Douglas Eadline at Linux Magazine looks back on the year in HPC for 2010 and sums up the highlights:
The SC10 Beowulf Bash was a also a highlight. We had over 750 people show up! As has become our yearly lament, “we need a bigger venue next year.” Score one for the community. Another, highlight that I just stumbled upon is the SC10 Analyst Crossfire session. This is a video well worth watching. The panel includes Addison Snell, CEO, Intersect360 Research (moderator), Michael Wolfe, Engineer, The Portland Group, Inc., Peter ffoulkes, VP of Marketing, Adaptive Computing, Jay Boisseau, Director, Texas Advanced Computing Center, and Thomas Sterling, Professor, Louisiana State University.
Eadline then goes on to list some disappointments in this space:
From a technology standpoint, we seem rather complacent. We are cramming more cores into the same space and at the same time adding GPUs cards in a somewhat orthogonal fashion. While GPUs as array processors may sound new the concept is quite old (and works in many cases). We are able to push the limits of computation with the Top500 list while at the same time we cannot provide the “missing middle” with what it needs to grow. I also do not believe this is an economic argument i.e. that there is no market for HPC with small and medium size organizations. The opposite is true. There is a crying need for HPC in industry because innovation allows companies to compete. And all companies need to compete.
