Entries filed under “HPC People”

New assignments, promotions, hirings, and firings in the HPC community.

Interview: IBM’s David Ungar on End-to-End Non-Determinism

By Rich Brueckner | Published May 22, 2012

In this interview, cloud consultant Miha Ahronovitz discusses parallel programming with Dr. David Ungar from IBM Research. Ungar is author of the popular article Many Core processors: Everything You Know (about Parallel Programming) Is Wrong!

Miha Ahronovitz: In parallel distributed computing, using a product like Grid Engine we got different results if the round robin servers were processing some sequential jobs mixed with parallel, or if we dedicated the servers to parallel MPI processing exclusively. We didn’t know why at the time. How can you explain this?

David Ungar: I think the problem you described, is that you have different results if you configure the servers differently. One of the principles in our project is what we call “end-to-end non-determinism”. The idea is if you go into these parallel systems to get performance – this holds for multi-core, many-core, distributed, then you need to take an approximate route.

Read the Full Story.

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Professor Lorena A. Barba Wins NSF CAREER Award

By Rich Brueckner | Published March 8, 2012

Professor Lorena Barba has been awarded the prestigious CAREER award of the National Science Foundation for her research and educational endeavors in scientific computing and applications in fluid mechanics and computational biology.

Receiving the CAREER award will give my research program considerable momentum, at a time when computational science is rising in the national agenda,” Barba said. “The field is challenged to reach the milestone of ‘exascale computing’ in a few years, that is, computing a thousand times more powerful than today’s. With rapid changes in computer hardware, the algorithms and software used in science need to be re-invented, they need to be parallel like never before.”

The award will fund Prof. Barba’s research in scalable algorithms for extreme computing on heterogeneous systems. Read the Full Story.

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Torsten Hoefler Wins 2012 SIAG/Supercomputing Junior Scientist Prize

By Rich Brueckner | Published February 21, 2012

NCSA’s Torsten Hoefler, who leads application and system performance modeling and simulation efforts for the Blue Waters project, has been selected as the recipient of the 2012 SIAG/Supercomputing Junior Scientist Prize. The award honors distinguished contributions in the field of algorithms research and development for parallel scientific and engineering computing.

Hoefler’s research revolves around performance-centric software development and deals with scalable networks, parallel programming techniques, and performance modeling. He received the award at the 2012 SIAM Parallel Processing Conference, at which he gave a presentation about his research work title Performance-oriented Parallel Programming: Integrating Hardware, Middleware and Applications.

Abstract: Parallel programming is hard, optimizing parallel programming is even harder, and writing optimal parallel programs is nearly impossible. Optimizing communication in parallel programs routinely requires dealing with low-level system details. We show portable abstractions that enable transparent optimizations but require advanced techniques in the lower layers. We conclude that scaling to larger machines demands a holistic approach to integrate hardware, middleware, and application software to develop performance-portable parallel programs.

For more information about Hoefler’s research, see www.unixer.de.

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Douglass Post Named American Society of Naval Engineers Gold Medal Awardee for 2011

By Rich Brueckner | Published February 15, 2012

Dr. Douglass Post, chief scientist for the High Performance Computing Modernization Program, has been awarded the 2011 Gold Medal by the American Society of Naval Engineers. Since 1958, the Gold Medal Award has been awarded to individuals who have made a significant naval engineering contribution in a particular area during the past five years.

Post was recognized for his leadership and vision in establishing and realizing the Computational Research and Engineering Tools and Environments (CREATE) Program. Under Post’s leadership, the CREATE Program is beginning to demonstrate that physics-based computational engineering tools can transform how the DoD approaches development and operation of weapons systems.

The HPCMP CREATE program is developing computational tools for developing air vehicles, ships and radio frequency antennas, as well as cross-cutting tools for Mesh and Geometry (MG) generation. The CREATE Ships Project develops and deploys design and analysis tools to assess hydrodynamic performance and vulnerability, and develops and optimizes design concepts for naval ships.  The CREATE Air Vehicles Project tools enable development of air vehicle designs and assessment of the performance of fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft, including propulsion systems.  The CREATE RF Antenna tools enable the design and development of multiple RF Antenna systems integrated with weapons platforms.  The CREATE MG Project being executed by the Naval Research Laboratory facilitates rapid analysis of the performance of weapons systems.

Read the Full Story.

 

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Seymour Cray – The First Iconic Figure in the Industry

By Rich Brueckner | Published February 2, 2012

Patrick Seitz over at Investor’s Business Daily has posted an interesting profile of Seymour Cray, calling him the “first iconic figure in the industry.”

Cray was a risk taker. Whereas corporations tended toward evolutionary technology, he was looking for breakthrough advances in computing. That conflict led Cray on four occasions to start new companies to pursue his dreams of faster, more capable computers. “He did his own thing in his own way,” Steve Wallach, recipient of the 2008 IEEE Computer Society Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award, told IBD. “What Steve Jobs was to personal computers, Seymour Cray was to supercomputers.”

Read the Full Story or check out this mini-documentary on Seymour Cray I helped produce back in 1996.

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HPC People on the Move – Barrenechea Leaves SGI for Open Text

By Lewey | Published December 16, 2011

It’s me again–Dr. Lewey Anton. I’ve been commissioned by insideHPC to get the scoop on who’s jumping ship and moving on up in high performance computing.

SGI’s CEO Mark Barrenechea has resigned and is taking on a new role as CEO of Open Text. The resignation is effective January 1 and Chairman of the Board Ronald Verdoorn will serve as interim CEO.

This was kind of a shocker as SGI seemed to be doing very well financially of late. So, if you’re like me, you might be wondering what Open Text does. I pulled this description from their web site, but I’m afraid I’d need a supercomputer to translate what it means:

With 17 years experience, OpenText stands unmatched in our understanding of ECM. Our comprehensive OpenText ECM Suite is a reflection of our ECM expertise, enabling you to control the risk and cost related to your content, empower your people and foster decision-making, stimulate agility and innovation, and provide a compelling experience to your end-users. Furthermore, it increases process efficiency, improves user and team productivity, addresses compliance requirements, reaches new customers, and better serves existing ones.

Aren’t we glad we cleared that up? Where did they get this white board picture, from a strip club?

Good luck with that Mr. Barrenechea. Start by turning their web site into something resembling English.

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Video: SIGHPC Chair Looks to the Future of HPC Community

By Rich Brueckner | Published November 4, 2011

In this video, Cherri Pancake from Oregon State University tells us all about the new SIGHPC - an ACM Special Interest Group designed to give the international HPC community a home base for the rest of the year beyond the Supercomputing conferences. As Chairperson, Cherri has helped to bring together a veritable who’s who of HPC luminaries for the SIGHPC Executive Committee and Advisory Board.

Cherri is also the Housing Chair for SC11 and we go on to discuss what looks to be a record year for the conference series in terms of attendance and a number of other areas.

Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * Subscribe on other podcast players

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Andy Bechtolsheim to Address Roadmap Conference Nov. 10 in San Francisco

By Ralph | Published November 1, 2011

Clipped from: gigaom.com (share this clip)

This week GigaOM announced that Andy Bechtolsheim will present at RoadMap. The conference that will look at how connectedness changes everything from how we live, work, create and consume. Other speakers at the conference include Drew Houston of Dropbox, Jack Dorsey of Twitter & Square, Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital, Brian Chesky of AirBnB, Tom Conrad of Pandora, Jim Lanzone of CBS Interactive, Bob Bowman of MLB.com and Ed Leonard of Dreamworks Animation.

Everything that has a silicon beat – phones, eBook readers, game devices, cars, televisions to even heart rate monitors and scales – is being connected and in turn redefining the very idea of our economy. This state of constant connectedness is what makes it an exciting time. And as exciting as this time might be, today is a time of immense confusion. In order to make sense of many of the changes, I decided that it was time to host an event that gives us a roadmap to the future.

Read the Full Story.

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Scientific Computing Honors René Luna-Garcia as HPC Innovator

By Rich Brueckner | Published October 28, 2011

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Scientific Computing continues its SC11 HPC Innovator series with an interesting profile of René Luna-Garcia from CIC-IPN in Mexico.

René’s many years of physics research tie him to hundreds of collaborators around the globe. His work has spanned premier facilities and much of the planet, from the Tevatron collider at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the U.S., to the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina; to conference venues in Europe; and back to his home country of Mexico, where he collaborates in the multi-year deployment of the High-Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) particle-detector observatory at Sierra Negra.

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TACC’s Kelly Gaither Honored as HPC Innovator

By Rich Brueckner | Published October 21, 2011

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Scientific Computing has posted an HPC Innovator profile of Dr. Kelly Gaither from the Texas Advanced Computing Center.

Kelly Gaither is a major driving force in HPC visualization, development of large “superdisplays” comprised of large, tiled viz-walls in dealing with large data and parallel systems. As Director of Visualization at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), she currently hosts one of the world’s largest scientific visualization “SciVis” systems, and is helping to mature many programs and techniques now broadly recognized as another critical pillar in scientific method and discovery.

I’ve been to see the viz-walls at TACC, and I can tell you that they’re truly remarkable. This recognition for Kelly Gaither is well-deserved and it’s a great primer for the SC11 Scientific Visualization Showcase coming up next month in Seattle. Read the Full Story.

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SC11 Preview: CHPC Continues HPC Advocacy on African Continent

By Rich Brueckner | Published October 19, 2011

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Scientific Computing has posted an excellent profile of Happy Sithole, Director of the Center for High Performance Computing in South Africa. When I worked back at Sun, CHPC was one of our showcase HPC customers with the first Top 500 system listing for Africa.

Built upon a great vision and entirely from scratch, the CHPC has become a prestige center in South Africa providing large scale compute resources to hundreds of researchers, institutes and industrial partners. One of the major influences on Happy’s objectives is his participation at a global level in key industry events, such as the upcoming SC11 conference in Seattle. Through Happy’s deep participation in key technical forums, like the SC conferences, CHPC has become a critical a connection, linking with the global research community as much as SC is in supporting Happy’s own plans around large scale HPC, networking infrastructures and data storage.

Read the Full Story and be sure to check out the CHPC booth 849 at SC11!

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HPC innovators to be Honored at SC11 with IEEE and ACM awards

By Rich Brueckner | Published October 19, 2011

IEEE and ACM have just announced this year’s winners of the Sidney Fernbach Award and the Ken Kennedy Awards to be presented at SC11.

  • Charles Seitz, one of the founders of Myricom, Inc., and president and CEO of Myricom until last year, is the winner of the 2011 Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award. Known as an architect and designer of a wide range of computing and communications systems, Seitz will be recognized for “innovations in high performance message passing architectures and networks.” The Cray award honors innovative contributions to high performance computing systems that best exemplify Seymour Cray’s creative spirit. The award includes a crystal memento, a certificate and a $10,000 honorarium.
  • Cleve Moler, a mathematician and computational scientist specializing in numerical analysis, is the recipient of the 2011 Sidney Fernbach award in recognition of “fundamental contributions to linear algebra, mathematical software, and enabling tools for computational science.” Moler is the chairman and chief mathematician of MathWorks, the company he founded with Jack Little in 1984 to commercialize MATLAB, a high-level numerical computing environment. For nearly two decades Moler was a professor of mathematics and computer science, at the University of Michigan, Stanford University and the University of New Mexico. He was computer science chair at UMN when he developed several packages of mathematical software for computational science and engineering.  In 1985, he joined Intel to co-found its supercomputing division and produce the first commercial parallel computer line, the Intel iPSC, whose development led to the Paragon and to ASCI Red. The Fernbach award was established in 1992 in memory of high performance computing pioneer Sidney Fernbach and includes a certificate and a $2,000 honorarium.
  • Susan L. Graham, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the 2011 Ken Kennedy Award winner for her contributions to computer programming tools that have significantly advanced software development. Graham’s research covers human-computing interaction, programming systems and high performance computing.  Her work has led to the development of interactive tools that enhance programmer productivity as well as new implementation methods for programming language that improve software performance.

All three awards will be presented at 8:30 AM prior to the keynote address at SC11 on Tuesday, Nov. 15 in the Sheraton Hotel Ballroom. The three awardees will give presentations to SC11 participants on Wednesday, Nov. 16, beginning at 10:30 a.m. in rooms LL4 and LL5 of the The Conference Center, which connects to the Washington State Convention Center.

Read the Full Story.

 

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Dr. Lewey Finds HPC People on the Move

By Lewey | Published October 15, 2011

It’s me again–Dr. Lewey Anton. I’ve been commissioned by insideHPC to get the scoop on who’s jumping ship and moving on up in high performance computing.

  • Giri Chukkapalli, formerly of Sun Microsystems, is now at Appro.
  • Earl J. Dodd is leaving the Rocky Mountain Supercomputing Center to “pursue other activity in the high performance computing world,” according to an announcement released on Friday afternoon.
  • John Fragalla, formerly of Dell and Sun, is now Principal Solutions Architect at Xyratex.
  • Alan Gara, formerly an IBM Fellow and father of Blue Gene, is now a Fellow at Intel.
  • Sharan Kalwani is now HPC Platform Strategist at Intel.
  • John Kirkley is now Editor of the Digital Manufacturing Report.
  • Erwan Menard, formerly of HP, is now COO of DDN.
  • Stephen Perrenod, formerly of Sun, is now a partner at Orion Marketing.
  • Mark Seager, formerly of LLNL, is now CTO for the HPC Ecosystem at Intel.
  • Steve Scott, formerly CTO at Cray, is now CTO of the Tesla Business Unit at Nvidia.
  • Sayantan Sur, formerly of Ohio State University, is now a Software Engineer at Intel Corporation.
  • Mike Vildibill, formerly of SDSC and Sun, is now at Appro.

New Updates from our Readers:

Have you moved or know of HPC folks in new positions? Let us know by sending an email to: lewey@insidehpc.com. In the meantime, keep up with the HPC community’s movers and shakers by subscribing to insideHPC today.

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Video: Richard Feynman on Science and Beauty

By Rich Brueckner | Published October 9, 2011

Our Video Sunday feature continues with this amazing piece featuring the words of the late Richard Feynman.

After dismissing the popular notion that scientists are unable to truly appreciate beauty in nature, physicist Richard Feynman (1918 – 1988) explains what a scientist really is and does. Here are some of the most memorable lines from this beautiful mix of Feynman quotes and (mostly) BBC and NASA footage.

I think this one is worth watching in HD, folks. Set aside a minute and take it in. HPC is very much at the heart of the science today and its search for answers, but sometimes I find things like this that make me think about the questions.

A Tip of the Hat goes to ajlopez for pointing us to this video.

Also posted in Video, Video Sunday | 1 Comment

insideHPC Guest Spot on RCE Podcast

By Rich Brueckner | Published October 3, 2011

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In this RCE podcast, Rich Brueckner from inside-HPC joins hosts Brock Palen and Jeff Squyres to discuss current events and what’s coming next in high performance computing.

Topics:

The RCE Podcast has now recorded over 60 episodes with a focus on Research, Computing, and Engineering. With topics spanning from Lustre to Torque to Hadoop to Boinc, these guys do a great job of keeping things lively and down-right informative. Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * Subscribe to RSS feed

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