SC10 Analyst Crossfire – Supercomputing Wrap-up Show from Rich Brueckner on Vimeo.
In this wrap-up video from SC10, Addison Snell from Intersect360 Research moderates a panel discussion on the latest developments in HPC with two industry experts and two supercomputing center directors. Recorded November 19, 2010 at SC10 in New Orleans.
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Now that the new TOP500 list is out, you might be wondering what it means in terms of the bigger picture and the global economy. But what if you could look at historic data from the TOP500 and match it against socio-economic factors such as FLOPS/capita and FLOPS/$GDP using motion charts? You might see trends that could lead to a whole new set of insights. Well, that’s exact what Berkeley’s Karl Fuerlinger has done for us HPC fans at http://top500minder.net.
I find this type of visualization is pretty well suited to interactively explore the dynamics of the HPC market. Additionally, with the recent rise of HPC in China I think it’s all the more important to look at the broader socio-economic environment of our field. Data from the 11/2011 list and the Chinese Tianhe-1A system are not included yet, but the page will be updated as soon as those results become available.
I caught up with Karl over email to find out more about the project.
insideHPC: This is an interesting site. Can you tell us a little about yourself and your day job?
Karl Fuerlinger: I’m a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley and also work with people at the NERSC computing center. After a couple of years in the US I’ll me moving back to Germany to join the University of Munich and the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in January. I’m interested in all aspects of parallel computing and work mostly on tools for performance monitoring and workload characterization.
insideHPC: What prompted you to create this site?
Karl Fuerlinger: I wanted to see what the Top500 data looks like when visualized using Gapminder-style motion charts for quite some time and finally got around doing it recently. I think the motion charts are a very intuitive technique to visualize progress over time and with the economic rise of developing countries its interesting to look at the effects it has on our field. All credit goes to the maintainers of the Top500 list and to the people who invented and implemented these nice visualization methods. I only put the two together.
insideHPC: Did you spot any surprising trends when you started to visualize this Top500 data?
Karl Fuerlinger: With the Top500 data itself I think it is interesting to see how quickly technologies and vendors come and go, with a few things such as IBM’s strong presence since 2000 that stay fairly constant. For FLOPS/capita I was hoping to see how smaller countries stack up against the dominant U.S. when you consider the country’s size. FLOPS/$GDP is interesting because someone’s got to pay for all the computing centers in the end. The orders of magnitude of these numbers are interesting too. We’re at about 60 MFLOPS per person and 1400 FLOPS per $GDP of aggregate performance in the Top500 in the U.S.
insideHPC: With the recent rise of HPC in China, why do you think it’s all the more important to look at the broader socio-economic environment of HPC?
Karl Fuerlinger: China and other emerging countries have enjoyed an amazing economic growth in the last couple of years at a time when many institutions in the western countries face cuts to education and research programs. I’m not an economist or social scientists, but these developments should be of interest to anyone engaged in education or R&D. The 2010 UNESCO science report just came out in early November and I think it clearly identifies to the growing role of knowledge for the global economy and we all know about the importance of HPC for scientific discovery. The report also shows that R&D spending as a percentage of GDP in emerging economies is up sharply over the last five years, while it stagnates or declines in the U.S. and Europe — something we should be wary about. In terms of FLOPS/$GDP Top500minder graphs show that China is on the trajectory to rapidly catching up with the U.S. and potentially overtaking it. This has happened only once before — in 2002 with Japan’s Earth Simulator.
insideHPC: Can we look forward to seeing an update when the next TOP500 list comes out in June 2011?
Karl Fuerlinger: I’ll definitely try to keep the site up to date and hopefully add some more external data sources to highlight some of the developments. Suggestions are always very welcome.
This year the city of New Orleans will be hosting the 23rd annual Supercomputing Conference, and it’s a great match. New Orleans is a city in the midst of reinventing itself, even as it continues to celebrate the traditions that have made it famous. And today HPC finds itself inventing the present in the era of trans-petaflops computing even as we are running hard toward an exascale future.
Reinvention and change have always been at the core of HPC. As new technologies enter the computing landscape, our community adopts and adapts what it finds on the quest to expand the capabilities of the tools of discovery and exploration that we provide to enable the “makers” — the scientists, engineers, and thinkers — to make the world a better, safe, healthier place for all of us.
There is a periodicity to the change in HPC: ideas fade from relevance as new technologies come on the scene only to find themselves repurposed again a decade later in response to opportunities presented by even newer ideas. Today the idea of heterogeneous computing is once again shaping the present and future of HPC, and SC10 is focusing on heterogeneity as one of its three thrust areas (the website has more information on the thrust areas at SC10).
Very generally speaking, a heterogeneous computer is a system that uses different types of computational units to accomplish the work of the applications that use the computer. At a fine level of granularity, even a single microprocessor is a heterogeneous computing system, as it comprised of integer and floating point units, instruction decoders, and other components that each perform a very specific type of task on the chip. But practitioners today group all of those functions together in a single conceptual computational unit. So the Beowulf cluster of the early 2000s, with its hundreds of identical commodity computers interconnected by a communications network, would be considered a homogeneous cluster. All of the computations are performed using the same kind of computational engine: an Intel or AMD chip, for example.
But if you add in a new kind of computational engine – a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), Cell processor, or graphics processing unit (GPU) for example – then the cluster becomes a heterogeneous computer. In this configuration the added computational units offer the potential of significant performance improvements for several calculations of interest. In other words, they “accelerate” certain types of computation, and so are often referred to as accelerators.
The idea of using accelerators for specific kinds of computations goes back a long way in HPC. Scientific computing systems in the 1980s made by Floating Point Systems and others, for example, had attached arrays of processors that specialized in the floating point calculations that central to scientific and technical computing. Acceleration in the HPC landscape today is diverse, with offerings based on FPGAs (often with extensive software support, as in the Convey Computing approach), the Cell Broadband Engine developed by IBM and others and, most commonly, GPUs made by NVIDIA and AMD/ATI.
By far the most common accelerator used in HPC today is the GPU, adapted from its origins in specialized graphics processing to support general scientific and engineering calculations. Because of their high degree of specialization to a specific subset of intense numerical calculations, GPUs and accelerators in general can offer a dramatically improved level of computation for a fixed energy budget. For this reason many experts believe that the power-constrained exascale systems targeted for the end of this decade will rely heavily on specialized computational units, moving the idea of heterogeneity from an “add-on” role to center stage in large-scale system design.
Medium-sized deployments of GPU-accelerated HPC systems are showing up today, with multi-petaflops behemoths in support of national extreme scale computers expected to enter service over the next six to twelve months.
This is the perfect time for SC10 to turn its focus to the renewed concept of heterogeneous computing and acceleration, and those who want to learn more will find a rich selection of papers, talks, and learning opportunities in New Orleans this year.
SC10 starts off the week with a significant focus on heterogeneous computing. Sunday and Monday offer tutorials on CUDA, OpenCL (an emerging standard that promises to bridge the gap in language semantics for managing applications targeted at both the CPUs and GPUs in a heterogeneous computer). Attendees may also want to dive in with a deep focus on one area of heterogeneous computing through the 4th International Workshop on High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing Technology & Applications (HPRCTA’10), held concurrently with SC10.
The rest of the technical program offers an amazing variety of papers, talks, and sessions that all touch on topics central to heterogeneous computing today and tomorrow. It is not possible to cover them all without replicating a substantial portion of the program guide (which you can find here), but here are just a few highlights that may be of special interest.
There are two Masterworks sessions that should be especially interesting to those with their eyes and activities turned toward an exascale future. Steve Wallach will be giving a talk Wednesday morning about the complex issues that software designers will have to address in putting exascale computers to use in solving problems of practical interest. Later that morning, Wen-mei W. Hwu will focus in on higher-level programming models for the heterogeneous computing systems expected to be at the heart of exascale systems at the end of the decade.
If you like your technical information to come with the possibility of a trophy, you’ll want to drop in and give a listen to the Gordon Bell Prize finalist lecture, “Petascale Direct Numerical Simulation of Blood Flow on 200K Cores and Heterogeneous Architectures.” This talk is especially relevant to those wanting to dive in to practical heterogeneous computations based on GPUs today as it covers results on hybrid GPU-CPU machines (including the new NVIDIA Fermi architecture).
The papers sessions throughout the week include many items of potential interest. For example, “Optimal Utilization of Heterogeneous Resources for Biomolecular Simulations” should also appeal to those working on large GPU-accelerated computations today. The authors will present a parametric study of the value of various approaches to dividing computational work between the CPU and GPU computing elements.
The panels are always lively at SC, and two panels at this year’s event promise entertainment and insight as the industry’s brightest voices share their insight about large scale heterogeneous computing. “Toward Exascale Computing with Heterogeneous Architectures” brings industry veterans like Jeffrey S. Vetter, Satoshi Matsuoka, John Shalf, and Steve Wallach to the stage to talk about the significant challenges — from low programmer productivity and lack of portability, to the absence of integrated tools and sensitive performance stability — in the context of future exascale systems. “On The Three P’s of Heterogeneous Computing: Performance, Power and Programmability” brings the insights of well-known HPC community leaders Wu Feng, Bill Dally, Tim Mattson, and others to bear on three of the most challenging aspects of computing today and tomorrow.
The thrust areas at SC10 offer a unique opportunity to dig deep into critical issues driving the supercomputing community. Tune into events in the Heterogeneous Computing thrust area throughout the week to be sure you are well-positioned to understand the issues of today, and to plan well for the machines of tomorrow.
Every year, the SC conference sessions features “Technology Thrusts” that showcase how HPC impacts new and emerging fields. For SC10, the Thrust areas are Climate Simulation, Heterogeneous Computing, and Data Intensive Computing. So to bring these Thrusts in focus, SC10 Plenary talks come straight from the people involved in this forward-thinking research.
We chose these plenary speakers because they have played pivotal roles in the fields we are highlighting at SC10, and are some of the most visionary and talented professionals in science and high-performance computing today,” said Barry V. Hess, SC10 General Chair and Deputy Chief Information Officer for Sandia National Laboratories. “These speakers are the best and brightest in the world, working in fields that have direct impact on the world and our place in it,” added Ricky Kendall, chair of the SC10 Technical Program and Group Leader for the Scientific Computing Group at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. “The plenary talks are designed to stimulate new ideas, and to keep people thinking.”
Plenary speakers include:
More information on the SC10 Technical Program is available at the conference site.
I’ve mentioned the Disruptive Technologies event at SC10 a few times recently, and I thought it might be helpful for you guys and gals if we dug in and explored the event, its background, and what it’s all about in a little more depth. SC10 and John Shalf, from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the chair for Disruptive Technologies at this year’s show, sat down with us over email to talk with insideHPC about the plans for this year’s event.
John Shalf: “Disruptive technology” refers to drastic innovations in current practices such that they have the potential to completely transform the high-performance computing field as it currently exists — ultimately overtaking the incumbent technologies or software tools in the marketplace. Disruptive Technologies, which has taken place as part of SC since 2006, examines new computing architectures and interfaces that will significantly impact the high-performance computing field throughout the next five to 15 years, but have not yet emerged in current systems.
insideHPC: Why is it relevant to the SC conference series?
Shalf: We examine Disruptive Technologies to bring awareness of those ideas that may be coming down the road so that feedback can be provided at critical stages resulting in the idea’s maximum value when the technology is adopted. An example of a disruptive technology is commodity cluster computing. Over time, it has transformed the hardware and software ecosystem for high performance computing.
The focus of the SC conference can often skew towards near-term considerations. However, the most exciting research ideas and boldest departure from business as usual comes from groups that are looking at ideas that are at least a decade out. Disruptive Technologies creates a venue to bring early stage technologies out into the open to challenge our pre-conceived notions on how things are done, to give us the breath of options and possibilities and foster discussion about the future of computing.
insideHPC: Can you tell us a little about the history of Disruptive Technologies as a formal part of the SC program?
Shalf: The Disruptive Technologies exhibit originated within the SC06 conference “Exotic Technologies” thrust area. A technology may start out as exotic, niche or situational, but when it provides a new and alternative option for HPC that others need to acknowledge then we have a disruption.
The exotic technologies exhibit was crafted as a venue to discuss ideas and technologies that are 10-15 years out into the future – too far out to be in a product. This is indeed where some of the most interesting ideas and boldest thinking in HPC technology are taking place. Many of the exhibits on the SC show floor have increasingly focused on the near term issues and existing product roadmaps. However, we know that the pathway for going from research to a product can be very long. Some of the most interesting ideas and technologies in development are not even on the product roadmap. In 2007, the exhibit’s name changed to “Disruptive Technologies” in homage to Clayton Christensen’s 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, where the term was first coined. The exhibit today continues to serve as a forum for examining technologies that may significantly reshape the world of high performance computing.
insideHPC: Is there a particular focus or theme that you are interested in showcasing this year?
Shalf: This year we want to highlight technologies, which can be hardware, software, communications, power or thermal management, that will be enabling exascale computing. By all accounts, the path to exascale computing will require many highly disruptive technology phase transitions. Yet there are many enormous hurdles that remain to be solved over the next decade to overcome power, performance, and costs to get to a practical exascale computing platform by 2018. Therefore, any technology that is able to overcome these hurdles will be “disruptive” by definition.
insideHPC: What technologies have been showcased in the past that were especially interesting or, with the benefit of hindsight, especially prescient?
Shalf: The early discussions of 3D chip stacking, low power non-volatile memory, and silicon photonics technology were particularly interesting in retrospect. At the time, they seemed like exotic packaging technologies, and their importance was not broadly recognized at the time. However, after 3 years of deep investigation of hardware constraints, and a more complete understanding of the technology options required to get to exascale, these technologies have emerged as being on the critical path to overcome many of the challenges for exascale computing.
insideHPC: Is there typically good international participation?
Shalf: We are very much looking to increase international participation. Just as the SC show has grown in size and in its international scope, we hope that the Disruptive Technologies program will also attract greater international attention.
insideHPC: When is the showcase open? Where can attendees find it?
Shalf: The Disruptive Technologies exhibit will have a highly visible location on the exhibit floor, so will consequently open and close with the SC10 exhibits. In addition, we will have a panel on Friday on the DARPA Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) program, which is designed to foster new innovative projects to develop radically new computer systems that overcome the challenges of efficiency, dependability, and programmability anticipated in the exascale era. The panelists, who lead the selected UHPC teams, will discuss the perspective on how to address these challenges and their comprehensive hardware/software strategy they developed for the UHPC program.
insideHPC: How can interested folks be a part of this discussion?
Shalf: Companies or organizations that wish to participate in the Disruptive Technologies exhibit should apply at the submission website https://submissions.supercomputing.org/, by August 5 2010.
The submission form is very straightforward. We just need a title, contact information, 250 word abstract describing your technology and why it is disruptive, and 50 words to describe what you need to show off your invention (e.g. power hookups, projectors, how much table space in our booth). Finally, you can upload any supporting documentation describing your invention (extra information for the committee to evaluate the disruptiveness of your technology).
Anyone considering applying but who has questions can get in touch with us at disruptive-techs@info.supercomputing.org, and we will be happy to answer any questions about the exhibit or your submissions.
During the week of SC09, insideHPC grabbed a minute with Barry Hess, the general chair of SC10, to talk about this year’s conference. Barry is the Deputy Chief Information Officer at Sandia National Laboratories and brings decades of experience in technical computing to SC10, as well as a decade of service to the SCxy community. In this first interview of the SC season, we talk with Barry about what he and his committee have planned for us in New Orleans later this year.
insideHPC:Tell us about SC10: what’s going to be new and different about the conference this year?
Barry Hess: It will be different, but our goal is to keep the momentum going. It has been a very pleasant surprise that, even through the downturn in the economy during 2009, the conference kept its momentum with record attendance and a dynamic, enthusiastic crowd. Certainly our focus stays on the technical program, with the highest quality technical papers.
What will change next year is that we’ll have more space — we’ll have the largest amount of space we’ve ever had, in meeting rooms and in exhibit space. We’ll have 370,000 square feet of exhibit floor, about 70,000 more square feet than we had in Reno (our next biggest venue). A couple things happen when we have that much space. We can make more “islands” for the exhibitors — booths in which attendees can walk all the way around — which gives them more value in terms of visibility. Then we can also do some more creative things, like putting whisper suites right on the exhibit floor, which the exhibitors like. Then we can do more creative things inside the conference center to add more value for the attendees because of the space.
One of things that is special about SC is the communication that happens on the show floor between attendees and exhibitors, but also among the different types of exhibitors. Industry representatives are at the conference to sell their wares, the research groups are there to sell their intellectual property to the industry booths, and you get this great mix of everybody looking for connections with everybody else on the show floor. This is one of the things that makes this a unique conference — exhibitors can talk with customers, but also talk with companies or organizations of which they are customers, and everyone is in one place. And that is one of the things that keeps our attendance up, even in a tough economy. Everyone feels they get the right amount of value from coming here.
insideHPC: From your perspective, what is the heart of the conference?
Hess: The technical program drives everything. It’s the engine that creates opportunity for the exhibits. It’s what drives the value for the education program, and provides the funding for that. So really the technical program is the top thing you have to protect and enhance. You want everybody to go back home and say “Wow! That was the best conference,” and you want them to bring their peers back next year.
insideHPC: What are the thrust areas or areas of special emphasis for the 2010 conference?
Hess: There are three thrusts this year. You can’t go to New Orleans without looking at global climate change, and so climate modeling and all the technologies and software and work that’s being done in that area will be a strong area of emphasis for us. Heterogeneous computing is also an area we are paying special attention to in the SC10 program. And the third area is data intensive applications. That’s been an issue for a long time, but now it’s becoming a driving issue: how do you move large data around, how do you visualize it, and so on.
Those are the three thrusts that this year’s committee feels are really going to drive supercomputing on a national and international scale.
insideHPC: For SC09 there was a big focus on sustainability, and certainly both the technical program and Vice President Gore’s talk brought in the topics of climate change. Do you think this is something that we’ll see continue beyond SC10?
Hess: Definitely. We probably won’t solve the problem for years and years, but how we approach the issue will change over time, and so it will remain an interesting and timely topic for future SC conference.
Speaking generally, I’ve worked with the conference chairs over the past four years in developing thrusts for the conference, and we try to work together from year to year to make sure we don’t have abrupt changes. We will be taking the work that we’re seeing at SC09 and moving that forward to SC10. You’ll see that obviously with climate. With sustainability it won’t be a thrust for SC10, but it will just be part of how we run the business of the conference. Every chair builds on the shoulders of the past chairs, and each year builds on the successes and lessons of the years before.
insideHPC: Each year the conference pushes an area that is just on the cusp of emerging in the HPC community. For example, there were several events around efficient datacenter design during SC09, reflecting the shift in the community that was really just picking up speed during this year. What emerging issues will we see reflected in the SC10 program?
Hess: I think the edge in 2010 will be specifically around the heterogeneous architecture work that is going on. During SC09 the most heavily attended tutorial — in fact, they had to move to the ballroom — was the CUDA tutorial. Yesterday I saw clusters with Atom processors on the exhibit floor. People are really getting very creative as they struggle to create new supercomputers for a variety of new missions where HPC is starting to have a real impact. Areas like search, finance, and cybersecurity.
We are in a time period now where there are a lot of disruptions in technology and the programs, we’ve had a large change in government focus. It’s a very disruptive time, and we’re looking at what that means both to the HPC industry, and to the people that will need to use supercomputing in these new mission areas.
insideHPC:Tell me about you and your history with the conference. It’s a tremendous amount of work and an incredible commitment. Why do it?
Hess: I’ve been involved with the conference committees since 2000, and I was an attendee and exhibitor well before that, all the way back to 1996. My first job with the committee was signs in 2000. I took that job because it exposed me to all aspects of the conference. Being involved on the committee really allows you to build new connections, and strengthen existing connections, with the incredibly smart, incredibly talented people that are a part of this conference. And once you are a part of the committee you really begin to understand the value that the conference provides to the community, and you start to see volunteering on the committee as a service. My organization has been very supportive of my involvement, because they realize the value of this conference to the HPC community and they want to be a part of making sure that continues to happen.
insideHPC: Is getting involved with the SC committees something you would recommend for people just starting their careers, or do they need to be a little more “grown up?” Is it too late to get involved now for SC10?
Hess: We have people very far along in their careers. We have people after their careers, retired, that still come. We do have quite a few new, young people. And the steering committee encourages that as a way to bring in the next generation that will take over the conference tomorrow, and bring in a new perspective today.
It is a little too late to get involved with the SC10 committee, since we are just about 9 months from the conference. But there are opportunities on the SC11 and SC12 committees. If there is a particular area that someone would like to get involved with the call for participation has a listing of all the SC10 area chairs — just send an email to that person. And every part of the program has contact emails on the website. The SC10 chairs will pass your name onto the SC11 and SC12 chairs. Now is a great time to get involved for SC11 and SC12.
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