Virtual SC20 Retrospective: Thinkers’ Thoughts on HPC Today and Tomorrow

Check out this assemblages’ reflections on last week’s virtual SC20. Their thoughts range from big-picture insights on how the event reflects the state of HPC to the keynotes, sessions and announcements they think were particularly notable (and worth going back and watching, if you missed them). Among the topics covered: The convergence of the Top500 and Green500 supercomputer lists, the emerging earmarks of machine learning HPC workloads and the validity of supercomputing predictions made at SC in 2006 over against predictions for 2035.

EuroHPC – The European Strategy for Supercomputing

Jean-Marc Denis from EPI gave this talk at the HPC User Forum. “The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking is a 1 billion Euro joint initiative between the EU and European countries to develop a World Class Supercomputing Ecosystem in Europe. EuroHPC will permit the EU and participating countries to coordinate their efforts and share resources with the objective of deploying in Europe a world-class supercomputing infrastructure and a competitive innovation ecosystem in supercomputing technologies, applications and skills.”

Call for Papers: MSST Storage Conference in Santa Clara

The 2019 Mass Storage MSST conference has issued its Call for Papers. “MSST 2019 will focus on distributed storage system technologies, including persistent memory, new memory technologies, long-term data retention (tape, optical disks…), solid state storage (flash, MRAM, RRAM…), software-defined storage, OS- and file-system technologies, cloud storage, big data, and data centers (private and public). The conference will also put the spotlight on current challenges and future trends in storage technologies.”

Rock Stars of HPC: DK Panda

As our newest Rock Star of HPC, DK Panda sat down with us to discuss his passion for teaching High Performance Computing. “During the last several years, HPC systems have been going through rapid changes to incorporate accelerators. The main software challenges for such systems have been to provide efficient support for programming models with high performance and high productivity. For NVIDIA-GPU based systems, seven years back, my team introduced a novel `CUDA-aware MPI’ concept. This paradigm allows complete freedom to application developers for not using CUDA calls to perform data movement.”

Rock Stars of HPC: Karan Batta

From software developer at a small start-up in New Zealand, to Senior Program Manager at one of the largest multinational technology companies in the US, Karan Batta has led a career touched by HPC – even if he didn’t always realize it at the time. As the driving force behind the GPU Infrastructure vision, roadmap and deployment in Microsoft Azure, Karan Batta is a Rock Star of HPC.

Rock Stars of HPC: James Phillips

Recipient of a Gordon Bell Award in 2002, James Phillips has been a full-time research programmer for almost 20 years. Since 1998, he has been the lead developer of NAMD, a parallel molecular dynamics code designed for high-performance simulation of large biomolecular systems that scales beyond 200,000 cores, and is undoubtedly a Rock Star of HPC.

Rock Stars of HPC: John Stone

This Rock Stars of HPC series is about the men and women who are changing the way the HPC community develops, deploys, and operates the supercomputers and social and economic impact of their discoveries. “As the lead developer of the VMD molecular visualization and analysis tool, John Stone’s code is used by more than 100,000 researchers around the world. He’s also a CUDA Fellow, helping to bring HPC to the masses with accelerated computing. In this way and many others, John Stone is certainly one of the Rock Stars of HPC.”

Announcing Our Newest Rock Star of HPC: David Bader

At insideHPC, we are pleased to announce that David Bader is our latest Rock Star of HPC. While HPC tends to focus on compute-intensive problems, Big Data challenges require novel architectures for data-intensive computing. My group has been the first to parallelize and implement large-scale graph theoretic algorithms, which are quite a challenge because of […]

Rock Stars of HPC: Thomas Schulthess

Our Rock Stars of HPC gallery is growing as we look to a new generation of heterogeneous computing. And when the opportunity came to us to name our first European Rock Star of HPC, one name kept coming up: Thomas Schulthess: Thomas Schulthess is the director of the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) at Manno. […]

Rock Stars of HPC: Dona Crawford

In this special feature written by Mike Bernhardt from The Exascale Report, we honor Dona Crawford, the first woman to grace the ranks of our Rock Stars of HPC. 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, […]