HPCwire Interviews Diane Bryant On Eve of HPC Matters Plenary

HPC Matters Plenary Speaker Diane Bryant

Thomas Ayres and Tiffany Trader for HPCwire

Back in September, the news broke that Intel’s Senior Vice President Diane Bryant was named the HPC Matters plenary speaker for the SC15 conference taking place in Austin, Texas.

The theme for this year’s HPC Matters program is “Fueling the Transformation” and Bryant, along with multiple industry luminaries, will be taking the stage before the SC15 opening gala on November 16 to discuss the myriad of ways that HPC is transforming lives.

Bryant leads Intel’s datacenter business unit, one of the chipmaker’s strongest segments. This year, FORTUNE magazine named Bryant to its Most Powerful Women in Business list. Criteria for selection to this prominent listing includes the importance of the woman’s business in the global economy, health and direction of the business, career arc, and cultural influence.

This dovetails well with Bryant’s role as speaker for this year’s HPC Matters plenary. The HPC Matters program, launched by the SC program committee two years ago, rests on four pillars: influencing daily lives, science and engineering, economic impact, and education.

Bryant speaks frequently on all of these issues and has been especially prominent in promoting the benefits of diversity in the workplace. For the upcoming HPC Matters plenary, Bryant will draw on her experience running Intel’s datacenter group, which includes the HPC business segment and products ranging from high-end coprocessors for supercomputers, to big data analytics solutions, to high-density systems for the cloud. In the exclusive interview to follow, she shares her thoughts on where she sees HPC heading in the upcoming years, why it’s an important topic in our world, and how her career at Intel has shaped her views on HPC. Following is the interview:

HPCwire: What key points are you going to touch on in your presentation?
Diane Bryant: We are in the midst of an unprecedented change in High Performance Computing. Everything about how HPC systems are used and built is going to change over the next decade. HPC must support more complex models with more and more data, and enable new usages as industries realize the benefits of very powerful real-time analytics.  To meet these needs, HPC must achieve exascale performance and beyond, while expanding access to more users.  This will require a transformation of not only the systems, but the entire solution stack.

How does HPC matter to you?
Diane Bryant: As an engineer, what excites me is seeing how information technology is used to solve real world problems.  HPC is a transformational capability helping solve society’s most pressing challenges.  Look at the improvements in life science and precision medicine that have really been enabled by researchers and physicians gaining access to more powerful supercomputers.  Seeing industry after industry take these tools with Intel technology as their foundation and use them to improve lives and drive economic growth is tremendously gratifying and exciting to all of us who work to push IT forward.

Click here to go to the full HPCwire article.

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.

SC15: Start the Countdown

SC15 welcome banners are up today in downtown Austin.

Preparing for SC15
SC15 will be a rich and exciting experience for both new and old attendees. To start planning your agenda, begin at the SC15 website. Here you will find descriptions of the activities and a detailed Technical Program Schedule that can be used to build your own personalized agenda.

When viewing the online Technical Program Schedule, once you select an event and want to add it to your personal schedule, just click on one of the calendar icons (Outlook, iCal or Google calendar) and that event will be stored there.

Get the SC15 Mobile App Now Available!
The SC15 App is now available. You can download it from the Apple and Android app stores by searching for SC15 or click here for all the details.. An HTML5 version is available here.

The SC15 app will include the standard components from years past, but with new features for improved attendee experience. Features in the new app include:

•     Searchable event schedule for easy-to-find sessions and events
•     Attendee personalization, scheduling and notes within the app
•     SC15 updates to keep attendees informed and involved
•     Exhibitor directory with map
•     Ability for attendees to easily share their SC experience through Live Activity Feed and Social Media
•     QR Code reader to quickly find SC15 information
•     In-app access to session surveys for sessions you’ve bookmarked in your schedule
•     Integration with ACM Digital Library so that finding session speaker papers and abstracts during the conference is a cinch

You will need to log in to the app and establish an account with your email address. This account will allow you to access your calendar, notes, and other in-app data to sync across multiple devices.

Safety Notes
We value the safety of all SC attendees and want you to focus on enjoying your stay and experience at the conference. To assist you, here are a few common conference reminders and safety pointers to help make sure you have a safe and productive trip.

•     Please make sure to use the buddy system, multiple persons are better--don’t ever walk alone at night.
•     Make sure you have a phone on you in case of emergencies and you have at least one other attendee’s contact information.
•     Please DO NOT WEAR YOUR CONFERENCE BADGE outside of the convention center. This is often a targeting mechanism for scammers and criminals.
•     Ask your hotel staff if certain areas are safe/not safe before going out.
•     Don’t leave your belongings unattended.
•     If you are driving, take a second to double check that your car doors are locked.
•     Stay on well lit or major streets at night.

Registration
Upon arrival at the Austin Convention Center, please proceed to the registration in the Atrium to register and pick up your badge, which you need to wear at all times. We strongly encourage Workshop and Tutorials participants to register the day before the event to avoid long registration lines, or you can register online.

The registration desk will be open as follows:

• Saturday - Nov 14: 1:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
• Sunday - Nov 15: 7:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
• Monday - Nov 16: 7:00 a.m. – 9:00 p.m.
• Tuesday - Nov 17: 7:30 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
• Wednesday - Nov 18: 7:30 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
• Thursday - Nov 19: 7:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
• Friday - Nov 20: 8:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.

Please note: anyone attending the HPC Matters Plenary will need to have a badge, but there is no fee to get one in order to attend the Plenary.

How SC is Organized
There are four main components of the SC Conference: Technical Program, Exhibits, Students@SC, and SCinet:

Technical Program: the heart of the conference, the technical program provides multiple forums for sharing research, development, and applications in high performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis:

•     HPC Matters Plenary
•     Invited Talks
•     Technical Papers
•     Tutorials
•     Panels
•     Workshops
•     Posters
•     Emerging Technologies
•     Scientific Visualization Showcase
•     Birds of a Feather
•     Awards

Technical Program registration and badge are needed for attending most of these sessions, while tutorials and workshops require separate registrations.

For the full Attendee Guide, click here.

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!

SC15 Releases Short Video on Why High Performance Computing Matters to PayPal

As one of the world's largest internet payment companies, PayPal handles massive amounts of sensitive data.  Hear from Ryan Quick, principal architect for advanced technologies from PayPal, on how they strive to use high performance computing to make every day online transactions something you don't even have to think twice about.

According to Quick, handling such massive amounts of data is like drinking from a fire hose.  He stresses how they aim to make every transaction a smooth and safe process whether dealing with regulations from country to country, state to state, or transaction to transaction. In 2014, PayPal moved $228 billion in 26 currencies across more than 190 nations, generating a total revenue of $7.9 billion.

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.

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 Enhanced Mobile App to Apple and Android App Stores

The SC15 mobile app is now available.

The SC15 App, developed by DoubleDutch, is now available. You can download it from the Apple and Android app stores by searching for SC15 or by clicking here.  An HTML version of the app is also available from this website.

The SC15 app will include the standard components from years past, but with new features for improved attendee experience. Features in the new app include:

•     Searchable event schedule for easy-to-find sessions and events
•     Attendee personalization, scheduling and notes within the app
•     SC15 updates to keep attendees informed and involved
•     Exhibitor directory with map
•     Ability for attendees to easily share their SC experience through Live Activity Feed and Social Media
•     QR Code reader to quickly find SC15 information
•     Integration with ACM Digital Library so that finding session speaker papers and abstracts during the conference is a cinch

You will need to log in to the app and establish an account with your email address. This account will allow you to access your calendar, notes, and other in-app data to sync across multiple devices.

SC15 Releases Short Video on How HPC is Impacting Climate Change as Explained by Leading World Experts

Hear from the experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who explain how high performance computing is the most important component in analyzing future climate change scenarios or models and developing strategies to help circumvent rapid climate change.

According to Dr. Alexander “Sandy” MacDonald, Chief Science Advisor, NOAA’s Office of Oceanic Research Director of the Earth System Research, “Climate change is one of the greatest, if not the greatest issue of the 21st century.”

Adding to the discussion are Benjamin Santer and Dean Norman Williams from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who highlight why this is such a pressing issue and what steps are being done to better understand the global impact.

Simplifying the World’s Most Powerful Computer Network with SDN

For the first time, SC’s research and production network (SCinet) will be using the emerging technology software defined networking (SDN) to manage and simplify the operations for a portion of the SC conference’s show floor network.

SCinet is the research and production network that serves as the backbone of data communications for the annual SC Conference. By using SDN in the SCinet network, the group of network engineers deploying SCinet will be able to transfer the task of configuring individual network switching devices to a single piece of software, removing human error from the process of setting up connections within the network.

Nick Buraglio, SDN Project Lead

“Take the last three problems or errors that have occurred on a network of any notable size,” says Nick Buraglio, network engineer at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) and lead of SCinet’s SDN project, “it’s almost always a configuration problem—some kind of human error that caused those issues.”

As the pilot year for this SDN project, half of SCinet’s circa one hundred, one-gigabit booth connections will be SDN configured. This technology will simplify managing these network connections and will hopefully reduce the time engineers spend troubleshooting configuration and provisioning errors.

“Previously SCinet had to create its own configurations for devices which required a unique configuration template for each device along a path. Using SDN, we can take all the idiosyncrasies of various devices into account and configure these devices using a single piece of software,” said J.P. Velders, a network engineer from the University of Amsterdam and co-chair of SCinet’s routing team.

Although still an emerging technology, SCinet anticipates that SDN will increase efficiencies. This network provides a unique platform for running high performance computing (HPC) applications and demonstrations at the SC conference, which is in its 27th year. SCinet, built by more than 100 volunteers from academia, industry and government, has been providing the network connectivity and platform for HPC research at SC since 1991.

From left: SCinet volunteers J.P. Velders, Paul Wefel, Conan Moore and Davey Wheeler (SCinet Chair)

“SDN allows the participating vendors to showcase the programmability of their equipment in a production environment.  In addition to the enhancements to the SCinet architecture itself, the use of SDN helps promote the practical usability of the technology to conference participants and the network industry as a whole, “ says Conan Moore, a network engineer from the University of Colorado Boulder and co-chair of SCinet’s routing team.

To implement SDN, SCinet is partnering with Brocade, a network technology company. Brocade is providing both the routing and switching equipment, and the Controller software, which uses OpenFlow, the feature that enables SCinet to deploy SDN across multiple devices.

The SCinet team used OpenFlow in 2014 with Big Switch Networks technology for cybersecurity applications.  “Last year we monitored network traffic for security events using SDN to control the security monitoring infrastructure,” Buraglio said.

While SDN will be isolated to part of the SCinet network this year, Velders anticipates that the technology will span the entire network by 2016.

“Our goal is to scale up the use of SDN to the entire network which will save time when having to configure several hundreds of booth connections and their associated circuits. It will allow us to become more agile and more flexible to accommodate changes and requests,” Velders said.

SC15 Invited Talk-Dr. Laura Grigori Presents Fast and Robust Communication Avoiding Algorithms: Current Status and Future Prospects

Left: computation to communication ratio for the LU factorization with partial pivoting of a dense matrix on a model of exascale machine (ISC 2014). Right: preconditioned Krylov solver as used in the map making problem in astrophysics, results obtained on a Cray XE6 machine (Astronomy and Astrophysics, 2014). Please click to enlarge.

This talk will address one of the main challenges in high performance computing which is the increased cost of communication with respect to computation, where communication refers to data transferred either between processors or between different levels of memory hierarchy, including possibly NVMs.

I will overview novel communication avoiding numerical methods and algorithms that reduce the communication to a minimum for operations that are at the heart of many calculations, in particular numerical linear algebra algorithms.

Communication avoiding LU uses tournament pivoting to minimize communication (SC08).  Lightweight scheduling combines static and dynamic scheduling to provide a good trade-off beween load balance, data locality and dequeue overhead (IPDPS 2012). Please click to enlarge.

Those algorithms range from iterative methods as used in numerical simulations to low rank matrix approximations as used in data analytics. I will also discuss the algorithm/architecture matching of those algorithms and their integration in several applications.

Speaker Background:

Dr. Laura Grigori

Dr. Laura Grigori obtained her Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2001 from University Henri Poincare in France. She was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, before joining French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (INRIA) in France in 2004.

Currently she now leads a joint research group between INRIA, University of Pierre and Marie Curie, and the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), called Alpines.

Her field of expertise is high performance scientific computing, numerical linear algebra, and combinatorial scientific computing. She co-authored the papers introducing communication avoiding algorithms that provably minimize communication.

She is leading several projects in preconditioning, communication avoiding algorithms, and associated numerical libraries for large scale parallel machines. She is currently the Program Director of the SIAM Special Interest Group on Supercomputing.

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 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 Invited Talk - Nils Thuerey Presents Virtual and Real Flows: Challenges for Digital Special Effects

To get the motion of a crown splash right, surface tension is crucial. The simulation shown here uses a mesh-based approach (please click on photo to enlarge).

Physics simulations for virtual smoke, explosions or water are by now crucial tools for special effects in feature films. Despite their wide spread use, there are central challenges getting these simulations to be controllable, fast enough for practical use and to make them believable.

A drop of liquid impacting a pillar. The thin sheets that form over time are important for believable visuals, but tough for surface tracking algorithms (please click on photo to enlarge).

In this talk I will explain simulation techniques for fluids in movies, and why “art directability” is crucial in these settings. A central challenge for virtual special effects is to make them faster. Ideally, previews should be interactive. At the same time, interactive effects are highly interesting for games or training simulators.

While this image shows a two-way coupled liquid simulation, one-way coupling is often sufficient (or preferred) for special effects applications (please click on photo to enlarge).

I will highlight current research in flow capture and data-driven simulation which aims at shifting the computational load from run-time into a pre-computation stage, and give an outlook on future developments in this area.

Speaker Background:

In 2012, Dr. Nils Thuerey won a Technical Oscar.

Dr. Nils Thuerey works in the field of computer graphics, with a particular emphasis on physically-based animation. One focus of his research targets the simulation of fluid phenomena, such as water and smoke. These simulations find applications as visual effects in computer generated movies and digital games.

Examples of his work are novel algorithms to make simulations easier to control, to handle detailed surface tension effects, and to increase the amount of turbulent detail. After studying computer science, Professor Thuerey acquired a Ph.D. for his work on liquid simulations in 2006. He received both degrees from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.

The Technical Achievement Award

Until 2010 he held a position as a post-doctoral researcher at ETH Zurich, in collaboration with Ageia/Nvidia. Subsequently, he worked for three years as Research & Development Lead at ScanlineVFX, developing large scale physics-simulators for visual effects. Since fall 2013 he has been Professor for Games Engineering at Technischen Universität München (TUM).

In 2012, Dr. Thuerey won a Technical Oscar from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.