In this video, Andy Bechtolsheim discusses founding Sun Microsystems and why he thinks the company eventually failed. He also shares what the key success factors for Startups in technology markets and the story behind his writing the first investment check for starting Google.
Video: Andy Bechtolsheim on Risk and What it Takes to Succeed in Technology Markets
Video: Interview with Thomas Zacharia
In this video episode of Anything is Possible, Former ORNL Chief Research Officer Thomas Zacharia discusses his background and how he came to lead a team of researchers with the world’s fastest supercomputer in Tennessee.
Dr. Zacharia currently serves as the Executive Vice President of Research and Development at Qatar Foundation, where he contributes to QF’s overall mission by advancing and promoting the organization’s research initiatives in Energy and Environment, Information and computing technology, Life sciences and biomedical research and Social sciences.
Wes Bethel from LBNL Named ACM Distinguished Scientist
Wes Bethel, leader of the LBNL Visualization Group in the Computational Research Division, has been named an ACM Distinguished Scientist. The award recognizes ACM members who have made a significant impact on the computing field.
In the letter nominating Bethel, he was cited for his work on visualization and data analysis for nearly 30 years and being “a well-regarded leader of scientific visualization.” During his 10-year leadership of the Visualization Group, the group has grown from three staff members to 14, and the team regularly produces field-leading work recognized via best paper awards at conferences. Bethel is responsible for coordinating and leading or co-leading a number of multi-institutional research activities, such as the “Scalable Data Management, Analysis and Visualization Institute” and “Visual Data Exploration and Analysis of Ultra-large Climate Data.”
Read the Full Story.
Mezzacappa to Lead UT-ORNL Supercomputer Center
Tony Mezzacappa, a leader in the field of astrophysics and supernova science, has been named director of JICS, which operates Titan, the world’s fastest supercomputer. Mezzacappa is a pioneer in the field of supernova science, a UT-Battelle Corporate Fellow, and group leader for theoretical physics in the Physics Division at ORNL as well as a joint professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UT.
Dr. Mezzacappa brings unique and extensive experience in computational astrophysics, supernova science and academic vision to the JICS director position,” said UT Chancellor Jimmy G. Cheek. “We are excited for his leadership and the forward-moving direction of the center.”
Read the Full Story.
John Shalf Moves to CTO Role at NERSC for Exascale Research
John Shaff, one of our celebrated Rock Stars of HPC, has been appointed CTO at NERSC. Shalf will also continue to serve in his current role as head of the Computer and Data Sciences Department in Berkeley Lab’s Computational Research Division (CRD).
NERSC is the primary HPC facility for scientific research sponsored by theDOE’s Office of Science. As Chief Technology Officer, Shalf will help NERSC develop a plan to achieve exascale performance.
A key goal of DOE’s exascale program is to develop high performance scientific computers that deliver a thousand times the performance of today’s most powerful computers at all scales, while using less than twice the power, by the end of the next decade. The demands of energy efficiency are driving deep changes that will change the way we do computing at all scales, not just exascale. NERSC will take an active role to work with industry as a public/private partnership to guide HPC designs and bring the DOE user community along in this time of great transition.”
Read the Full Story.
SC12 Announces Award Winners for Innovation in HPC
This week SC12 announced a set of HPC innovators who will be honored by the IEEE/ACM when the conference convenes next month.
The winners for 2012 are as follows:
- Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award: Peter Kogge from the University of Notre Dame. Kogge was the developer of the space shuttle I/O processor, the world’s first multicore processor, and a number of other important innovations, was recognized “for innovations in advanced computer architecture and systems.”
- Sidney Fernbach Award: Klaus Schulten and Laxmikant “Sanjay” Kale from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, honored “for outstanding contributions to the development of widely used parallel software for large biomolecular systems simulation.”
- Ken Kennedy Award: Mary Lou Soffa from the University of Virginia, honored for contributions to detecting and managing software security flaws.
All three awards will be presented at 8:30 a.m. Tuesday, Nov. 13, prior to the SC12 keynote address in the Salt Palace Convention Center ballroom. The three awardees will give presentations to SC12 attendees on Wednesday, Nov. 14, beginning at 10:30 a.m. in room 155E.
Andy Bechtolsheim Keynote on Moore’s Law & Networking
Over at EE Times, Rick Merritt writes that Andy Bechtolsheim’s recent keynote at the Linley Tech Processor Conference shed new light on the future of the high performance and networking market.
By 2013, half of all servers could include 10GE interfaces, rising to 80 percent in 2015, Bechtolsheim predicted. That’s about when Intel’s 22-nm server processors based on its Haswell design will emerge, starting a shift to 40GE on servers. The good news is large-scale data centers are creating a robust growth market for such systems. Bechtolsheim showed market research figures estimating the data center switch business alone will rise from $4-5 billion in 2010 to $15 billion in 2015. “This is basically tripling in five years–one of the few IT markets growing at this rate and it’s driven by the shifts from 1 to 10 and 40GE,” he said.
Read the Full Story.
John Barr Joins The Exascale Report
We have been tracking a number of HPC People on the Move recently, and today I learned that John Barr has joined The Exascale Report editorial team as a European correspondent.
Barr is a widely recognized independent industry analyst, formerly Research Director of HPC at the 451 Group, who brings 30 years experience in the HPC industry to the publication. Barr will provide a European perspective on exascale issues, including coverage of users, vendors, and European Commission funded research programmes.
Congratulations go out to John in his new role.
John Gustafson Joins AMD as Chief Graphics Product Architect
AMD announced today that John Gustafson has joined the company as senior fellow and chief product architect, Graphics Business Unit. In this role, Gustafson will set the technical vision for the AMD graphics business unit, driving the technology roadmap and platform for the AMD Radeon and AMD FirePro product lines.
I look forward to working with my teams to expand the AMD graphics technology roadmap,” said Gustafson. “The next decade will serve as a watershed era for GPUs in graphics rendering power and compute capabilities, creating the opportunity for multi-teraFLOPS APUs. In terms of raw performance, the evolution of discrete graphics has far exceeded that of the CPU, and the programmable characteristics of today’s GPUs have thrown open a door that could very well see it rival the CPU as the most critical element of computer performance in the near future.”
Gustafson is a 35-year veteran of the computing industry. He joins AMD from Intel, where he headed the company’s eXtreme Technologies Lab, conducting cutting-edge research on energy-efficient computing and memory, as well as optical, energy and storage technologies. Prior to that, he served as CEO at Massively Parallel Technologies and CTO at ClearSpeed Technology, a high-performance computing company. Gustafson has also held key management and research positions at numerous companies including Sun Microsystems, Ames Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories.
In 1988, Gustafson wrote Reevaluating Amdahl’s Law to address limitations of Amdahl’s Law, which models the maximum potential performance improvement from parallel processing. Gustafson proved that processors working in parallel can solve larger problems, marking a change in how the industry viewed parallel processing. Today, Gustafson’s Law is widely accepted among academia as the standard for parallel processing education.
Bo Ewald Takes the Helm at LiquidCool Solutions
Former SGI CEO Bo Ewald has taken over as CEO of LiquidCool Solutions, formerly known as HardCore Computer.
In what is being described as a reboot of the company, Ewald will transition the company from being a direct manufacturer of high-end, liquid-cooled desktop computers and servers. Instead, the company will focus on selling its liquid cooling technology to other system vendors. And while LiquidCool will continue to service the Hardcore machines being the used by customers, it is no longer in the computer manufacturing business.
Ewald has a storied history in HPC with leadership roles at LANL, Cray Research, Linux Networks, and of course SGI, which he left in 2009 before the company was acquired by Rackable. His experience and wide industry network will undoubtedly be key to getting the best possible partners for LiquidCool. Read the Full Story.
On behalf of insideHPC, I’d like to say, “Good luck, Bo. And welcome back!”
Video: Interview with Kathy Yelick from LBNL
In this video, Kathy Yelick, Associate Lab Director for Computing Sciences at LBNL discusses the importance of computational science and why we need faster supercomputers.
More Details on Allan Snavely Memorial
Some members of the HPC community have written in to share that a memorial service for Allan Snavely will be held in San Diego on Aug. 12, in coordination with the Self-Realization Fellowship. Snavely, who was recently named CTO of LLNL, suffered a heart attack over the weekend while road biking.
It’s difficult to summarize a life so full of accomplishment,” said SDSC Michael Norman. “Allan would rather blaze his own trail than travel along a well-worn path accepted by others. He was driven to stay ahead of the curve, striving to find innovative solutions to advance high performance computing for science and society. The Gordon system embodies Allan’s out-of-the-box thinking. The term visionary is sometimes overused, but I and others believe Allan fit the description. The HPC community has lost a true visionary.”
A number of articles have been written about Snavely this week, including a feature from SDSC and a great piece by Charles Babcock at Information Week.
Allan Snavely is survived by his wife, Nancy, and daughter, Sophia. Donations are being accepted for a college fund created for Sophia. To contribute, please write your check to “Merrill Edge” and include the account number “Edge 53Z-19187″ on the subject line. Checks should then be mailed to: 1400 Merrill Lynch Dr., Pennington, NJ 08534
Update: The Allan Snavely Memorial Service takes place Aug. 12 in Encinitas.
Allan Snavely Passes Away
The HPC community lost one of its own this week with the passing of Allan Snavely from LLNL/UCSD. He apparently suffered a heart attack while was out road biking, which was one of his passions.
Allan Snavely is the CTO for supercomputing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).
He is a noted expert in high performance computing (HPC), has published more than 75 cited papers with more than 1,400 citations on this subject (his current h-index is 23 i.e. 23 publications have been cited 23 or more times in other journal articles or conference proceedings), he has presented numerous invited talks including briefing U.S. congressional staff on the importance of the field to economic competitiveness, has twice been a finalist for the Gordon Bell Prize (2007 and 2008) in recognition for outstanding achievement in HPC applications, and in 2009 shared the SC09 Storage Challenge Award for the design of Dash, an innovative new supercomputer that makes extensive use of flash memory. Dash is just a prototype of a much larger system he and and his team have built: Gordon, the most powerful supercomputer in the world for accessing data with 100 GB/s of bandwidth to disk and 36 million IOPS of random data access from 300 TB of NAND flash. Allan Snavely received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego.
Update: SDSC has put out a press release stating that arrangements for a memorial service have not been finalized at this time.
Video: For ISC’12, the Big Data Beast is the Gorilla in the Room
In this video, insideHPC interviews a special guest fake celebrity in the Panasas booth at ISC’12.
HPC Community Member Kyril Faenov Passes Away
The HPC community lost one of its own this week with the untimely passing of Kyril Faenov of Microsoft, formerly lead of their Technical Computing Group.
Before joining the SQL organization in 2011, Kyril was the General Manager of the Technical Computing Group, which developed Windows HPC Server, Parallel Computing Platform and mathematical modeling tools aimed at enabling broader access by commercial, government and academic customers to large scale cloud computing and data analysis resources. Kyril founded the High Performance Computing business unit in 2004 and lead the development of Windows HPC Server product, world-wide industry and academic partnerships.
Faenov was 38. According to the memorial site, funeral services will be held on Wednesday, May 30 at Hills of Eternity Cemetery in Seattle.
