE-CS Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award

Mateo Valero

Mateo Valero, a professor in the Computer Architecture Department at UPC in Barcelona, has been named the recipient of the 2015 IEEE Computer Society Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award.

Prof. Valero, Director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center at the National Center of Supercomputing in Spain, was selected as the recipient for the award “in recognition of seminal contributions to vector, out-of-order, multithreaded, and VLIW architectures.”

The Seymour Cray Computer Engineering award is one of the IEEE Computer Society’s highest awards, and is presented in recognition of innovative contributions to high-performance computing systems that best exemplify the creative spirit demonstrated by Seymour Cray. The award consists of a crystal memento, a certificate, and a US$10,000 honorarium.

Prof. Valero’s research is in the area of computer architecture, with special emphasis on high-performance computers, including processor organization, memory hierarchy, interconnection networks, numerical algorithms, compilers, and performance evaluation and runtime-aware architecture for multicore.

He has published approximately 600 papers, has served in the organization of more than 300 international conferences, and has given more than 500 invited talks at conferences, universities, and companies. Prof. Valero has been an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Micro, IEEE Computer Architecture Letters, Parallel Programming Languages, and the editor of several special issues of IEEE Transactions on Computers and Computer magazine.

Prof. Valero has been honored with several prestigious awards including the IEEE-Computer Society ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award, the IEEE Computer Society Harry Goode Award, the ACM Distinguished Service Award, the Euro-Par Achievement Award, the King Jaime I in basic research, and two Spanish National Awards—the Julio Rey Pastor award, in recognition of research on informatics and/or mathematics, and the Leonardo Torres Quevedo award for engineering.

He has been named Honorary Doctor by the Spanish Universities of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Zaragoza, Complutense de Madrid, and Cantabria, and by the University of Chalmers in Sweden, the University of Belgrade in Serbia, and the University of Veracruz in Mexico. He is a Hall of the Fame member of the IST European Program (selected as one of the 25 most influential European researchers in IT from 1983–2008 in Lyon, November 2008).

In 1994, Prof. Valero became a founding member of the Royal Spanish Academy of Engineering. In 2005, he was elected Correspondent Academic of the Spanish Royal Academy of Science; in 2006, member of the Royal Spanish Academy of Doctors; in 2008, member of the Academia Europaea; and in 2012, Correspondent Academic of the Mexican Academy of Sciences. Prof. Valero is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the ACM, and an Intel Distinguished Research Fellow.

In 1998, Prof. Valero won a “Favorite Son” Award in his home town, Alfamen (Zaragoza), and in 2006, his native town named their public college after him.

Seymour Cray

Previous Seymour Cray Award recipients include Gordon Bell, Ken Batcher, John Cocke, Glen Culler, William J. Dally, Monty Denneau, Alan Gara, John L. Hennessy, Peter Kogge, Kenichi Miura, Steven L. Scott, Charles Seitz, Burton J. Smith, Marc Snir, Steven Wallach, and Tadashi Watanabe.

The 2015 IEEE Computer Society Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award will be presented at the SC15 Conference awards plenary session in Austin, Texas on November 17,  2015. For more information about IEEE Computer Society awards, click here.



About IEEE Computer Society
IEEE Computer Society is the world’s leading membership organization for professionals in all aspects of modern computing—from cloud to big data, security to mobile, robotics to software defined systems, wearables to IoT. A true community for technology leaders, the Computer Society provides resources to keep its members current in technology and moving forward in their professions—publications, a renowned digital library, a vast program of conferences, technical committees, and much more. The Computer Society also serves the profession at large through the establishment of standards, professional qualifications and certifications, training and education programs, events on leading-edge technologies, conference publishing, and a wealth of other services and programs focused on advancing the science and art of computing. More information on IEEE Computer Society can be found at www.computer.org.

SC15 Invited Talk Spotlight: Superscalar Programming Models - Making Applications Platform Agnostic

StarSs is a task-based programming model by Barcelona Supercomputing Center that has the potential to change the way applications are developed (click on image to enlarge).

Programming models play a key role providing abstractions of the underlying architecture and systems to the application developer and enabling the exploitation of the computing resources possibilities from a suitable programming interface.

When considering complex systems with aspects such as large scale, distribution, heterogeneity, variability, etc. it is indeed more important to offer programming paradigms that simplify the life of the programmers while still providing competitive performance results.

StarSs (Star superscalar) is a task-based family of programming models that is based on the idea of writing sequential code which is executed in parallel at run-time taking into account the data dependencies between tasks.

The talk will describe the evolution of this programming model and the different challenges that have been addressed in order to consider different underlying platforms from heterogeneous platforms used in HPC to distributed environments, such as federated clouds and mobile systems.

Speaker background:

Dr. Badia in the MareNostrum supercomputer site (BSC, Spain).

Rosa M. Badia holds a PhD on Computer Science (1994) from the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC). She is a Scientific Researcher from the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) and team leader of the Workflows and Distributed Computing research group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). She was involved in teaching and research activities at the UPC from 1989 to 2008, where she was an Associated Professor since year 1997. From 1999 European Center of Parallelism of Barcelona (CEPBA).

Her current research interest are programming models for complex platforms (from multicore, GPUs to Grid/Cloud). The group led by Dr. Badia has been developing StarSs programming model for more than 10 years, with a high success in adoption by application developers. Currently the group focuses its efforts in two instances of StarSs: OmpSs for heterogeneous platforms and COMPSs/PyCOMPSs for distributed computing including Cloud.

For this last case, the group has been doing efforts on interoperability through standards, for example using OCCI to enable COMPSs to interact with several Cloud providers at a time. Dr Badia has published more than 150 papers in international conferences and journals in the topics of her research. She has participated in several European projects, for example BEinGRID, Brein, CoreGRID, OGF-Europe, SIENA, TEXT and VENUS-C, and currently she is participating in the project Severo Ochoa (at Spanish level), ASCETIC, Euroserver, The Human Brain Project, EU-Brazil CloudConnect, and trasnPLANT and it is a member of HiPEAC2 NoE.

This is the second episode in a series providing you with details behind the SC15 Invited Talks Program.