HPC Advisory Council

Now that SC09 is done we can look back on the council activities and achievements during the largest HPC show in the world. As we did during SC08 and ISC’09, the council members invested a huge amount of effort and brought together the fastest networking solution – a 120Gb/s InfiniBand network demonstration, as part of SCinet. You can see the networking diagram below and I would like to thank the following organization that helped to make this amazing demo a reality: AMD, Avago, Colfax Intl, Dell, HP, IBM, InfiniBand Trade Association, Koi Computers, LSI, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Luxtera, Mellanox Technologies, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, RAID, Scalable Graphics, SGI, Sun Microsystems, Texas Advanced Computing Center, The University of Utah Center for High-Performance Computing, and Voltaire. 

One of our council members, Scalable Graphics, helped to create a highly visual demo of a Peugeot car rendering in 3D (see picture below). The demo included an interactive component, where viewers wear glasses that tracked their position and moved the image accordantly.

Also during the conference, we held our semi-annual meeting, where we reviewed our plans for 2010. To recap, we will be building off our successful HPC Advisory Council Workshop in China and we will be hosting 4 workshops next year; the first one in March will be hosted in Switzerland together with the Swiss Supercomputing Center, and the second in May as part of the International Supercomputing Conference. More info can be found on the council main web pages.

Best regards,

Gilad, HPC Advisory Council Chairman.

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During the ISC’09 conference several of the Council members (AMD, Dell, Mellanox, and Platform) presented its HPC in a Cloud proof of concept based on work that the council performed inside the HPC Advisory Council’s High-Performance Center. We have posted this Bird-of-Feather presentation below. Let us know what you think of this concept.

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While we running around the convention center in Hamburg, Gilad and I took several videos of the various activities from the Council and its members.

See you all again soon,
-Brian

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This week the 32nd HPC User Forum was held in Roanoke, Virginia. This was a great opportunity to meet, talk and hear from industry experts and end-users. There were very interesting sessions on the state of high-performance computing, the current problems, and what work is necessary to move to exascale computing. It was also a great opportunity to meet many of the HPC Advisory Council members.

The HPC Advisory Council had a session during the HPC User Forum, and I would like to thank the members that participated in the panel, and in particular to Jennifer Koerv (AMD), Donnie Bell (Dell), Sharan Kalwani (GM), Lynn Lewis (Microsoft), Stan Posey (Panasas), Lee Porter (ParTec) and Arend Dittmer (Penguin Computing).

Some of the talks at the User Forum were on HPC futures, not only on building the next PetaScale/ExaScale supercomputers, but how to make HPC easier and more productive. Platform Computing talked on HPC in a cloud and services, and NVIDIA on using GPUs. This is one of the main research activities right now in the HPC Advisory Council – enabling efficient HPC as a Service (HPCaaS) and smart scheduling strategies. Initial results are available on the HPC Advisory Council web, and you are encouraged to take a look (the focus at the event was on bioscience applications). We will extend the research to add QCD codes (quantum chemistry), with the help and support from Fermi National Lab.

We are having our first member’s conference call on May 4th, so don’t forget to accept the invite that you got, and if you did not get it, please let me know at hpc@mellanox.com.

Best Regards,

Gilad Shainer, HPC Advisory Council Chairman

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Replicating our success from SC’08, the HPC Advisory Council has joined the ISCnet team at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC’09) to showcase and demonstrate a large 40Gb/s InfiniBand eco-system, connecting multiple booths on the showfloor. Several members are providing the needed resources to support this activity (providing hardware, software and a 3D visualization demo for this network).

Please check it out and I hope that you will be able to take part in this demonstration. Please let me know if you have additional questions.Semi-annual meeting: We are also looking into possibilities of holding a HPC Advisory Council Member meeting during ISC’09. During the meeting we will meet and greet the council members, review the council activities (application expertise and HPC outreach) and review our plan for this year’s activities and goals. Please let us know if you or your group will be attending the show, and if you would be interested in attending by sending an email to hpc@mellanox.com.

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I would like to thank all the folks who came to our first member meeting during SC’08. We had a great turnout and we hope you all had a good time (looking at the beverage bill…I would say YES! ). Although, it’s TBD right now, I would expect we will be having another meeting/get-together during ISC’09 in June, so stay tuned…

I look forward to seeing you all there and at the many events I end up attending.
-Brian Sparks

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