Ron Brightwell
In this video from the 2017 MVAPICH User Group, Ron Brightwell from Sandia presents: Challenges and Opportunities for HPC Interconnects and MPI.
“This talk will reflect on prior analysis of the challenges facing high-performance interconnect technologies intended to support extreme-scale scientific computing systems, how some of these challenges have been addressed, and what new challenges lay ahead. Many of these challenges can be attributed to the complexity created by hardware diversity, which has a direct impact on interconnect technology, but new challenges are also arising indirectly as reactions to other aspects of high-performance computing, such as alternative parallel programming models and more complex system usage models. We will describe some near-term research on proposed extensions to MPI to better support massive multithreading and implementation optimizations aimed at reducing the overhead of MPI tag matching. We will also describe a new portable programming model to offload simple packet processing functions to a network interface that is based on the current Portals data movement layer. We believe this capability will offer significant performance improvements to applications and services relevant to high-performance computing as well as data analytics.”
Ron Brightwell currently leads the Scalable System Software Department at Sandia National Laboratories. After joining Sandia in 1995, he was a key contributor to the high-performance interconnect software and lightweight operating system for the world’s first terascale system, the Intel ASCI Red machine. He was also part of the team responsible for the high-performance interconnect and lightweight operating system for the Cray Red Storm machine, which was the prototype for Cray’s successful XT product line. The impact of his interconnect research is visible in network technologies available today from Bull, Intel, and Mellanox. He has also contributed to the development of the MPI-2 and MPI-3 specifications. He has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed journal, conference, and workshop publications. He is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, has served on the technical program and organizing committees for numerous high-performance and parallel computing conferences, and is a Senior Member of the IEEE and the ACM.
