Appro is one of the market leaders in HPC cluster solutions, and this acquisition is another step forward as we continue to transform Cray into a company that provides world-class offerings to customers across all segments of the supercomputing market, including Big Data,” said Peter Ungaro, president and CEO of Cray. “I look forward to welcoming all our new Cray colleagues in this exciting moment for our company — positioning us well for accelerated growth into the future.”

In this special RichReport Podcast, Pete Ungaro discusses the Appro acquisition on the company’s quarterly earnings call. Read the Full Story or check out the Cray 3Q2012 earnings call transcript.

Related posts:

• Appro and Terascala Partner on Storage
• Appro partners with NEC
• Appro HyperGreen Clusters Get SCOnline 2009 Product of the Year

The post Podcast: Cray to Acquire Appro appeared first on insideHPC.

We are really pleased to have this link-up with insideHPC, a publication which we greatly respect,” said Dr Tom Wilkie, publisher of SCW. “The agreement will allow a wider audience for SCW’s features and analysis, while allowing us to benefit from insideHPC’s news reporting focus. We believe this will improve still further the service that we can deliver to our readers.”

“Our readership is largely supercomputer users that look to us to provide HPC news without the noise,” added Rich Brueckner, president of insideHPC. “Not only does Scientific Computing World have great technical content for us to share with our readers, SCW has an expansive readership in Europe that will enable us to reach more scientists and engineers on a global basis.”

I should also note that we have already gotten rolling with this collaboration. While SCW is a monthly print publication, insideHPC stories are already appearing on their sister site HPC Projects.

About insideHPC

insideHPC is one of the most popular news and information portals for global stakeholders interested in high-performance computing, supercomputing and emerging high-end computing technologies. Each month, insideHPC serves up close to one million page views to a highly targeted, dedicated following of supercomputing and HPC professionals. As the flagship publication of the inside* family of online news portals, insideHPC is now joined by inside-BigData, inside-Cloud, and inside-Startups.

Related posts:

• The Register and insideHPC Announce Collaborative Cross-Publishing Agreement
• Wordcloud – What insideHPC Looked Like in 2011
• Off the Wire: insideHPC Launches inside-STARTUPs.com

The post Scientific Computing World and insideHPC Announce Cross-Publishing Agreement appeared first on insideHPC.

Dahlia Lounge—Cuisine:Asian Influenced North- west: 2001 Fourth Ave. (Virginia St.) Seattle, WA 98121 206-682-4142

This 20+year veteran of the Seattle scene is still going strong with a super-loyal local following that mixes with out-of-town foodies looking for a unique Seattle experience. Chef Tom Douglas will take you on a culinary journey using Asian ingredients and tech- niques along with the freshest Northwest offerings. All of this in a sophisticated, yet comfort- able urban-chic dining room with professional, informed and unstuffy service. Don’t miss the raw bar, the crab cakes and a chance to see why salmon is king in the world of Cascadia cuisine. Certainly do not leave without having something sweet from one of the most expertly de- signed dessert menus in town.

Le Pichet—French Cuisine 1933 First Ave. (Virginia St.) Seattle, WA 98101 206-256-1499

Take a trip to Paris without leaving this fair city by stop- ping by the gorgeous, yet simply designed bistro. Named after the vesicles by which you can (and should) order expertly chosen wine from a value-based list, this long time Belltown favorite is for the Francophile in all of us. Choose from a number of crisp, properly dressed, seasonal salads and a charcuterie plate, then move on to perhaps the best chicken dish in Seattle—a whole bird perfectly roasted to order for two. Of course, the French love their desserts and Le Pichet delivers not only the classics like chocolate mousse and crème brulee but other nicely done modern takes as well.

Matt’s in the Market—Local, Seasonal NW Cuisine 94 Pike St # 32 Seattle, WA 98101-2066 (206) 467-7909

Located on the 3rd floor of the Corner Market Building in the world famous Pike Place Market, this simply, yet tastefully de- signed restaurant offers spectac- ular views of the Puget Sound. With the market directly

across the street the chef and his staff have access to an amaz- ing bounty of the freshest local ingredients. Try the absurdly flavorful pork belly or grilled octopus then have anything involving the always fresh fish or a locally sourced lamb dish. It is every chef’s dream to not have to get in a truck to find the fresh- est, most local of ingredients and even more of a dream to have an endless supply right at your doorstep—Matt’s makes this a dream come true.

“Start with the wicked shrimp, have the tuxedoed waiters make you a before-your-eyes caeser, then experience a table-side carved Chateubriand…”

El Gaucho—Steakhouse 2505 First Ave. (Wall St.)Seattle, WA 98121 206-728-1337

The restaurant to see local sports celebrities, broker a multi-million dollar deal or plain just be seen, El Gaucho is a Seattle institution for movers and shakers. Step back in time in this ultra swank, darkly lit supper club style restaurant and re-live the glory days. Steak, of course, is star of the show here and the 28 day dry-aged, hand picked, Mid-West prime beef does not disappoint. Start with the wicked shrimp, have the tux- edoed waiters make you a before- your-eyes caeser then experience a table-side carved Chateubriand and finish with Bananas Foster. With live Latin music nightly, a happening bar scene and a well- dressed crowd, you’ll feel like Frank and Dean could walk in at any moment.

Wild Ginger—Modern Pan-Asian 1401 3rd Ave Seattle, WA 98101 206-623-450

Wild Ginger has been around since 1989—an eon in restaurant years—and in it’s current stunningly beautiful digs for the past 11 years. A certain testament to the fantastic job the kitchen has been doing over this span in serving up perfectly executed Pan- Asian cuisine that takes advantage of the local access to Asian ingredients and the freshness that the local water and land provide. Try the satay bar where you can savor a lovely skewered prawn

or Vietnamese Hawker Beef that comes with various dipping sauces that are superbly paired. Duck, a staple course in Asian cuisine, is rendered grandly here with crispy skin enveloping the smoky, gamy meat inside. Dungeness crab, a Northwest staple, is also prepared magnificently and served with

a black bean sauce, ginger and chiles that will take you on a tour of Southeast Asia in one dish. 22 years in the business and Wild Ginger’s atmosphere, food and service have only seemed to got- ten better over time—a remark- able feat.

Salumi—Artisan Cured Meats 309 Third Ave South Seattle, WA 98104 206-621-8772

This cured meats (salumi) shop run by Armandino Batali—yes, father of star Chef Mario—in Pioneer Square is a closet of a restaurant/deli that has a very NYish feel.

Mr. Batali cures all meats in- house and serves other more entrée like items including a to-die-for porchetta lasagna or an excellent wild mushroom gnocchi. Sit down at the long communal table and rub el- bows with local business people, tourists and hipsters and have a glass of excellent, inexpensive wine poured in a juice glass. If that is too cozy, the line for to go sandwiches–while often long– moves rather quickly and is more than worth the wait to have some of this wildly popular establishments homey, yet fantastic fare.

Reprinted from the Print’nFly Guide to SC11 Seattle, an in-flight magazine custom-tailored for your trip to the biggest Supercomputing conference ever. Download the PDF (15 Mbytes). If your IT crowd blocks Dropbox, please Download here.

Related posts:

• Smartphone Version – Guide to SC11 Seattle
• Print ‘n Fly Guide to SC11 Seattle
• SC11 to Return to Seattle

The post Get Hungry – Seattle Recommendations from a Local Foodie appeared first on insideHPC.

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world’s leading questionnaire tool.

When a popular piece of software like Grid Engine goes open source, it sometimes becomes a challenge to determine how many users are out there. With that in mind, insideHPC is looking for Grid Engine users. We suspect that a number of our readers use Grid Engine, so please help us out with this quick survey. No strings attached. Thanks!

Related posts:

• Grid Engine June User Summits Open for Registration
• Sponsored Post: Calling All Grid Engine Users – Complete the Survey to be Entered to Win an iPad!
• Interview: Oracle Grid Engine Alive and Well

The post Survey: Are You a Grid Engine User? appeared first on insideHPC.

Ralph Wells joins the insideHPC editorial team as Associate Editor. Wells has been a contributing writer to insideHPC since it changed hands in September 2010. Prior to that, Mr. Wells worked 11 years at The Oregonian, Portland, Oregon’s daily newspaper, where he focused on business and technology.

insideHPC has also named William Wallace as Associate Publisher responsible for business development and growing the publication’s strategic partnerships. Wallace has more than 12 years of customer service and account management experience in the Portland-metro area. Wallace graduated from the University of Texas with a B.A. in Urban Studies and studied at Oxford University in England under the Fellowship Program in Humanities.

Also joining the staff as an Account Executive is Amie Scheckla. Scheckla brings more than 10 years experience in human resources, customer service and account management to the insideHPC team.

At insideHPC, we’ve experienced a lot of growth in the past year,” said company President Rich Brueckner. “We launched our sister publication, inside-Startups, just two months ago and It quickly became clear to me that we needed to expand our staff to better serve our readers. Together, Amie, Ralph, and William bring a tremendous amount of talent and enthusiasm to the insideHPC team. Our readers and advertisers can look forward to some really amazing innovation coming from our publications in the coming year.”

Publishing since 2006, insideHPC was acquired by HPC industry veteran, Rich Brueckner, in December 2010. The publication was growing at a rapid rate when Brueckner took over, and under his leadership, has continued a steady momentum of expansion. In the past 24 months, insideHPC has experienced 100% growth in terms of new readers, and 185% growth in the number of page views each month.

Related posts:

• insideHPC Acquired by Industry Veteran Rich Brueckner
• insideHPC Achieves Record Growth for 2012
• insideHPC Launches inside-BigData.com – New Site Expands Coverage to Profile Predictive Analytics

The post insideHPC Expands Staff to Meet Rapid Growth appeared first on insideHPC.

For the next four weeks, we’ll provide on-site coverage of some of the most important Spring events in high performance computing: the HPC Advisory Council Switzerland Workshop, the National HPCC Conference, the Open Fabrics Workshop, and LUG’2011.

It’s our own little version of March Madness here at insideHPC, so you can look forward to our unique event coverage including presentations, video interviews, twitter streams and a whole lot more. Of course, we’ll continue to post the latest HPC news and commentary from around the globe.

Related posts:

• insideHPC Hits the Road for March Supercomputing Events
• insideHPC Goes On the Road for April HPC Events
• insideHPC Launches Special GTC Edition, May 2 – May 18

The post insideHPC Launches Spring Events Edition appeared first on insideHPC.

Foreword,
by Rich Brueckner

“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.”
— Alan Watts

We all know of the Big Bang, how our universe came to be in a massive explosion, seemingly starting from nothingness. And for those who study cosmology, further understanding requires us to define the dark energies that somehow endowed our world with order.

Now, we haven’t observed dark energy, dark matter, and the secrets of dark gravity directly, but we do see their effects. As we learn in this book, without them, the universe would not have formed in a way that could have spawned intelligent life.

As a writer, I am intrigued by these dark energies because they imply a backstory–phenomena that happened first that led to this outcome. So in this way, dark energies seem to me to be metaphors of science. Like the stories of Genesis and Adam and Eve, what they really represent is a deeper truth.

In this book, Dr. Perrenod does a wonderful job of explaining the origins of the universe in way that is accessible to the layman. When you want to understand how the universe came to be, you ask an astrophysicist. But when you really want to know why, I think you have to start by asking yourself some questions. Try a thought experiment.

Put yourself in the place of a Universal Mind before the Big Bang. If you really wanted to understand yourself, you would need to have something intelligent outside of yourself that could experience that which is you. Not to get metaphysical here, but if we were at the scene of a crime, what I’d be suggesting here is motive.

Thanks to modern physics and cosmology, we no longer live in a universe where dark forces lurk far beyond our capacity for comprehension. I believe that, through the works of Stephen Perrenod and others, we will come to that knowing. But even as we look out to the stars, I think it begins with understanding that not only are we within the universe, but the universe is within us.

Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Dark Gravity is now available as an ebook on a number of different platforms including the Kindle and Nook, with more on the way. It’s well worth the read, and Dr. Perrenod has now started a blog on related topics in cosmology.

Related posts:

• Simulating the Multiverse With the Grid
• COSMOS – Fundamental Cosmology, Dark Energy, and the Cosmic Microwave Sky
• Perrenod: Why the Higgs Boson is not Dark Matter

The post New Book Examines how Dark Energy Enabled a Universe that Supports Intelligent Life appeared first on insideHPC.

Related posts:

• Take the “Bribery is fair play” survey and you just might win an iPod
• This week is your last chance to win one of our fabulous survey prizes
• Announcing the iPod Winner from insideHPC Reader Survey

The post Take Our Survey: Win an iPod Touch! appeared first on insideHPC.

I caught up with Whamcloud CEO Brent Gorda to learn more.

insideHPC: What did you announce today?

Brent Gorda: Whamcloud recently talked about a few high profile hires that we feel round out our staff and put us in a leadership position. We are now stepping up to help the community move forward and collaboratively produce a “community release” of Lustre 2.1. Note this is a community effort ­the community is helping with the next release, which involves taking the code from the canonical tree, testing, applying fixes and providing the result to the community in the best shape possible.  Of course, any code modifications will be provided back upstream to the canonical tree in proper form for inclusion there.

insideHPC: Everyone seems to be afraid of a fork in the Lustre code, is that where this is headed?

Brent Gorda: Fears of a fork in the Lustre code are unfounded. These fears appear to stem from observing that there are now a number of user groups (at least three) and new corporate entities (at least two including us). If you listen to these groups, none have suggested they want to fork the code. I believe we have heard just the opposite sentiment expressed by each group.  In reality the people who work on the code, the developers, have not changed. They are the same people still working together, productively, on the same open source project. These individuals may be employed by different companies in some cases, but they continue to do technical work in a collaborative and cooperative way. They are not interested in forking the code either.

insideHPC: What about Oracle? They own the IP but they reportedly have ceased development of Lustre. Does a release need their blessing?

Brent Gorda: Oracle does not need to bless the community to move forward in this manner and neither should they be bothered by it. Oracle has rightfully acquired the IP and so of course they own it. But it is open source and the community can just move it forward.  The lack of communication from Oracle has everyone concerned about the technology, the company, the people. There is no evidence that Oracle wishes to preclude the community from access to or use of Lustre. In fact it would seem the opposite is true. For this entire time, Oracle has continued their community service by providing gate keeping, testing and release activities.

insideHPC: The people I talk to in the Lustre community seem to agree one thing: that a new release needs to come out. How has the community responded to this announcement so far?

Brent Gorda: The community has indeed been asking for a new release and looking for someone to lead that effort. We have received a number of offers of help from individuals and companies who are well qualified to make that offer. I expect the number of volunteers will grow as word gets out that the activity is starting up. It is exactly what one would expect a community to do and really underscores that the threat of a fork is overblown.

insideHPC: Going forward, do you think Lustre code will be developed in a similar fashion to Mozilla or Apache? What is the right model?

Brent Gorda: This is a hard question to answer because there are many possible correct responses. One of the common signs of success in other projects is that deep in the core of the activity there are a small number of gatekeepers. These are highly skilled technologists who work closely together, know one another well and share a tight bond based on respect and trust of one another. Note that in most cases these people actually work for different companies ­even competitors. It does not matter who writes the paycheck for these people. What matters is they care deeply about doing the right thing with the product. Whatever model we settle on will preserve these core strengths. We’ve worked up a white paper on this very topic covering details around community development strategies and challenges, maintaining quality, and other relevant topics.

I should also mention that automated updates on Lustre code changes and builds are available on Twitter and on http://builds.whamcloud.com/.

insideHPC: Testing and certification are critical to a real-time file system like Lustre. I’m told deployment on big systems is the best way to shake out the bugs. How will Whamcloud help that process?

Brent Gorda: It is true that large-scale deployments are key to finding and fixing issues. In fact Sun (and now Oracle) have spent a huge amount of time and effort over the past few years mostly doing testing and hardening of Lustre 1.8 and 2.0. The Hyperion machine at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has been an incredible resource for this as have large systems at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and other sites. Whamcloud has been socializing the idea of a community test infrastructure (software) – an automation capability which would make it easier to exploit test resources, ensures consistent testing and which produces a test results database to help qualify code contributions and monitor convergence on stability.  The thinking is that if we make it simple to test Lustre, it will be easier for the community to contribute resources and more will be offered.

insideHPC: You have some notable contracts now with a couple of the National Labs. Will the releases you put out be driven by their particular needs?

Brent Gorda: The specific release we are talking about here is a community release not driven by a single user group. In general, however, the national labs’ interests in making petascale systems more pedestrian are key to enabling the community uptake in these systems. As the labs move on to multi-petascale and even exascale, they are funding the research and development that will trickle down to the wider community systems of the future.  Lustre was envisioned by a few very smart people ­- namely Peter Braam (CFS) and Mark Seager (LLNL). It was funded to a large degree by the labs’ “Path Forward” program. The fact that the national labs still care enough about the technology to continue to put millions into it is a testament to the technology, the visionaries who started the project, and the people who continue to be behind it today.

insideHPC: The Europeans have formed their own consortium around Lustre. Do they have a seat at the table here as well?

Brent Gorda: Absolutely, yes. You may recall that up until very recently, the Europeans – specifically the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) – had the most capable Lustre installation anywhere. Whamcloud has participated in the European meetings and has joined the European Open Filesystems Cooperative Society (OFS SCE) as a founding member.  The European group is serious and has a large number of well-qualified members who will add greatly to the project.

Related posts:

• Whamcloud aims to make sure Lustre has a future in HPC
• Interview: Mark Seager of LLNL on Whamcloud and the Future of Lustre
• OpenSFS Aligns with Whamcloud on Lustre 2.1 Community Distribution

The post Interview: Whamcloud to Foster Community Release of Lustre 2.1 appeared first on insideHPC.

HPC and Wall Street have a happy marriage. It’s a love-fest – making perfect sense since banks have big enough wallets for HPC and are always looking for a technological edge. The scale of this love-fest is tremendous, for example around 40% of trades on the London Stock exchange were done by robotic intelligence in 2006. United States estimates are closer to 80%. But what about venture capital?

In this world of data and calculation, the job of a venture investor seems an anomaly indeed. While there are some exceptions, most venture investors allocate billions of dollars every year based on little more than gut intuition and subjective experience.

This is not to, in any way, detract from successful investors; the ability to pick winners and wrestle out a deal can require tremendous skill. The point here is merely to pose a question. Given the dollars at stake and lives in the balance, will venture investing inevitably evolve in a more empirical direction? Will there someday be robo-venture capitalists? Perhaps more pointedly, can venture capitalists learn to benefit from HPC?

Once upon a time advertising was a matter of visionary intuition and a “special human touch.” Today marketing MBAs are increasingly being replaced by statisticians and datacenters. Software developers are becoming the new “Mad Men.” If you want to know what makes left-handed, Republican, blonde, female smokers buy pink purses in Nebraska, you’re increasingly better off writing a few lines of Linux rather than hosting a living room focus group.

While intuition-based venture investing works sometimes, it mostly fails. Investors spend lots of time screening deals only to see around 90% fail (on a good day) and industry-wide VC returns in the US over the past 10 years were negative (as of 2010). Not only is venture capital falling short of investor expectations but it – by necessity – excludes most ventures. Less than 1% of startups attract VC investment in any given year, while less than 95% of businesses attract any equity investment at all (either from VCs or angel investors).

A common counter-argument to HPC tools is that venture investing is inherently unquantifiable. Too unpredictable. Too subtle. Forever exempt from the purview of robots. Yet is venture capital really more multivariate than manufacturing, biology, chemistry, quantum mechanics or many of the other realms HPC tackles year after year? What makes venture investors immune? Why are they so special?

The field of Psychology is perhaps a worthy analogy to venture capital. Equally amorphous and intangible, psychology is divided between clinical methodologies (relying on human judgment and subjective analysis) and mechanical methodologies (relying on statistics, algorithms and other more objective tools). More than 136 different studies have tested the relative accuracy of both methods going as far back as the early 1900s, almost invariably concluding that mechanical methods are more consistent, accurate and yield higher quality results.[i]

Even in Blink[ii], a book often held up in defense of intuition, author Malcolm Gladwell goes to lengths to call out the limitations of intuition, such as inaccuracy and cognitive bias. It’s been found that even simple checklists (the most basic of objective tools) can reduce hospital surgical mortality by around half. Half![iii] How’s that for a little data-orientation?

With so much at stake in venture capital, can HPC lend more of a hand? Perhaps it’s time for venture capitalists to follow their Wall Street cousins and further explore the benefits of HPC. Predictive analytics, multivariate simulations, complex adaptive systems and agent based modeling are just a few examples of how HPC may give venture investors a leg up. We’d all like to see money more efficiently find its way to the very best ventures (and vice versa), which can create jobs, technological breakthrough and invigorate entire ecosystems. In that spirit, we may all benefit from a little more robo-venture capital as we look towards the decade ahead.

[i] Grove & Meehl, Comparative Efficiency of Informal (Subjective, Impressionistic) and Formal (Mechanical, Algorithmic) Prediction Procedures: The Clinical-Statistical Controversy, Psychology, Public Policy, and Law (1996).

[ii] Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Little, Brown and Company (2005)

[iii] Haynes, Weiser et al, A Surgical Safety Checklist to Reduce Morbitidy and Mortality in a Global Population, The New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 360:491-499 (January 29, 2009)

Related posts:

• RapidMind lands $10M in venture funding
• Video: Automated Startup Simulator
• T-Platforms Joint Venture to Develop Superpowered EXTOLL Interconnect

The post Special Feature: Robo-Venture Capital? appeared first on insideHPC.

Raising money can be tough for HPC firms, especially lately. Capital scarcity not only impacts startups and mid-sized companies, but also the larger firms that depend on them as vendors, customers or ecosystem partners. Accessing capital can be extra challenging for HPC firms with peak revenue a few times a year, followed by long lulls in between (such as around government procurement cycles or large installations).

With this in mind HPC managers and CEOs should be aware of revenue-based finance as an option for short- or long-term capital needs.

What is revenue-based finance and why should HPC firms care?

Revenue-based finance (RBF) is a relatively new way for business to raise money that’s been gaining momentum over the past few years. Basically, a business gets a lump sum of cash. In exchange, the investor gets a percentage of the business’s gross revenue for a length of time, or until a maximum “cap” has been repaid. The HPC firm gets money and gives up a percentage of its revenue, up to a limit.

How much money can an HPC business raise this way and what do they give up?

There’s no inherent limit on how much money a business can raise this way – whatever it can talk an investor into. Yet most of the time businesses only raise up to 15-20% of their revenue. In other words, an HPC business with $5 million in sales could raise anywhere from $100K — $1M. Again that’s not a hard and fast rule; I’ve seen companies with zero revenue raise several million in RBF. Just keep in mind that’s been the exception rather than the rule, at least so far.

In exchange for this cash businesses typically give investors 1% — 6% of their monthly gross revenue for a period of time, or until the maximum repayment cap is reached. Caps typically range from 2X – 5X. For example, a business with $1 million in revenue could get $150K in exchange for giving 5% of its monthly revenue to an RBF investor until $450K is repaid over time (assuming a 3X cap).

Those caps seem high, isn’t that expensive money?

It depends. Right now there are a wide variety of deal terms being used for RBF agreements. If an RBF contract fixes both the (1) duration and (2) magnitude of repayment (how much must be repaid, and by when) in addition to requiring personal liability and collateral, it can definitely be expensive money. Structured that way it’s almost identical to standard mezzanine debt or a bank loan.

However if an RBF contract doesn’t fix either the repayment (1) duration,(2) magnitude, or both, it becomes much more attractive and can’t be compared with traditional debt. It starts to behave more like equity from a risk/reward perspective. This is especially the case if an RBF investor doesn’t require any personal liability or collateral – and most don’t.

With those kinds of terms, RBF can be a fantastic option for the right HPC firms; some of the best elements of debt and equity without all the downsides or risk. For example, imagine a deal where an HPC business gets $150K in exchange for 5% of gross sales until $450K is repaid. If the duration isn’t fixed, the HPC business can take as much (or as little) time to repay the $450K as its organic revenue growth permits. It could take one year, it could take ten. Moreover, no money is repaid in months where the business has zero revenue since payments are a flat percentage of sales.

Also, if the magnitude of repayment isn’t fixed there isn’t a “guaranteed” return. So if the business goes bust the entrepreneur doesn’t have to repay anything. Conversely, if the business is a huge success its repayment is limited to the cap. Both the HPC firm and the investor share the risks of failure, while both also stand to gain more upside if things go well.

In summary, RBF encompasses a wide range of potential deal structures. Some terms make it more like debt, in which case things like APR, personal liability and collateral come into play. Other terms make it more like equity, in which case things like APR, personal liability and collateral don’t matter — they aren’t part of the deal.
What are the downsides to RBF?

In addition to what we’ve already covered, RBF is only useful if your business has big enough gross margins to survive after paying 1% — 6% of revenue to an investor. For example, a 15% gross margin hardware business would probably go out of business if it had to pay 5% of sales to an investor. They’d starve their cash flow.

That’s why RBF has been particularly interesting for software and service businesses. They tend to have larger margins, or at least more flexible margins that allow them to pass the 1% – 6% royalty on to their customers. Royalties could even potentially be included in RFP bids and thus “pay for themselves” in a manner of speaking, all the while providing an HPC firm with additional capital for growth, cash flow management, downturns or whatever the need may be.

Another downside is that it can be hard to raise more than one round of RBF at a time, since two or three royalties stacked on top of each other is usually too much for a business to handle. This has to be taken into account when exploring RBF funding.

How did I first hear about RBF and what’s my involvement?

I’ve been researching RBF for a number of years now and first learned about it from Professor Clayton Christensen when I was working with him at Harvard. He’d asked me to look into it as a side note for an article we were contemplating. This led me to Arthur Fox, the modern pioneer of RBF who had deals in this way for almost 20 years in nearby Lexington, Massachusetts.

Since then I’ve advised a number of funds and businesses regarding RBF such as Revenue Loan in Seattle, which is backed by Voyager Capital, Summit Capital and Founders Co-Op. I’m also on the Board of the Revenue Capital Association, the trade association for RBF investing. My personal goal is to encourage the right kinds of RBF to create the most benefit for both investors and entrepreneurs. Done correctly, this could be game changing for business worldwide by providing an innovative way to raise cash.

How many investors are doing these kinds of deals?

In 2000 there were only a tiny handful of RBF funds, mostly in New England. RBF was also being used by larger boutique funds, but exclusively in healthcare and biotech. Today there are nearly 20 dedicated RBF funds nationwide and over 22X more dollars being invested this way in healthcare alone (around $3.3 billion in healthcare RBF investments in 2007 – 2008). Traditional venture capitalists have also started doing occasional RBF deals without creating separate, dedicated funds. For example, Intel Capital has been openly considering strategic RBF investments and may have some on the books by next year.

There are also a booming number of RBF deals being done by angel investors, friends, family and business themselves. They’ve been much faster to adopt RBF for a variety of reasons. For example, one business used RBF to buy out a partner who wanted to leave the company. Another entrepreneur used RBF instead of equity to raise money from grandparents on a fixed income who wanted payback to begin immediately. A third business with around $7M in revenue had six locations and used an RBF investment to open a seventh. The mix has been diverse, creative and encouraging.

What are 5 quick benefits of RBF?

• RBF allows business to immediately leverage future revenue streams
• Most RBF agreements don’t require personal liability on the part of the entrepreneur.
• Where it makes sense, RBF allows businesses to raise capital without taking onerous bank covenants (debt) and without giving up precious ownership of their businesses (equity).
• Flexible payments (go up and down month-to-month as a percentage of sales)
• RBF aligns the entrepreneur and investor around growing sales (rather than creating conflicts of interest around personal liability or a quick exit).

Where can HPC businesses learn more about RBF?

While there isn’t much out there yet in the way of deep research and tools, rest assured there will be plenty more in the future. Meanwhile my website (www.growthsci.com) frequently blogs about RBF, I’m a guest blogger at RBF Central (www.revenuebasedfinance.com), and I recently published an academic article touching on RBF through MIT (http://miter.mit.edu/article/revenue-capital-disruptive-models-venture-funding-tools-developing-nations).

Also keep an eye out for the Revenue Capital Association and its upcoming website next year. So far it’s been a relatively discrete organization but in the future there will be a ton of helpful tools, research, resources and educational material for the HPC community to sink its teeth into.

About the Author: Thomas Thurston is President and Managing Director of Growth Science International.

Related posts:

• NVIDIA throws in cash, support to encourage new companies to build on its platform
• Money for SiCortex
• Shirts? Yeah, we got shirts. And cash. Did we mention cash?

The post RBF: A Growing Way for HPC Firms to Raise Cash appeared first on insideHPC.

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.

Having trouble viewing? The Vimeo hosting page has a download link in the lower right corner (it varies based on your geography).

Panelists:

• Michael Wolfe, Engineer, The Portland Group, Inc.
• Peter ffoulkes, VP of Marketing, Adaptive Computing
• Addison Snell, CEO, Intersect360 Research
• Jay Boisseau, Director, Texas Advanced Computing Center
• Thomas Sterling, Professor, Lousiana State University

Topics:

• Tianhe and GPU computing: What is China’s global role? Will the U.S. respond? Is GPU computing the architecture of the future for HPC? Intel MIC vs. NVIDIA in 2012? Does AMD matter?
• Reaching new HPC users: Some call it the “missing middle.” Is there an opportunity to bring HPC to more users in entry-level and midrange. Supply chain. What needs to be done to enable it?
• File systems: How important are parallel file systems? Handicap the field: GPFS, Lustre, pNFS, Panasas, etc.

Speed round:

• Windows in HPC – its role?
• Cloud computing – its role?
• Highlights and disappointments from SC10?

Related posts:

• HPC Analyst Crossfire to Wrap Up SC11
• Video: Analyst Crossfire Wraps Up SC11
• Video: HPC Analyst Crossfire from ISC’12

The post Video: SC10 Analyst Crossfire Program is Must-See TV appeared first on insideHPC.

I first met Dona Crawford at SC’95 in San Diego when she was the conference Deputy Program Chair and the HPC Challenge Co-chair.  Two years later, Dona was one of the most visible leaders in the HPC community as the General Chair for SC’97 in San Jose.

I have worked with many top corporate and agency executives during my 23 years in the HPC community, and I have met very few community leaders with the spirit, enthusiasm, and love of life that we see in Dona Crawford.  From her days as one of the original leaders of the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) program, a national effort dating back to the early 90s, to her current position as Associate Director for Computation at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) where she is responsible for a staff of roughly 900, she has built a tremendous following of loyal employees and close friends.  I have heard numerous colleagues refer to Dona as a true leader who inspires and motivates with vision and passion.  She is admired by her employees and peers, respected by her colleagues, and loved by her friends.

It is indeed a great pleasure to acknowledge and introduce you to Dona Crawford – a true Rock Star of HPC.

INSIDEHPC: You have such a rich history in this community and have been involved in so many milestone activities – what would you call out as one or two of the high points of your career – some of the things of which you are most proud?

There are a few career milestones that come to mind.

Dona Crawford (left) and her sister Gail (right) having just finished running/walking Bay to Breakers

I was one of the original leaders of the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI), a national effort dating back to the early 90s to provide—at that time—teraFLOPS of computing and the associated environment for nuclear weapons scientists to use computer simulations instead of conducting underground nuclear tests to certify the safety, security and reliability of the stockpile. ASCI (now known as ASC—Advanced Simulation and Computing) signified a paradigm shift in science from test-based to modeling- and simulation-based validation.

In the early days of ASCI, few computing experts believed the program would be able to take high-performance computing from 50 gigaFLOP/s to 100 teraFLOP/s in 10 years. Nobody had broken the one-teraflop barrier at the time, so it was quite a tall order. I would walk into a room with colleagues from other institutions and many would scoff at me. It was uncomfortable, but it turns out there’s something to be said for believing in a “wild” idea and fighting for its success.

ASCI is the result of a very large team of dedicated people from DOE Headquarters, industry, academia, and the labs. ASCI brought together the computing expertise of Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia national laboratories and established the framework for advancing computing to where it is today at the labs, with each of the national labs working in partnership with industry to pursue different hardware approaches and applications software. ASCI changed the way the world thinks about computing, and I’m proud of the small role I had in its inception. ASC today continues to push the boundaries of computational science, demanding ever more capability in computing hardware for predictive science.

As part of ASCI, I helped establish the Academic Strategic Alliances Program (ASAP). The idea was to have leading-edge universities work on large, complex, multi-disciplinary problems to validate our simulation-based approach. The Alliances were extremely successful at accelerating new developments in simulation science and high-performance technologies for computer modeling. This type of working relationship is good for the discipline and for the HPC community, and it continues today.

From the beginning, it was clear a critical component of the initiative would be making the supercomputing resources easy to access and use from remote locations. I was part of the team that created the DisCom2 (Distance and Distributed Computing and Communication) strategy, which blended two strategic thrusts. Distance Computing extended high-performance computing to remote sites, while Distributed Computing developed an enterprise-wide integrated supercomputing environment capable of supporting DOE’s science and engineering requirements. DisCom2 took advantage of the ongoing revolution in commodity- and cluster-based high-performance computing, as well as adopting and expanding on the open software approach to cluster computing. I was very interested in seeing DisCom2 come to fruition since I was located at the smaller of the two Sandia National Laboratories’ locations at the time and was leading the network research and development activities.

In 1993, I co-founded InfoTEST (née the National Information Infrastructure Testbed), which was a partnership between academia, private industry, and the national laboratories that was a precursor to the World Wide Web and Internet commerce. I was working at Sandia-Livermore and knew that to be efficient and productive, we had to have a way to access the big computers and computing resources at the other labs (Sandia/New Mexico, Livermore, and Los Alamos). For InfoTEST, I led a group that tied together distributed computing resources throughout the country and then demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of national-level access. This development resulted in performance data and practical experience that was critical to the establishment of the Internet. This was also one of the early efforts in network-based computing, which proved the viability of the concept for what would become known as grid computing.

I’ve also had several “firsts” as a woman in computing and management. For instance, I noticed I’m the first insideHPC female “rock star.” I was also the first mid-level and the first top-level technical female manager at Sandia. In the early 80s, I was the first technical female staff member to reduce my workweek to spend more time with my two babies at home. I worked four days a week, and even though I was still putting in 40 hours, it was considered part time. My managers were initially reticent — there was an underlying fear that all mothers would exercise this “reduced workweek” option if it were available and the workforce would therefore be reduced and part of it become less productive. Of course, none of those things happened. I only worked that schedule for four months, but I really treasured having an extra day at home with my children.

I think we’ve made progress in gender equality in computing. To be perfectly honest, I never felt there was a “glass ceiling” that I needed to push through. I just did what I was good at, worked hard, and was rewarded. But it does not go unnoticed that I am still the only woman in the room in many meetings.

INSIDEHPC: What are your thoughts on how we can attract the next generation of HPC professionals into the community – and provide them with the experience-based training that they will need to be successful?

I think it’s a combination of marketing and education. You have to put resources— time and money—into stoking the pipeline, and you need to find a way to communicate the exciting parts of what you’re doing in a way that connects with aspiring young scientists.

It’s never too early to start talking to kids and encouraging their curiosity about science and computing. There’s a great program I’m involved with called Expanding Your Horizons that encourages young women to consider careers in science, technology, engineering, and math. More of these organized efforts directed at young people are needed.

Lawrence Livermore organizes and funds an excellent summer scholar program and postdoctoral research program that is well known in academia. Our students and postdocs interact with world-renowned scientists on new areas of research and are given access to some of the most advanced computing facilities in the world. If you take the time to show the next generation a path—one that is exciting, meaningful, and has staying power—a good number of them will follow it.

INSIDEHPC: What motivates you?  What is your passion?

Hands down, my passion is helping people. Luckily, in my job I get to do that in various ways, not the least of which is the fact that computing technology can transform the way we live and help improve our relationship with mother earth.

I’m passionate about sustainability. Clean air, clean water and low-carbon emitting, sustainable energy are goals of the highest order. The computing community has a tremendous capability at its disposal. We can design a model that reflects the entire earth system, not just its individual parts. And we can present the system in a manner that is understandable and even compelling to the general public. Because the changes to the earth are playing out over decades, it’s hard to comprehend and convey the need for individual and collective change today. We as a nation can’t implement the sort of changes necessary to achieve a sustainable world if we as citizens do not clearly understand the problem.

Science diplomacy is another topic I’m passionate about. I just returned from an eye-opening trip to Saudi Arabia on behalf of CRDF Global. CRDF’s objective is to advance global peace and prosperity through international scientific and technological collaboration. In my opinion, nothing but good can come from nurturing a spirit of science and technology cooperation, supporting opportunities to strengthen research and education in universities abroad, and providing critical benefits to the global community. When researchers interact on objective topics, each subconsciously learns to understand how the other feels about subjective topics. Understanding one another at different levels is what helps promote peace. The bonus is that we can help improve our global standard of living through science and technology.

INSIDEHPC: What “non-HPC” hobbies or activities do you have?  If you ever really have ‘time off’ – how do you spend it?

There is nothing I’d rather be doing than spending time with my family. I have two very successful children who have always been my top priority as well as my greatest joy and source of pride. I also love to cook for and spend time with my extended family, plus I have many good, long-lasting friendships.

Additionally, I enjoy traveling and meeting people from other cultures. In those situations, I try to be respectful of their social mores.

Because I like people, I guess I have a bit of a reputation of trying to get people to “cut loose.” The way I do that is by cutting loose myself. I won’t reveal my secrets—you’ll have to ask others in the community about some of my antics.

INSIDEHPC: Approximately how many conferences do you attend each year?  What would you say is your percentage of travel?

I’m selective about the conferences I attend, but I never miss the SC (Supercomputing) conference.  I’ve been involved as an organizer in some way or another since 1991 and I was the general chair in 1997.  I also try to attend the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) and the Salishan Conference on High-Speed Computing.

Travel is a big part of my job. I travel about 25% of the time. I’ve been to Washington, D.C. on 11 separate trips so far in 2010. I serve on advisory committees for the National Research Council, the National Science Foundation, and the Council on Competitiveness, and I’m on the board of directors for CRDF Global. I also serve on a number of industrial advisory committees and academic or laboratory review committees. These opportunities all require a commitment to travel.

My current travel schedule is paltry compared to 20 years ago. During the early ASCI years, when I worked at Sandia-Livermore, I was traveling 48–50 weeks a year. I was leading Sandia’s effort to consolidate its Livermore computing operations with its other location in New Mexico, so I commuted by plane every week between Livermore and Albuquerque, with frequent side trips to Washington, D.C. thrown in. For 10 years, I lived mostly in hotels. I was on a first name basis with the hotel and car rental people.

INSIDEHPC: How do you keep up with what’s going on in the community and what do you use as your own “HPC Crystal Ball?”

Mark Seager is my crystal ball.

It’s easy for me to keep up with what’s going on in HPC because I have a staff of 900 absolutely brilliant people moving in many different directions, and I get all that information filtered back to me.

INSIDEHPC: What do you see as the most exciting possibility of what we can hope to accomplish over the next 5-10 years through the innovative applications of HPC?

I’m not sure it’ll happen in 10 years, but there will come a day when all the various tools and technology platforms available—our iPads, cell phones, supercomputers, televisions—will merge into one big knowledge ecosystem. Technology will change our existence in ways that we can’t foresee today. That is exciting. With technology comes knowledge, knowledge breaks down fear, and fear is what causes trouble in the world. I think the most exciting possibility is that technology will help humans become more unified.

INSIDEHPC: What are your thoughts on HPC’s ability to address what many are referring to as “the missing middle” which I loosely interpret as a broad spectrum of small and mid-size businesses. (Is HPC starting to reach a larger audience of people who previously did not have access to it?)

The first thing we have to do is understand the problems that small and mid-size businesses are interested in solving, and then figure out practical ways HPC can address their needs. The next step is forming partnerships to help overcome some of the barriers: make the infrastructure affordable and the codes easy to use. With our history of building out the technology focused on solving specific problems, we can and should provide a bridge to companies looking to do the same. The national labs will always need to push the tip of the pyramid in HPC, but if we don’t help build out the base, there is a danger the tip will topple . Many of the labs, Livermore among them, are working with a wider variety of industrial partners, one at a time, to do just that.

INSIDEHPC: What do you see as the single biggest challenge we face over the next 5-10 years?

Power. We could easily go about making the next big supercomputer by stringing a bunch of components together, but if the resulting machine requires 100MW of power to operate, that’s just not a realistic option. We have to innovate machines that require substantially less power.

INSIDEHPC: Any closing thoughts you would like to share with the HPC community?

From left, Karli, Dona's son Josh, Dona, Dona's daughter Julia, and Mike

For instance, climate modelers have said they need exascale computing capabilities to achieve high-resolution coupled earth system models at 1-km resolution. Having more knowledge about climate change and its effects earlier by even a few years may well be worth a billion dollars.

China’s new supercomputer recently took the world performance lead, and the country’s government and scientists should be applauded for this remarkable achievement. Because I work at a national security laboratory, I tend to think about future challenges in terms of national security. High performance computing and simulation are essential both for national security and for industrial competitiveness in the world economy. China’s major investments in HPC show that they recognize this truth and are willing and able to focus money, energy, and creativity in this direction. There are other similarly focused efforts in Russia, Europe, and Japan.

Technology is at an inflection point where the laws of physics are dictating that we do things differently. The underlying technologies exploited this past decade to build ever-faster supercomputers are facing the end of an era of “easy” gains. Technology will change and everything that technology touches will change.

If we cede our leadership on the hardware side, it’s very likely we’ll also eventually cede our leadership in software, components, and other critical technologies that support cost-effective and powerful server and PC markets all the way down to the cell phone. There is no doubt that these technologies provide distinct advantages to the sponsoring nation.

As a nation, we’ve given a lot away; let’s at least keep our innovation. If we’re going to continue to use HPC as an economic engine for competitiveness in the global marketplace, we need focused and consistent investments in advanced computing technology.

Related posts:

• Dona Crawford on Why Big Science Requires Big Computers
• Rock Stars of HPC: Bill Kramer
• Rock Stars of HPC: Thomas Schulthess

The post Rock Stars of HPC: Dona Crawford appeared first on insideHPC.

While the lure of HPC can be rightfully strong, a growing body of empirical research suggests some counterintuitive keys to success for those who dare dip a toe into HPC waters for the first time. This research stems from “disruption theory,” a body of innovation theory pioneered by Clayton Christensen, the legendary Harvard Business School professor who delivered the keynote at SC10 in New Orleans this month.

Here are 3 disruption-minded tips for starting an HPC business:

1. Avoid high performance. According to disruption research, new entrants tend to fail if they position their offerings as having higher performance than pre-existing incumbents. In other words, if your market entry strategy is to out-perform existing solutions, think again. Such businesses disproportionately fail.

This is counterintuitive, especially in HPC where firms tend to target the high end almost by definition (i.e. if they weren’t positioning themselves as higher performance, they probably wouldn’t be in HPC to begin with). However the results are in; such firms have alarmingly higher probabilities of failure. Avoid the high-end when you first enter an industry, even if that industry happens to be HPC.
The reason new entrants in this situation tend to fail is simple. By out-performing competitors right out of the gate, incumbents are forced to respond aggressively (or risk losing their best customers). Pitted head to head in this manner against, larger, more powerful, better funded incumbents, startups tend to fail.

2. Target low performance or invisible markets. Rather than targeting better performance, disruption research finds far higher probabilities of survival for new entrants that start with lower performance, lower cost offerings. Instead of targeting the high-end (like the now defunct networking and storage firm Entrada Networks did the late 1990s), new entrants should target the low-end (like NetApp did during the same timeframe).

Alternatively, startups also tend to survive if they begin in entirely new, uncharted, invisible market segments. Rather than being lower cost and lower performance than the incumbents, they simply go where no incumbents exist. For example, Linux allowed new generations of less sophisticated developers with smaller budgets to enter the market for the first time and begin writing enterprise/HPC code. To some extent Linux did, in fact, compete with Unix and other proprietary tools. However the bulk of its growth didn’t come from direct Unix converts, but from the larger population of new developers that could finally enter the market due to Linux’s accessibility and convenience.

3. Don’t have vision. While it seems like every 3rd title in the airport bookstore touts the virtues of “visionary” leadership, a growing body of data-centric research is painting a very different picture of what kind of leader helps a startup survive. As it turns out, startups tend to do better without “O-Captain-my-Captain” leaders who guide their firms in one steadfast direction towards an unwavering future vision.
Instead, since the business of startups is highly iterative and uncertain (more is unknown than known) startups tend to be more successful with leaders who focus on learning quickly and making rapid, informed course corrections using real-world data. Apparently it’s less about vision and more about learning. Victory goes not to the proud, but to those who most quickly uncover and respond to the winning strategy… that is, before running out of money.

Summary

While it’s never been easy for startups to succeed in HPC (or any highly competitive industry for that matter), some bodies of research are beginning to make progress. It is possible to learn from those who have gone before and not every HPC startup has to make the same mistakes as its predecessors. By studying business more scientifically and empirically (rather than merely philosophically and subjectively) we can materially improve our odds of success; and that’s what high performance is really all about.

About the author: Thomas Thurston is President and Managing Director of Growth Science International.

Related posts:

• Sustaining and disruptive paths to HPC: what it means for startups?
• How can startups succeed in HPC? Disruptive modeling says to avoid high performance products
• Adaptive Computing Invites Tech Entrepreneurs to Pitch Their Startup at SC12

The post Special Feature: So You Wanna’ Start an HPC Business? appeared first on insideHPC.

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.

Related posts:

• The Top500 in pictures: what does it mean to hold the top slot?
• YAT500: Yet Another Top500 list
• TOP500 Predict Site Offers Prizes for Your Insight

The post New Site Visualizes Historical TOP500 Against Socio-Economic Trends appeared first on insideHPC.

We announced our 29-page entertainment guide for SC10 earlier this week, but PDFs can be hard to read on devices like the iPhone. So through the magic of WordPress, you should now be able to access the guide from this page once you get to SC10.

CONTENTS

• TRANSPORTATION AND SAFETY: Airport shuttles,cab numbers, and walking
• FEATURE ARTICLE: Exascale: The Beginning of the Great Disruption
• INTERVIEW: Gilad Shainer on Growing Your Business and the HPC Advisory Council
• LOCALS GUIDE to the best of New Orleans cuisine
• FOOD AND NIGHTLIFE: Everything you need to know uptown to downtown; Vegetarian and southern foods, Bars, beer, wine, and bourbon. By Tom Connor
• EXTRAS Great massages and barely legal Cigars
• FICTION: The Three Magi of Katrina. By Rich Brueckner

Download the full magazine: Print ‘n Fly Guide to SC10 New Orleans (10 MB PDF)
Download the 1-pager: Pocket Guide to SC10 New Orleans (360 Kbyte PDF)

Related posts:

• Exclusive: Print ‘N Fly Guide to SC10 New Orleans
• Fiction: The Three Magi of Katrina — SCI-FY Set at SC30 in New Orleans
• Smartphone Version – Guide to SC11 Seattle

The post Mobile Version: Print ‘n Fly Guide to SC10 New Orleans appeared first on insideHPC.

ISBN 1420072137

I just recently finished reading Introduction to Concurrency in Programming Languages, one of the entries in CRC’s incredibly active Computational Science Series (“Incredibly active?” Yes: the series homepage lists 7 titles applicable to HPC coming in 2011, and a similar number published in 2010.)

I picked this book out of my large-ish stack of books waiting, mostly patiently, to be reviewed because I’m working on a research project these days that has to do with new models of parallel programming. I figured I’d get a decent grounding in what’s already been done, and why, but I was also concerned I’d get lost in computer science formalism. I was right, and wrong.

The authors are from a nice mix of the theoretical and the applied: Sottile is from the U of Oregon, Mattson is from Intel, and Rasmussen is from Los Alamos National Lab. All are active in supercomputing; you may recognize Mattson from his work on OpenMP or his book adapting the patterns concept to parallel programming. They set out for themselves as a goal “the motivation and definition of language level constructs for concurrency that have been designed, studied, and found their way into languages that we use today.”

Don’t let that turn you off. The authors don’t assume you are fresh out of a computer science languages course. They go to some pain to create a gentle slope back into the languages pool, with many explanations by way of analogy. “Language level constructs,” they explain, are things like loops that let the programmer express the concept of a loop without forcing her to manage the program counter explicitly. By extension, a language-level construct for parallelism might be a for loop that executes in parallel. Of course, in theory, the benefit of this approach is that the compiler is free to pick the implementation that works best and the programmer gets to worry about higher-level tasks, like whether the science is right.

In practice, however, we’ve never really gotten much further than first base with this approach. The literature is littered with attempts to separate specification from implementation in HPC that worked fine for some subset of special cases, but never really panned out in the general case (for example, HPF). But there is also quite a large body of advances that have made it into general use, and the authors cover those in this text in the hope that the way forward is in understanding why these worked, and building upon them.

What won’t you find?

This is not a book about OpenMP, MPI, and the other libraries and language tools that extend or augment traditional sequential programming languages like C and Fortran so that programmers can develop code that executes concurrently. These approaches are discussed, but only to set them apart from the true focus of the book: languages that include concurrency in fundamental operators as part of the language.

I’ve already mentioned one alluring, if difficult to attain, advantage of including concurrent constructs in the language: the programmer can raise his focus from the implementation details and focus on correctness. This can be, as I’ve already discussed, a somewhat suspect motivation for further work given the dismal history of the practice. Happily there are more convincing reasons to care. Whenever the compiler encounters a library call, say to MPI_Send, it has to assume that no optimizations are possible across that call. No code reordering, no optimizations on the calling side of the function to help the function execute more effectively, no elimination of variables that are never used again, and no optimization across processors to create more efficient code (for example, by coalescing many small messages on the programmer’s behalf). Promotion of concurrent constructs to be a member of the language itself, as the authors explain, puts all of this back into play, and puts the compiler back to work on behalf of the programmer.

This seems like a fairly small step that could have large payoffs in programmer productivity, and to my mind makes a convincing case for pursuing this work, no matter how jaded you are by previous grand plans to give over implementation to all-knowing compilers.

The lay of the text

As I’ve already mentioned, a clear focus in this book is on keeping the material accessible. The authors succeed at this brilliantly. I came to this book with the equivalent of a minor in computer science finished almost two decades ago, and almost no memory of language theory (other than the word “automata”, which I always liked as a word). That was enough grounding to enable me to easily keep up with the authors and still come away from the book with a deeper understanding of the concurrent world around me.

The text opens with a few chapters of introductory material on the core concepts in parallelism and concurrency. Then they move on in chapter 3 to concurrency control mechanisms, discussing the merits and demerits of techniques such as synchronization, locks, monitors, and so on. In chapter 4, “The State of the Art,” the authors cover libraries (and their limitations), along with message passing, explicitly controlled threads, and more advanced techniques such as transactional memory. Chapter 5 lays the groundwork for discussing and assessing the effectively of high-level language constructs for concurrency, including a nice subsection on cognitive dimensions which I found quite helpful.

Chapter 6 introduces the historical context (dataflow or ALGOL, anyone?), and chapter 7 pushes forward to modern day approaches with work on array notation, co-arrays, functional languages, and more. Chapter 8 addresses performance considerations.

Chapters 9 through 13 look at parallel algorithms and how they present themselves for effective concurrent implementation. After an introduction to parallel algorithms in general, each of the remaining chapters looks at a specific pattern of parallel processing (remember, Mattson is one of the authors of this book) and studies its implementation from several different perspectives. These chapters are quite helpful, and one can imagine them serving as focal points for practitioners expanding their knowledge or for students finishing out a semester with a big project.

The book has three appendices that provide additional material on three very different approaches to programming in parallel today: OpenMP, Erlang, and Cilk.

The last word

Ok, so you (probably) won’t be cracking this book open in front of a crackling fire at a ski lodge this winter. At least not if you want to go home with someone you didn’t know at the start of the trip. But if you are just jumping into the world of concurrent programming, or taking a more theoretical look at the approaches we’ve all been taking for granted for the past 20 years in an attempt to make things better, then this book is a great start.

The authors present a clear motivation for the relevance of continuing this work, and provide both the historical context and knowledge of present day practice that you’ll need to get off on the right foot. That they manage to do this while keeping the language clear and the text accessible is a tribute to the effort Sottile, Mattson, and Rasmussen put into the creation of the text.

Related posts:

• Book Review: Programming Massively Parallel Processors by Kirk and Hwu
• John Shalf Talks Programming Languages
• Do we need new languages for parallel processing?

The post Review: Introduction to Concurrency in Programming Languages appeared first on insideHPC.

Brent Gorda

insideHPC had a chance this week to sit down with the executives of the newly minted Whamcloud, Brent Gorda [CEO] and Eric Barton [CTO]. Many of you probably know Brent from his work within the US Department of Energy supercomputing circles. He’s also very active in organizing various technical and community events for the IEEE/ACM Supercomputing conference series. Eric Barton brings 25 years of development experience in supercomputing to the Whamcloud team. He has been working on Lustre since he was brought in to stabilize its network stack when the project first received DOE funding. Most recently he was a Principle Engineer at Sun/Oracle where he served as Chief Architect of the Lustre group.

As you may know, Whamcloud’s business model is centered on the Lustre parallel file system. But what exactly does this mean? Lustre is an open source project, managed and held by the Oracle Corporation via their acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Given that Oracle’s core business isn’t dependent upon Lustre, many folks with large-scale Lustre deployments have been worried about the progression of the code base. We wanted to dig a little deeper and find out exactly what Whamcloud is up to with respect to our little friend Lustre.

During the interview, Brent Gorda summed up their intentions best: “Reduce the complexity and increase the community.”  Whamcloud intends to pour their own efforts into developing, hardening and improving what has become a real asset to the high performance computing community.  They plan on doing so via code contributions to the root Lustre source tree.  Unlike many other open source efforts that have become commercial products, they will not fork the source tree for their own endeavors.  This is extremely important in building and maintaining their idea of community: Lustre is everyone’s Lustre.

Eric Barton

So how does affect their view of development?  I asked Eric Barton what their three top goals were with respect to development.  First, he said that Whamcloud is committed to working to improve the quality and stability of the code.  Without a stable code base to work from, scalability is simply a pipe dream.  This also implies de-prioritizing several of the features requested for the initial Lustre 2.0 release. 

The second major development goal is to begin preparing for the exascale deployments.  This one really threw me for a loop.  However, Eric is very grounded is his thought when he explains why.  Given that they want to always maintain the quality and stability of the file system, they need to begin to think intelligently about how to address systems with hundreds of thousands of nodes in the future.  They want to ensure that these features make it into the code base gracefully, as opposed to dropping the features in the community’s cage all at once.  Finally, he wants to make sure that the proper health and monitoring features gracefully make it into the source.  Exascale means nothing if the platform can’t be kept stable long enough to run an application.  A healthy system is a happy system.

So where is Oracle in all of this?  Brent and Eric were very adamant that they do not intend to directly compete with Oracle.  Oracle, via their inherited Sun support contracts, receives revenue based on the service and support of the Lustre file system.  They both indicated that Whamcloud will carefully manage its relationship and impact on Oracle. Whamcloud’s focus is Lustre on Linux for HPC — particularly the high end — whereas Oracle is more focused on commercial deployments. Whamcloud would rather be good stewards of the community and garner revenue through non-recurring engineering.

All in all, Whamcloud seems to be off to a raging start.  They’re growing on a daily basis [up to 10 employees at the time of the interview] and they’ve already had significant interest from partners and potential customers.  What was recently a damsel in distress with Lustre, now has its knight in shining armor with Whamcloud.

Related posts:

• Interview: Mark Seager of LLNL on Whamcloud and the Future of Lustre
• Interview: Whamcloud Gears Lustre for the Enterprise to Exascale
• Industry experts form new Lustre startup

The post Whamcloud aims to make sure Lustre has a future in HPC appeared first on insideHPC.

Among the works he has co-authored are the influential “View from Berkeley” (led by David Patterson, and others), the DOE Exascale Steering Committee, and the DARPA IPTO Extreme Scale Software Challenges report that sets DARPA’s information technology research investment strategy for the next decade.

He also leads the LBNL/NERSC Green Flash project — which is developing a novel HPC system design (hardware and software) for kilometer-scale global climate modeling that is hundreds of times more energy efficient than conventional approaches — and participates in a large number of other activities that range from the DOE Exascale Steering Committee to Program Committee Chair for SC2010 Disruptive Technologies exhibit.

Shalf’s energy and dedication to HPC are helping to actively shape the future of HPC, and that’s what makes him this month’s HPC Rock Star.

insideHPC: How did you get started in HPC?

John Shalf: I spent a lot of time as a kid hanging out in the physics department and computing center at Randolph Macon College (RMC) in Ashland, where I grew up.  The professors there gave me (and other neighborhood kids) accounts on their IBM mainframe and Perkin-Elmer unix minicomputer, and access to the supply rooms behind the classrooms were there were hundreds of computing technology artifacts such as 3D stacked core memories from old IBM systems, and adders constructed using vacuum tube logic.   My friends and I spent a lot of time in the summers and after school in 4th thru 6th grade, exploring the back rooms and having the professors patiently explain what we were looking at and how it worked.  We also got our first taste of the UNIX operating system and CRT terminals, albeit we learned more about playing Venture (a text video game) than programming.

When I was about 11, Dr. Maddry offered to teach me how to build a computer in exchange for my help cleaning up his lab during the summer.  We actually had a race where he built a computer using a Z80 chip, and I built my computer using an 8080a.  Both of our computers had 128 bytes (yes bytes… not kilobytes) of memory, ran at 500khz (could run faster if you turned off the fluorescent lights In the room), and was programmed using a set of dip-switches on the board.  I still remember the 8212 tristate latches and the TTL discrete logic chips we needed to glue everything together. I had a blast building it, and just as much fun programming it, despite the rudimentary nature of the user interface, and the low-resolution of the display system (12 LED’s lined up in a row to show the data and the memory addresses).  After that, I become hooked on computer architecture and machine design.

In college, I took my first HPC course and become interested in parallel computation. Where we got accounts on the HPC systems (Cray vector and IBM) at the NSF supercomputing systems. I was particularly fascinated with Thinking Machines systems, but also learned a lot about dataflow computing. Around this time, I collected many old machines through surplus auctions as well to learn how they worked. I had quite a collection of PDP-8s and PDP-11s, and started the Society for the Preservation of Archaic Machines (SPAM). The chemistry department maintained many PDP’s for their experiments, so they became a resource for manuals, circuit diagrams, advice on machine repair, and a FORTH interpreter that ran on top of RSTS.

During this time, I also discovered Ron Kriz’s vislab, where I developed an interest in computer graphics and visualization as another way to interact with the HPC community.  Whereas I had been connected to computing only through my study of computer architecture and programming, the vislab and working on programming / optimization of material science codes for the Engineering Science and Mechanics (ESM) department opened me up to direct collaboration with science groups.  It was there that I learned that the interdisciplinary collaborations in HPC is where the rubber hits the road.  That the pursuit of answers to scientific grand-challenges required such broad-based collaborations is what makes “supercomputing” so exciting.

insideHPC: What would you call out as one or two of the high points of your career — some of the things of which you are most proud?

Shalf: My first real job in HPC was at NCSA, where I divided my time between NCSA’s HPC consulting group  (led by John Towns), Ed Seidel’s General Relativity Group, and Mike Norman’s Laboratory for Computational Astrophysics.  This was the golden years for NCSA and the NSF HPC Centers program as well.  NCSA Mosaic was just getting popular. I got to work on HPC codes on a variety of platforms.  The LCA was developing its first AMR codes (Enzo).  I got to learn how to work on virtual reality programs in the CAVE, and participated in national-scale high-performance networking test beds for the SC1995 IWAY experiment.  There was such a wide variety of computer architectures — Cray YMP, a Convex C3880, and a Thinking Machines CM5.
What an amazing time!

It was also a time of great transition because it was clear that our vector machines were going to be turned off eventually and replaced by clusters of SMPs (SGI’s and Convex Exemplars initially, followed by clusters).  It’s very similar to what is happening to the HPC community today as we transition to multicore.  It was an exciting time to start in HPC. There were new languages like HPF, messaging libraries like PVM and P4, and MPI. It was unclear what path to take to re-develop codes for these emerging platforms, so we tried all of the options using toy codes.  Everyone was busily creating practice codes to try out each of these emerging alternatives to re-develop their entire code base to survive this massive transition of the hardware/software ecosystem.

The first few implementations of the parallel codes worked, but revealed serious impediments to future/collaborative code development.  When Ed Seidel’s group moved to the Max Planck Institute in Potsdam Germany, Paul Walker and Juan Masso hatched a plan to create a new code infrastructure, called Cactus, to combine what we’d learned about how to parallelize the application efficiently and hide the MPI code from the application developers with clever software engineering to support collaborative/multidisciplinary code development. Cactus was so titled by Paul because it was to “solve thorny problems in General Relativity”.  I had a huge amount of fun developing components for the first versions of Cactus, which is still used today (www.cactuscode.org).  We had a huge sense of purpose and dedication to the development of Cactus infrastructure — creating advanced I/O methods, solver plug-ins, remote steering/visualization interfaces, etc. I continued to work with subsequent Cactus developers (Gabrielle Allen, Tom Goodale, Erik Schnetter, and many others) many years after leaving Max Planck to extend it for Grid computing and new computing systems. One of the first things the group did when I came to LBNL was to run the “Big Splash” calculation on the NERSC “Seaborg” system, of inspiraling colliding black holes. The calculation was ground-breaking, in that it disproved a long-held model for initial conditions for these inspiraling mergers, and its demonstration of what you could do with large scale computing resources ultimately spawned the DOE “INCITE” program.  The work with the Cactus team is one of the highlights of my career, even though there was a cast of hundreds contributing to its success.

The Green Flash project is also one of the projects that has been a lot of fun. Like Cactus, there are a large number of people working on different aspects of this multi-faceted project. I definitely love this kind of broad interdisciplinary work. We get to re-imagine computing architecture, programming models, and application design massively parallel chip architectures that we anticipate will be the norm by 2018. Our multi-disciplinary team is on the forefront of applying co-design processes to the development of efficient computing systems for the future. There are a lot of similarities between the move towards manycore/power-constrained architectures and the massive disruptions that occurred at the start of my career when everyone was moving from vectors to MPPs. It is exciting to have such an open slate for exploration, and a time for radical concepts in computer architecture to be reconsidered.

insideHPC: What do you see as the single biggest challenge we face (the HPC community) over the next 5-10 years?

Shalf: The move to exascale computing is the most daunting challenge that the community faces over the next decade.  If we do not come up with novel solutions, then we will have to contend with a future where we must maintain our pace of scientific discovery without future improvements in computing capability.

The exascale program is not just about “exaFLOPS,” it’s about the phase transition of our entire computing industry that affects everything from cell phones to supercomputers.  This is as big a deal as the conversion from vectors to MPI two decades ago.  We cannot lose sight of the global nature of this disruption — that is not just about HPC.  DARPA’s UHPC program strikes the right tone here.  We need that next 1000x improvement for devices of all scales.  Until recently we have been limited by costs and chip lithography (how many transistors we could cram onto a chip), but now hardware is constrained by power, software is constrained by programmability, and science is squeezed in between.  Even if we solve those daunting challenges, science may yet be limited by our ability to assimilate results and even validate those results.

I think there is a huge problem with us conflating success in “exascale” with the idea that the best science must consume an entire exascale computing system (the same is true to some extent with our obsession with scale for “petascale.”). The best science comes in all shapes and sizes.  The investment profile should be more balanced towards scientific impact (scientific merit, whether it is measured in papers or US competitiveness).  There is a role for stunts to pave the way to understand how to navigate the path to the next several orders of magnitude of scaling.  But the focus should definitely be more on creating a better computing environment for everyone — more programmable, better performing, and more robust.

We do have a tendency to say that the solution to all of our programmability problems is just finding the right programming model.  This puts too much burden on language designers and underplays the role of basic software engineering for creating effective software development environments.  Dan Reed once said that our current software practices are “pre-industrial,” where new HPC applications developers join the equivalent of a “guild” to learn how to program a particular kind of application.  Languages and hardware play a role (just as the steam engine played a role in the start of the industrial revolution), but software engineering and good code structures that clearly separate the roles of CS experts from domain scientists (frameworks like Cactus, Chombo, and Vorpal) and algorithm designers are also critical areas that often get under-appreciated in the development of future apps.

insideHPC: How do you keep up with what’s going on in the community and what do you use as your own “HPC Crystal Ball?”

Shalf: For hardware design and computer science, attending many meetings to interact with the community plays an essential role in gauging the zeitgeist of the community.  Given the huge amount of conflicting information, you need to talk to a lot of people to get a more statistical view of what technology paths are actually practical and what is just wishful thinking.  Getting someone to talk over a beer is always more insightful for the “HPC Crystal Ball” than simply accepting their PowerPoint presentation or paper at face value.  You have to constantly look at what other people are doing.

I’ve always enjoyed the SIAM PP (SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing) and SIAM CSE (SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering) meetings as a great source for seeing ideas that are still “in progress.”  Normally, conferences have a strict vetting process for papers.  The presented work is usually thoroughly vetted and mostly complete.  There is little opportunity to drastically change the direction of such work.  However, the SIAM meetings support having people getting together through mini-symposiums to discuss work that is still in progress, and in some cases, is not fully baked.  This is where there is a real exchange of wild ideas and new ways of thinking about solving problems.  I think there is a role for both types of meetings, but I definitely see more of the pulse of the community in the SIAM mini-symposiums.

I also find that journals that are targeted more at domain scientists have a lot of information about future directions of the community. You quickly find out what is important and why.  More importantly, you learn the vocabulary to actually communicate with scientists about their work.

insideHPC: What motivates you in your professional career?

Shalf: Scientists like to do things because they are interesting.  Engineers like to do things that are “useful”.  I’m an engineer who likes to hang out with scientists to get a bit of both the “interesting” and the “useful.”  If I can do things that are both interesting AND useful, I’m very happy.

There is a recent article in Science Magazine (Vol 329, July 16, 2010) entitled “learning pays off.” It showed research that people who went into science because they were excited by the science, and not simply because they were good at math, were the most likely to continue in the field.  This makes total sense to me.  I’m just a science geek.  I’m not a scientist or physicist by training, but I love to read Science and Nature magazine from cover to cover whenever a new one arrives.  I just love to learn new things and explore.  Supercomputing is a veritable smorgasbord of ideas and different science groups.  The deeper I dive into my professional career, the more I learn and the more people I meet who have radically different perspectives on computing and in science.  It’s so much fun to learn something new every day.

It’s also fun trying to be the man-in-the-middle to communicate between people with disparate backgrounds.  Because of my diverse interests, my career has run the gamut from Electrical Engineering and computer hardware design, to code development for a scientific applications team, to computer science, and then back again to hardware design.  I remember the perspective I had when I was in each of those different roles (when in EE, I thought the scientists were all just bad programmers, and when working for the apps group, I thought the hardware architects were just idiots who would not listen to the needs of the application developers).  All of the interesting things happening in supercomputing are happening in the communication between these fields, and I love to be there, right in the middle.  This is why co-design has become such a popular term: it’s where all of the action is today.

insideHPC: Are there any people who have been an influence on you during your years in this community?

Shalf: Many, many people.  Nick Liberante, and English professor with uncompromising standards for excellence, taught me how to organize thoughts for writing, and the importance of memorization to facilitate that organization process. Ron Kriz taught me the value of persistence, collaboration across multiple disciplines, and to be undaunted by the challenges of new and rapidly evolving technologies. Ed Seidel has had a huge influence on my career by launching me into the HPC business and teaching me how far you can push yourself if you set seemingly unrealistic stretch goals. Ed and Larry Smarr, Maxine Brown, and Tom Defanti demonstrated the power of demonstrating the “seemingly impossible” is within our grasp through ambitious demonstrations like the SC95 IWAY. Donna Cox taught me the magic that can result from bringing both scientists and artists together (seemingly disparate groups) to create powerful communication media. Tom Defanti taught me the importance of articulating what I want to do (either by writing, or presenting to others) by saying “It’s not a waste of time if you have the right attitude. You are writing the future.”  He also showed me how we can reinvent ourselves to take on new challenges as he went from CAVE VR display environments and jumped in to high performance international optical networking.

insideHPC: What type of ‘volunteer’ activities are you involved in — both professional activities within the community, and personal volunteer activities.

Shalf: I would say I’ve gotten way over committed to SC-related volunteer activities.  In the past, I’ve spent some time helping with the LBL summer high-school students program.  This year, I’ve gotten completely immersed in participating in the program committees and organization of HPC-related conferences.  I’m on the program committees for IPDPS, ISC, ICS, and SC.  It’s fun to participate in the organization and planning of so many different conferences, but it’s a lot of work.  I would like to get back to working with the high school and undergraduate students to get them excited about this field.

insideHPC: How can we both attract the next generation of HPC professionals into the community, and provide them with the experience-based training that they will need to be successful.

Shalf: Well, first we should call it “supercomputing” rather than HPC if we want to attract new talent.  It sounds interesting when a high-school kid says they want to work on supercomputers.  If they say they want to work on High Performance Computing, they’ll have their underwear pulled up around their ears by the class bully in no time.

I ended up in this field because of the patience of a few physics professors at RMC when I was growing up.  There is no degree in supercomputing (or HPC) because the field is fundamentally interdisciplinary.  So you have to catch kids early to get them excited about the breadth of experiences that supercomputing can offer.

Closing Comments from John Shalf

We are back in a transition phase for our entire hardware/software ecosystem that is much like the transition we made to MPI.  Times of disruption are also great times of opportunity for getting new ideas put into practice. The world is wide open with possibilities. It’s a great time to be involved in computing research.

Related posts:

• John Shalf Moves to CTO Role at NERSC for Exascale Research
• John Shalf Talks Programming Languages
• Q&A with John Shalf, chair of the Disruptive Technology showcase at SC10

The post Rock Stars of HPC: John Shalf appeared first on insideHPC.

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.

Related posts:

• John Shalf Moves to CTO Role at NERSC for Exascale Research
• SC10 Keynote to Focus on Disruptive Technology
• Rock Stars of HPC: John Shalf

The post Q&A with John Shalf, chair of the Disruptive Technology showcase at SC10 appeared first on insideHPC.