SC15 Awards Recap: Part 1

Once again, the SC Awards Ceremony was an entertaining event and one of the many highlights of conference week. This year, the SC15 Award Co-Chairs were Padma Raghavan and Franck Cappello who helped open the SC15 Awards Ceremony

According to Cappello, “The awards are very important for the SC conference series. They celebrate the best and the brightest of High Performance Computing [HPC].  The selection of the finalists and winners follow a very strict and codified process, involving many members of the program committee.”

SC15 Award Co-Chairs were Padma Raghavan and Franck Cappello.

He continued, “Awards are not just plaques or certificates. They define excellence. They set the bar for the years to come. They are a very powerful inspiration for young and senior researchers.”

Raghavan added that even being an award finalist at SC15 is already an achievement in itself. Following is a brief summary of some of the SC15 award winners.

SC15 Student Cluster Competition
The Student Cluster Competition is comprised of two awards: the first for the Highest LINPACK and the 2nd for the Overall Winner. These awards showcase student expertise in a friendly yet spirited competition.   It’s a non-stop, real-time, 48-hour challenge where students race to assemble a small cluster at SC15 to demonstrate the greatest sustained performance across a series of applications.

The students partner with vendors to design and build a cutting-edge cluster from commercially available components, not to exceed a 3120-watt power limit and work with application experts to tune and run the competition codes.  The Student Cluster competition is supported by Allinea and Schlumberger.

The first Student Cluster Competition award - Highest LINPACK Benchmark - went to Team TUMuch Phun, Technische Universität from München, Germany.       

Team TUMuch Phun, Technische Universität from München, Germany, receive the Highest LINPACK Benchmark award from SC15 Student Cluster Competition Chair, Hai-Ah Nam (far right). 

The Overall Student Cluster Competition winner was determined based on a combined score for correctly completed workload, benchmark performance, demonstrated understanding of architecture and performance through profiling and analysis, and interviews. This year’s winner was Team Diablo from Tsinghua University in China.

Team Diablo, Tsinghua University in China, celebrate winning the SC15 Student Cluster Competition.

Technical Papers Program

Jeffrey S. Vetter, SC15 Technical Program Chair, presents interesting data from this year’s submissions during the SC15 awards ceremony in Austin, Texas.

The Technical Papers Program is one of SC’s most valued components.  Each year SC receives submissions of original research that introduce new ideas to the field and stimulate future trends in HPC.  As in previous years, it was a tough competition, with 361 paper submissions covering a wide range of research interests and topics.

The committee met for two days in June to review the Papers. At the conclusion of the meeting, the committee had accepted 78 papers, which is a 22 percent acceptance rate.  Of the 78 papers, nine have been selected as finalists for the Best Paper and Best Student Paper awards.

Please note,  all technical papers are available at the ACM Digital Library and can be accessed by clicking here.

Best Student Paper

"Parallel Distributed Memory Construction of Suffix and Longest Common Prefix Arrays” by Patrick Flick and Srinivas Aluru was selected as the SC15 best student paper.

Patrick Flick’s and Srinivas Aluru’s winning paper proposes a novel algorithm for the suffix array problem. The performance results are very impressive and demonstrate a hundred fold improvement over existing methods. The algorithm itself has a potential broad impact on the field of genomics.

The three other finalists were:

• Adaptive and Transparent Cache Bypassing for GPUs - with Ang Li from Eindhoven University of Technology as the lead author.
• A Case for Application-Oblivious Energy - Efficient MPI Runtime- with Akshay Venkatesh - Ohio State University as the lead author.
• GraphReduce: Processing Large-Scale Graphs on Accelerator - Based Systems - with Dipanjan Sengupta - Georgia Institute of Technology as the lead author

Best Overall Paper
 

The SC15 Best Paper, ”ScaAnalyzer — A Tool to Identify Memory Scalability Bottlenecks in Parallel Programs” by Xu Liu and Bo Wu.

Xu Liu’s and Bo Wu’s winning paper proposes methods and tools that isolate the causes of memory bottlenecks in both hardware and software in advanced computing systems. The committee felt the fundamental contributions address the memory wall problem and could have wide applicability in software development at Exascale.

The Best Paper authors (with certificates from left) Bo Wu and Xu Liu receive their awards from members of the SC15 Awards Committee who are (from left) Padma Raghavan, Eva Deelman and José Moreira, co-chairs of the SC15 Technical Papers Committee, and Franck Cappello.

The other finalists were:

• Massively Parallel Phase-Field Simulations for Ternary Eutectic Directional Solidification - with Martin Bauer - FAU Erlangen Nuremberg as the lead author.
• Efficient Implementation of Quantum Materials Simulations on Distributed CPU-GPU Systems - with Raffaele Solcà - ETH Zurich as the lead author.
• Adaptive and Transparent Cache Bypassing for GPU's - with Ang Li - Eindhoven University of Technology as lead author.
• Exploiting Asynchrony from Exact Forward Recovery for DUE in Iterative Solvers - with Luc Jaulmes - Barcelona Supercomputing Center as the lead author.
• PGX.D: A Fast Distributed Graph Processing System - with Sungpack Hong - Oracle Corporation as the lead author. 

Check back here for additional coverage of other SC15 award winners in the near future.

China’s Team Diablo Turns Up the Heat to Win SC15 Student Cluster Competition

Tsinghua University Claims Third Cluster Competition Title this Year

Team Diablo from Tsinghua University, the overall winners of the SC15 Student Cluster Competition.

Team Diablo, a team of undergraduate students from Tsinghua University in China, won the top prize in the Student Cluster Competition at the SC15 conference in Austin, Texas. A team from Germany, Team TUMuch Phun from the Technical University of Munich, won the award for achieving highest performance for the Linpack benchmark.

For the Tsinghua University team, this was their third win, coming on the heels of victories at the International Supercomputing Conference in Germany and the Asia Supercomputing Community Student Supercomputer Challenge.

When they were announced as SC15 winners at the Thursday, Nov. 19, awards session, the team let out a whoop and went to the stage to collect their certificates.

“After they announced it, we were really excited,” said Youwei Zhou, a senior undergraduate student and team spokesman. “Our secret is teamwork and each member is capable of understanding the hardware and software. When we get stuck on a problem and cannot progress, we always figure it out with more people working on it. We also find potential performance increases this way.”

Zhou also said the each of this year’s winning teams from his university consisted of different students.

The Student Cluster Competition, which debuted at SC07 in Reno and has since been replicated in Europe, Asia and Africa, is a real-time, non-stop, 48-hour challenge in which teams of six undergraduates assemble a small cluster at SC15 and race to complete a real-world workload across a series of scientific applications, demonstrate knowledge of system architecture and application performance, and impress HPC industry judges.  

The students partner with vendors to design and build a cutting-edge cluster from commercially available components, not to exceed a 3120-watt power limit and work with application experts to tune and run the competition codes.

The award for Student Cluster Competition Overall Winner is based on the combined score for correctly completed workload, benchmark performance, demonstrated understanding of architecture and performance through profiling and analysis, and interviews.

In addition to the teams from China and Germany, the SC15 Student Cluster Competition line-up included:

●      Team Desert Heat, Arizona Research Computing, United States

●      Illinois Institute of Technology, United States

●      National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan

●      Northeastern University, United States

●      Pawsey Supercomputing Centre, Australia

●      Universidad EAFIT, Colombia

●      University of Oklahoma, United States

The Student Cluster Competition is part of the Students@SC Program. Funding for the SC15 Student Cluster Competition was provided by IEEE/ACM SC15 and supported by Allinea and Schlumberger.

SC15 Breaks Exhibits and Attendance Records While in Austin, Texas

Noted science communicator and award-winning actor Alan Alda gives the SC15 Keynote Address in Austin, TX, where record-breaking attendance reached approximately  13,000 people.

 Media Contact: Brian Ban (773) 454-7423 or BrianBan@SC15Austin.com

Austin, TX - SC15, the 27th anniversary conference of high performance computing (HPC), networking, storage and analysis, celebrated the contributions of researchers and scientists - from those just starting their careers to those whose contributions have made lasting impacts.

The SC15 Exhibit Hall broke records in Austin, TX. (Click photo to enlarge.)

The conference drew a record-breaking 12,914+ registered attendees (as of data collected on 11/20) and featured a technical program spanning six days. The exhibit hall featured 343 exhibitors from industry, academia and research organizations from around the world.

Crowds rushed to the SC15 Exhibit Hall between engaging Technical Sessions.

“In a world of ever-growing, complex problems, high performance computing has a plethora of opportunities to impact lives across multiple fields,” said Jackie Kern, SC15 General Chair from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

SC15 found its home in Austin, TX - pictured here at dawn.

She continued, “No longer is high performance computing reserved for only the biggest corporations in the world. It is now trickling down to smaller, medium-sized firms, which is only increasing its impact. This conference brings together the best research and industry minds in the world for one packed week of sharing ideas, networking, and education.”

SC15 General Chair Jackie Kern being interviewed by Austin-CBS affiliate KEYE in the Exhibit Hall.

According to Kern, the SC15 Exhibition was sold out and the industry-focused exhibit space was the largest to date in the history of the conference. The 217 industry-focused exhibits also marks a new SC15 record. In addition to record-breaking exhibit space, there were a total of 43 first-time exhibitors and 113 international exhibitors from 23 countries (outside the US).  In all, there was a total of approx. 137,000 net square feet of exhibit space and 343 industry and research organizations

SCinet - once again, the world's fastest conference computer network.

During the conference, Austin also became the hub for the world’s fastest conference computer network - SCinet (SC15’s custom network) which made 1.62 (16 100G + 2 10G) Terabits of bandwidth available to exhibitors and attendees.  The network featured 84 miles of fiber deployed throughout the convention center and $18 million in loaned equipment.  It was all made possible by 130 volunteers representing global organizations spanning academia, government and industry.

Noted science communicator and award-winning actor Alan Alda opened the SC15 Technical Program with a keynote speech focusing on the role of science in our society and the intersection of science and computing to a full house of approximately 3,000 people in Austin, Texas on November 17th.

Jeffrey S. Vetter, the SC15 Technical Program Chair, takes the stage.

The Technical Program again offered the highest quality in original HPC research. The SC workshops set a new record with more than 2,000 attendees. There were 10 Best Paper Finalists and 5 Gordon Bell Finalists. These submissions represent the best of the best in a wide variety of research topics in HPC.

Congrats to the 2015 Gordon Bell Prize Award winners. The team received their award at SC15 for using innovative algorithms & implicit solvers to realistically simulate current conditions of the Earth’s interior for the first time. Their work could herald a major step toward more accurately predicting earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

Overall Stats on Tech Program Tracks:

•    75 Birds-of-a-Feathers
•    78 Papers
•    12 Panels
•    135 Posters  
•    41 Tutorials
•    42 Workshops
•    14 Invited Speakers
•    14 Doctoral Showcase Presentations
•    10 Emerging Technology Presentations

Intel executive Diane Bryant addresses the crowd at the HPC Matters Plenary.

For the second year, SC featured an opening “HPC Matters” plenary that this year was led by Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Data Center Group, who discussed how next-generation supercomputers are transforming HPC.  She further identified exciting opportunities for advancing scientific research and discovery to deliver far-reaching impacts on society.

As part of this Plenary, Intel announced a $300,000 scholarship per-year for five years for women/minorities with STEM undergraduate degrees to fund fellowships for those pursuing PhD's degrees in computational and data science.  This commitment is in honor of Intel's third CEO Andrew Grove. 

The entire Plenary is available online and available by clicking here.

SC16 will be held next November 13th-18th in Salt Lake City, Utah.  For more details, click here.

About SC15
SC15, sponsored by ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) and IEEE Computer Society 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. For more information on SC15, please visit http://www.sc15.supercomputing.org/, or contact communications@info.supercomputing.org for more information.

About ACM
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery www.acm.org, 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.

Connecting Live in Austin with One of the Mosts Powerful Networks in the World

The SCinet network, SC’s Supercomputing Internet, is now live! On November 14, the Austin Convention Center became home to the fastest and most innovative computer network in the world built by volunteers, delivering more than 1.6 terabits per second of network bandwidth to the SC conference (SC15).

SCinet gives the SC conference attendees a unique chance to showcase and discover the latest research in HPC. By building the fastest, most innovative operational network possible every year, SCinet enables data-intensive research and live-use of high performing hardware to run multi-gigabit demonstrations, requiring a fast and robust infrastructure.

SC15 SCinet Contributors (click to enlarge).

“This network is unrivaled with regards to its capabilities and the broad-reaching influence, both nationally and internationally, to support demonstrations and experiments that could not be done easily in any other place. It’s a one-of-a-kind environment where research meets production,” says Davey Wheeler, SCinet Chair and Senior Network Engineer from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). “As the SCinet Chair leading the development of this network, this year is a culmination of 17 years of experience working on SCinet from year to year. It is humbling and honoring to be able to work aside these colleagues and see the tremendous talent, dedication, and creativity of the volunteers.”

SCinet is built by a team of expert volunteers from around the world, taking one year to design the network, three weeks to set it up, four days to operate it, and twenty-four hours to tear it down. Over 100 engineers from industry, academia and government institutions came together to build this network, using over $22 million in loaned equipment and over 89 miles of newly installed fiber optic cables.

“Having been the SCinet Chair for SC07 in Reno, I am intimately familiar with the incredible amount of planning and work that goes into creating what will be the most powerful network. Over 130 SCinet volunteers from more than 15 countries have worked energetically for the past year to provide wired and wireless access to our conference attendees, and the platform for our exhibitors to showcase bandwidth-driven HPC and cloud computing applications. SCinet continues to be a crucial part of SC and I am extremely grateful for their hard work,” says Jackie Kern, Director of IT Shared Services at UIUC and SC15 Conference Chair.

For SC15, SCinet has connected multiple 100 gigabit circuits, bringing an unprecedented 1.62 terabits per second of bandwidth to the Austin Convention Center. Lonestar Education and Research Network (LEARN) leads this effort in collaboration with leading national and international research networks and commodity providers. LEARN and SCinet supports the HPC community by providing multiple 100 gigabit waves and complementary capabilities throughout the SC15 conference events. 

In addition to the massive external capacity SCinet brings to the convention center, the network is also supporting research initiatives through a half-day workshop, Innovating the Network for Data-Intensive Science (INDIS); and the Network Research Exhibition (NRE). SCinet organizes the INDIS workshop to discuss technical papers and show floor demonstrations dedicated to high performance networking technologies, innovations, protocols, hardware, and much more.

Further, SCinet is providing the wireless connectivity for more than 11,000 expected conference attendees throughout the conference areas. The SCinet team built the SC15 wireless network using 339 wireless access points to support more than 4,000 simultaneous users on the conference wifi. The wireless network will include support for eduroam (education roaming) service, which allows users (researchers, teachers, students, and staff) from participating institutions to securely access the protected wireless network using their home organization’s login credentials.

SCinet is the result of the hard work and significant contributions of many government, research, education and corporate collaborators who have volunteered time, equipment and expertise to ensure SC15’s success. This year, SCinet continued the Contributors Program and we would like to give a special thank you to all SCinet contributors and volunteers!

Platinum contributors: CenturyLink, Ciena, ESnet, Infinera, Internet2, Juniper Networks, and Lonestar Education and Research Network (LEARN).

Gold contributors: Brocade, Cisco, and Gigamon.

Silver contributors: Alcatel-Lucent, Arista, Austin Convention Center, Dell, Greater Austin Area Telecommunications Network (GAATN), inMon, IXIA, Reservoir Labs, Spirent, and The University of Texas System.

Bronze contributors: CABLExpress, Commscope, Splunk, Verisign, and Viavi Solutions.

Volunteers from the following organizations supporting the development and deployment of SCinet: Alcatel-Lucent, Army Research Laboratory, CABLExpress Corporation, CENIC, CenturyLink, Ciena, Cisco, Clemson University, DFN-Verein, DataDirect Networks, Dell Research, Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), Florida LambdaRail (FLR), Freelance, Georgia Institute of Technology, Idaho State University, InMon Corporation, Indiana University, Indiana University GlobalNOC, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Infinera, Internet Consulting of Vermont, Internet2, JDSU, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Lonestar Education and Research Network (LEARN), Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI), Louisiana State University, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University, REANNZ, Radware, Reservoir Labs, SURFnet, Sandia National Laboratories, The University of Texas at Austin, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, University of Amsterdam, University of California, San Diego, University of Colorado Boulder, University of Heidelberg, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Michigan, University of Oklahoma, University of Pittsburgh, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, University of Texas, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Utah Education Network, and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

If you’re interested in volunteering for SCinet or participating in the Contributor’s Program for SC16, please email scinet@info.supercomputing.org.

SC15 Releases Exclusive Podcast with Science Advocate and Emmy Award Winning Actor Alan Alda

SC15 Keynote Presenter Alan Alda

Listen to Alan Alda, SC15 Keynote Speaker and founder of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stonybrook University, as he talks about the urgency for clear, engaging and accurate communication in high performance computing (and the importance of supercomputers in general) in this short, but enlightening conversation with SC’s Jorge Salazar.

Alan Alda Excerpt:
“I think the kind of transformation that's already been brought about by high performance computing is extraordinary. And for it to go further and fully realize its potential requires another kind of transformation… Powerful computing affects all our lives and can hopefully save our lives.

It can eventually help us survive some of our unfortunate efforts that have affected climate, for instance. To model climate change is one of the great benefits we're going to get from supercomputing. The trouble is, to really help the public understand all the benefits that they can get from supercomputing, it has to be communicated with clarity so that they get it and they get excited by it… (thus) I think we have to transform the scientists who are explaining this to the public before the public will allow them and participate with them in transforming their own lives with this amazing ability to model things on supercomputers.”

Listen to the full podcast by clicking here.

Background:
Alan Alda, actor, director and writer, has had a lifelong interest in science. He hosted the PBS program Scientific American Frontiers from 1993 to 2005, an experience he called "the best thing I ever did in front of a camera." Perhaps best known as surgeon 'Hawkeye' Pierce on the TV series MASH, Alda has won seven Emmys, six Golden Globes, and three Directors Guild of America awards for directing. His two memoires are both New York Times bestsellers.

A recipient of the National Science Board’s Public Service Award, Alda is a visiting professor at and founding member of Stony Brook University’s Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, where he helps develop innovative programs on how scientists communicate with the public. He is also on the Board of Directors of the World Science Festival.

For more details on the SC15 Keynote Address, click here.  To view the SC15 videos Alan Alda references in this discussion, 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 Invited Talk Focus: Dr. Panagiotis Tsarchopoulos Explains the European Supercomputing Research Programme

Over the last couple of years, through a number of policy and research initiatives, the European Union has worked in putting together an ambitious supercomputing research programme.

As part of this effort, in autumn 2015, the European Commission has launched several new supercomputing projects covering supercomputing hardware, software and applications. This launch marks an important milestone in European supercomputing research and development.

The talk will provide a detailed overview of the European supercomputing research programme, its current status, and its future perspectives towards exascale.

Speaker Background:

Dr. Panagiotis (Panos) Tsarchopoulos

Dr. Panagiotis (Panos) Tsarchopoulos is responsible for supercomputing research projects at the Future and Emerging Technologies unit of the European Commission. He holds a Ph.D. in computer engineering from the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany and an M.B.A. from the UBI, Brussels, Belgium.

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. 19th

Asynchronous Many-­Task Programming Models for Next Generation Platforms

Next generation platform architectures will require us to fundamentally rethink our programming models and environments due to a combination of factors including extreme parallelism, data locality issues, and resilience. As seen in the computational sciences community, asynchronous many-task (AMT) programming models and runtime systems are emerging as a leading new paradigm.

While there are some overarching similarities between existing AMT systems, the community lacks consistent 1) terminology to describe runtime components, 2) application- and component-level interfaces, and 3) requirements for the lower level runtime and system software stacks.

This panel will engage a group of community experts in a lively discussion on status and ideas to establish best practices in light of requirements such as performance portability, scalability, resilience, and interoperability. Additionally, we will consider the challenges of user-adoption, with a focus on the issue of productivity, which is critical given the application code rewrite required to adopt this approach.

Moderator/Panelist Details:

• Robert Clay (Moderator) - Sandia National Laboratories
• Alex Aiken - Stanford University
• Martin Berzins - University of Utah
• Matthew Bettencourt - Sandia National Laboratories
• Laxmikant Kale - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Timothy Mattson - Intel Corporation
• Lawrence Rauchwerger - Texas A&M University
• Vivek Sarkar - Rice University
• Thomas Sterling - Indiana University
• Jeremiah Wilke - Sandia National Laboratories

 

Towards an Open Software Stack for Exascale Computing

The panel will discuss what an open software stack should contain, what would make it feasible and what is not looking possible at the moment. The discussion is inspired by the fact that "this time, we have time" before the hardware actually reaches the market after 2020, so we can work on a software stack accordingly.

We will cover questions such as: Which would be the software development costs? What industries will migrate first? Would a killer app accelerate this process? Do we focus on algorithms to save power? How heterogeneous would/should “your” exascale system be? Is there a role for Co-design towards exascale? Is the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project an example to follow? Would cloud computing be possible for exascale? Who will “own” the exascale era?

Moderator/Panelist Details:

• Nicolás Erdödy (Moderator) - Open Parallel Ltd.
• Pete Beckman - Argonne National Laboratory
• Chris Broekema - Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy
• Jack Dongarra - University of Tennessee
• John Gustafson - Ceranovo, Inc.
• Thomas Sterling - Indiana University
• Robert Wisniewski - Intel Corporation

 

Procuring Supercomputers: Best Practices and Lessons Learned

Procuring HPC systems is a challenging process of acquiring the most suitable machine under technical and financial constrains aiming at maximizing the benefits to the users’ applications and minimizing the risks during its lifetime.

In this panel, HPC leaders will discuss and debate on keys requirements and lessons learned for successful procurements of supercomputers.

How do we define the requirements of the system? Is it to acquire a system for maximizing the capacity and capability, assessing new/future technologies, deliver a system designed for specific applications or provide an all-purpose solution to a broad range of applications? Is the system just a status symbol or must it do useful work?

This panel will give the audience an opportunity to ask questions to panelists who are involved in the procurement of leadership-class supercomputers and capturing lessons learned and turning that hindsight into best practices to procure and the most suitable HPC system.

Moderator/Panelist Details:

• Bilel Hadri (Moderator) - King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
• Katie Antypas - National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center
• Bill Kramer - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Satoshi Matsuoka - Tokyo Institute of Technology
• Greg Newby - Compute Canada
• Owen Thomas - Red Oak Consulting

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 Releases Short Video Explaining Why High Performance Computing is Important to NASA

NASA Aerospace Engineer Dr. Shishir Pandya explains how high performance computers (HPCs) help advance airplane and rocket technologies to save fuel and make travel more affordable for the public.  According to Pandya it is also critical to be pushing technology further to search for that next breakthrough.

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. Also, once again, there will be an HPC Matters Plenary during the conference.  This year's chosen speaker is Intel's Diane Bryant - recently named one of the top 51 most powerful women by Forbes. To view those details, click here.

Editorial note: Special thanks to NASA's Jill Dunbar for her assistance on this project.

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.

SC15 Invited Talk Spotlight: Societal Impact of Earthquake Simulations at Extreme Scale by USC's Dr. Thomas H. Jordan

Simulation of a “wall-to-wall” rupture of the southern San Andreas Fault. The peak ground velocities during this magnitude-8 earthquake are shown in color. White lines are seismograms at selected points. Graphic by Geoff Ely, Southern California Earthquake Center (click on image to enlarge).

The highly nonlinear, multiscale dynamics of large earthquakes is a wicked physics problem that challenges HPC systems at extreme computational scales. This presentation will summarize how earthquake simulations at increasing levels of scale and sophistication have contributed to our understanding of seismic phenomena, focusing on the practical use of simulations to reduce seismic risk and enhance community resilience.

Milestones include the terascale simulations of large San Andreas earthquakes that culminated in the landmark 2008 ShakeOut planning exercise and the recent petascale simulations that have created the first physics-based seismic hazard models.

CyberShake seismic hazard map for the Los Angeles region, showing the 2-s spectral acceleration response (in units of surface gravity) at an exceedance probability of 2% in 50 years. To create this map, over 300 million seismograms were computed at 336 sites for multiple realizations of all fault ruptures in Version 2 of the Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast using the tomographic velocity model CVM-S4.26. This is the information engineers need to design seismically safe structures.

From the latter it is shown that accurate simulations can potentially reduce the total hazard uncertainty by about one-third relative to empirical models, which would lower the exceedance probabilities at high hazard levels by orders of magnitude.

Realizing this gain in forecasting probability will require enhanced computational capabilities, but it could have a broad impact on risk-reduction strategies, especially for critical facilities such as large dams, nuclear power plants, and energy transportation networks.

Click here for an animation of ground motions in the Los Angeles region excited by a magnitude-7.8 earthquake on the southern San Andreas Fault. Areas of high plastic strain and inelastic dissipation are shown in green. Credit: Dan Roten, San Diego Supercomputer Center.

Speaker Background:

Dr. Thomas H. Jordan

Dr. Thomas H. Jordan is a University Professor and the W. M. Keck Foundation Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Southern California. His current research is focused on system-level models of earthquake processes, earthquake forecasting, continental structure and dynamics, and full-3D waveform tomography.

As the director of the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), he coordinates an international research program in earthquake system science that involves over 1000 scientists at more than 70 universities and research organizations. He is an author of more than 230 scientific publications, including two popular textbooks.

Jordan received his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1972 and taught at Princeton University and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography before joining the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984. He was head of MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences from 1988 to 1998.

He has received the Macelwane and Lehmann Medals of the American Geophysical Union and the Woollard Award and President’s Medal of the Geological Society of America. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

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: 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.

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.