How Intel is Fostering HPC in the Cloud

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In this video from SC18, Intel Fellow Bill Magro describes how the company is fostering technologies for a new era of HPC in the Cloud.

Many organizations are using HPC to do what they would otherwise do through physical experimentation, only faster and at lower cost. Others, in fields ranging from astrophysics to financial services, are using HPC to explore issues that defy physical experimentation altogether. In recent years, the demand for HPC has been growing even faster, as businesses have begun aggregating multiple servers into clusters to speed application performance for simulation, modeling, analytics, data visualization, machine learning, and more. Unfortunately, the cost and complexity of deploying a dedicated physical cluster remains a roadblock for many organizations. Cloud computing offers a potential solution by allowing people to create and access computing resources on demand. Yet meeting the complex software demands of an HPC application can be quite challenging in a cloud environment. In addition, running HPC workloads on virtualized infrastructure may result in unacceptable performance penalties for some workloads. Because of these issues, relatively few organizations have run production HPC work- loads in either private or public clouds.

Bill Magro is an Intel Fellow and serves as the Technical Lead and Strategist for Intel’s high-performance computing and workstation software and provides technical computing software requirements for Intel product roadmaps. He joined Intel in 2000 with the acquisition of Kuck & Associates Inc. (KAI). He began his Intel career as Director of the Parallel Applications Center, where he was responsible for enabling parallel applications to use Intel’s emerging multi-core technology. From 2006 to 2010, he served as Director of high-performance computing software solutions and led Intel’s efforts in HPC software products. His work in HPC and parallel computing has earned him two Intel Achievement Awards, the company’s highest technical award. Before joining KAI in 1997, he spent 3 years as a post-doctoral fellow and staff member at the Cornell Theory Center at Cornell University, where he performed research in quantum physics and evaluated future supercomputing systems. A recognized expert in HPC, he has authored numerous articles published in technical and academic journals and holds four patents, with another seven patents pending. He is a Member of the Association for Computing Machinery and the co-chair of the InfiniBand Trade Association Technical Working Group. Mr. Magro holds a bachelor’s degree in applied and engineering physics from Cornell University and a master’s degree and Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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