Showing posts with label hpc. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hpc. Show all posts

Thursday, 27 October 2011

My SC11 diary 6

Today was supposed to be a day away from the email, laptop, phone, etc. But it didn't quite turn out that way. Among other things, SC11 planning required some attention. Will try harder tomorrow (there won't be a diary entry tomorrow for example).

Which raises a question  - do you find time for a day off at SC? Some people arrive over the weekend and take a day away from supercomputing to do some local tourism. Others stay on an extra day or two after the end of SC for the same reason. Personally, unless flight schedules force an extra day or two, I don't normally do this.

Wednesday, 26 October 2011

My SC11 diary 5

I enjoy seeing the reactions of people attending SC for the first time. Perhaps being used to only attending other HPC events around the world, they are unprepared for the scale of the event.

Especially the exhibition. I am sure people get lost in there - properly lost, not just the few minutes disorientation that we all get several times in the SC11 week as we traverse the show floor looking for a specific booth or exit. Each year, I remember by about the 3rd day (but not the 1st!) that the booth numbers are partly logical - they are related to the rows/columns of the booth location within the hall. How handy for navigation!

Tuesday, 25 October 2011

My SC11 diary 4

Another good day with the SC11 schedule today - a good increase in the proportion of nailed down meetings.

Something that comes up during the process of arranging meeting at SC is the different logistics. There seems to be quite a variety of opinion as to the best way to attend SC week.

Monday, 24 October 2011

My SC11 diary 3

Well, shock, today so far has not been dominated by SC11! "Normal" work (and admin) has been the focus so far today. It is easy at this time of year to scan the headlines in the main HPC news outlets such as HPC Wire, InsideHPC, twitter (!), ... and assume SC is the only thing the HPC world is thinking of right now. The same is true of article preparation emails circulating for specialist publications like The Exascale Report. And it is even true to some extent for publications with a broader remit - e.g. Scientific Computing.

Friday, 21 October 2011

My SC11 diary 2

One goal for the end of each week leading up to SC11 is to have a net increase in certainty of my schedule for SC11 week itself. That means I hope for a reduction in the number of schedule entries labelled "hold for ..." or "tentative", etc. Of course, this usually also means an increase in the number of confirmed meetings, breakfast meetings, dinner meetings and so on. I also look for confirmation of my speaking slots, time to visit bits of the technical program, any media duties, and social events.

Thursday, 20 October 2011

My SC11 diary 1

The SC11 conference, or just "supercomputing", will be held in Seattle this November. For many in the high performance computing community, SC is the big event of the year. Certainly it is the one that attracts the most press (and press releases), the most attendees, the biggest exhibition, and absorbs the most amount of time in planning before we even get there. It is the event where we get to meet with many of our customers, most of our potential suppliers, and many friends and collaborators.

Monday, 29 August 2011

Supercomputers and other large science facilities

In my recent HPCwire feature, I wrote that I occasionally say, glibly and deliberately provocatively, that if the scientific community can justify (to funders and to the public) billions of dollars, large power consumptions, lots of staff etc for domain specific major scientific intrusments like LHC, Hubble, NIF, etc, then how come we can’t make a case for a facility needing comparable resources but can do wonders for a whole range of science problems and industrial applications?

There is a partial answer to that ...

Friday, 19 August 2011

What happened to High Productivity Computing?

How to make HPC more effective? Value for money and high impact strategic research facilities like HPC are often difficult to match. Not so long ago, this concern meant that the familiar HPC acronym was hijacked to mean "High Productivity Computing", to emphasize that it is not only the raw compute performance at your disposal that counts but, more importantly, how well you are able to make use of that performance. In other words: how productive is it?

What is this HPC thing?

[Originally posted on The NAG Blog]


I’m sure something like this is familiar to many readers of this blog. The focus here is HPC, but there is a similar story for mathematicians, numerical software engineeers, etc.


You've just met an old acquaintance. Or a family member is curious. Or at social events (when social means talking to real people not twitter/facebook). We see that question coming. We panic. Then the family/friend/stranger, asks it. We freeze. How to reply? Can I get a meaningful, ideally interesting, answer out before they get bored? What if I fail to get the message across correctly? Oops, this pause before answering has gone on too long. Now they are looking at me strangely. They are thinking the answer is embarrassing or weird. This is not a good start.


The question? “What do you do then?” Followed by: “Oh! So what exactly is supercomputing then?


Monday, 8 August 2011

Summer season big changes - football or supercomputing?

The world of supercomputing has gone mad.

So it seems as I catch up on the news around the HPC community after a week's vacation. Just today the news of IBM walking away from half a decade's work on Blue Waters and the story of an unknown organisation [now revealed to be NVidia] tempting Steve Scott to leave his Cray CTO role have been huge news but thinking back over the summer months there has been more.

The immediate comparison to me is that of the European football summer season (soccer for my American readers). Key players are signed by new clubs, managers leave for pastures new (or are pushed), and ownership takeover bids succeed or fail. It feeds a few months of media speculation, social gossip, with occasional breaking news (i.e. actual facts) and several major moves (mostly big surprises, but some pre-hyped for long before). But clubs emerge from the summer with new teams, new ambitions, and new odds of achieving success.

The world of HPC has such a summer I think.

Friday, 24 June 2011

ISC11 Review

ISC11 - the mid-season big international conference for the world of supercomputing - was held this week in Hamburg.

Here, I update my ISC11 preview post with my thoughts after the event.

I said I was watching out for three battles.

GPU vs MIC vs Fusion

The fight for top voice in manycore/GPU world will be one interesting theme of ISC11. Will this be the year that the GPU/manycore theme really means more than just NVidia and CUDA? AMD has opened the lid on Fusion in recent weeks and has sparked some real interest. Intel's MIC (or Knights) is probably set for some profile at ISC11 now the Knights Ferry program has been running a while. How will NVidia react to no longer being the loudest (only?) noise in GPU/manycore land? Or will NVidia's early momentum carry through?

Review: None of this is definitive, but my gut reaction is that MIC won this battle. GPU lost. Fusion didn't play again. My feeling from talking to attendees was that MIC was second only to the K story, in terms of what people were talking about (and asking NAG - as collaborators in the MIC programme - what we thought). Partly because of the MIC hype, and the K success (performance and power efficient without GPUs), GPUs took a quieter role than recent years. Fusion, disappointingly, once again seemed to have a quiet time in terms of people talking about it (or not). Result? As I thought, manycore is now realistically meaning more than just NVidia/CUDA.

Exascale vs Desktop HPC

Both the exascale vision/race/distraction (select according to your preference) and the promise of desktop HPC (personal supercomputing?) have space on the agenda and exhibit floor at ISC11. Which will be the defining scale of the show? Will most attendees be discussing exascale and the research/development challenges to get there? Or will the hopes and constraints of "HPC for the masses" have people talking in the aisles? Will the lone voices trying to link the two extremes be heard? (technology trickle down, market solutions to efficient parallel programming etc.) What about the "missing middle"?

Review: Exascale won this one hands down, I think. Some lone voices still tried to talk about desktop HPC, missing middles, mass usage of HPC and so-on. But exascale got the hype again (not necessarily wrong for one of the year's primary "supercomputing" shows!)

Software vs Hardware

The biggie for me. Will this be the year that software really gets as much attention as hardware? Will the challenges and opportunities of major applications renovation get the profile it deserves? Will people just continue to say "and software too". Or will the debate - and actions - start to follow? The themes above might (should) help drive this (porting to GPU, new algorithms for manycore, new paradigms for exascale, etc). Will people trying to understand where to focus their budget get answers? Balance of hardware vs software development vs new skills? Balance of "protect legacy investment" against opportunity of fresh look at applications?

Review: Hardware still got more attention than software. Top500, MIC, etc. Although ease-of-programming for MIC was a common question too. I did miss lots of talks, so perhaps there was more there focusing on applications and software challenges than I caught. But the chat in the corridors was still hardware dominated I thought.

The rest?

What have I not listed? National flag waving. I'm not sure I will be watching too closely whether USA, Japan, China, Russia or Europe get the most [systems|petaflops|press releases|whatever]. Nor the issue of cloud vs traditional HPC. I'm not saying those two don't matter. But I am guessing the three topics above will have more impact on the lives of HPC users and technology developers - both next week and for the next year once back at work.

Review: Well, I got those two wrong! Flags were out in force, with Japan (K, Fujitsu, Top500, etc) and France (Bull keynote) waving strongly among others. And clouds were seemingly the question to be asked at every panel! But in a way, I was still right - flags and clouds do matter and will get people talking - but I mainatin that manycore, exascale vs desktop, and the desperation of software all matter more.


 What did you learn? What stood out for you? Please add your comments and thoughts below ...

Friday, 17 June 2011

ISC 11 Preview

ISC11 - the mid-season big international conference for the world of supercomputing - is next week in Hamburg.

Will you be attending? What will you be looking to learn? I will be watching out for three battles.

GPU vs MIC vs Fusion

The fight for top voice in manycore/GPU world will be one interesting theme of ISC11. Will this be the year that the GPU/manycore theme really means more than just NVidia and CUDA? AMD has opened the lid on Fusion in recent weeks and has sparked some real interest. Intel's MIC (or Knights) is probably set for some profile at ISC11 now the Knights Ferry program has been running a while. How will NVidia react to no longer being the loudest (only?) noise in GPU/manycore land? Or will NVidia's early momentum carry through?

Exascale vs Desktop HPC

Both the exascale vision/race/distraction (select according to your preference) and the promise of desktop HPC (personal supercomputing?) have space on the agenda and exhibit floor at ISC11. Which will be the defining scale of the show? Will most attendees be discussing exascale and the research/development challenges to get there? Or will the hopes and constraints of "HPC for the masses" have people talking in the aisles? Will the lone voices trying to link the two extremes be heard? (technology trickle down, market solutions to efficient parallel programming etc.) What about the "missing middle"?

Software vs Hardware

The biggie for me. Will this be the year that software really gets as much attention as hardware? Will the challenges and opportunities of major applications renovation get the profile it deserves? Will people just continue to say "and software too". Or will the debate - and actions - start to follow? The themes above might (should) help drive this (porting to GPU, new algorithms for manycore, new paradigms for exascale, etc). Will people trying to understand where to focus their budget get answers? Balance of hardware vs software development vs new skills? Balance of "protect legacy investment" against opportunity of fresh look at applications?

The rest?

What have I not listed? National flag waving. I'm not sure I will be watching too closely whether USA, Japan, China, Russia or Europe get the most [systems|petaflops|press releases|whatever]. Nor the issue of cloud vs traditional HPC. I'm not saying those two don't matter. But I am guessing the three topics above will have more impact on the lives of HPC users and technology developers - both next week and for the next year once back at work.

 What will you be looking out for?

Thursday, 26 May 2011

Poll: legacy software and future HPC applications

I've added a new quick survey to the HPC Notes blog: "Which do you agree with more for developing the next generation of HPC applications?"

Is the argument about "protecting our invetsment" a load of nonsense? Or is throwing it all away and starting again irresponsible?

I've only allowed the two extremes as voting options - I know you might want to say "both" - but choose one!

See top right of the blog home page. Vote away ...

For clues on my own views, and some good audience debate, see the software panel video recording from the recent NCSA PSP annual meeting here: http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/Conferences/2011Meeting/agenda.html

Blog on the topic to follow shortly ... after some of your votes have been posted :-)

Friday, 18 March 2011

Performance and Results

[Originally posted on The NAG Blog]

What's in a catch phrase?

As you will hopefully know, NAG's strapline is "Results Matter. Trust NAG".

What matters to you, our customers, is results. Correct results that you can rely on. Our strapline invites you to trust NAG - our people and our software products - to deliver that for you.

When I joined NAG to help develop the High Performance Computing (HPC) services and consulting business, one of the early discussions raised the possibility of using a new version of this strapline for our HPC business, reflecting the performance emphasis of the increased HPC activity. Probably the best suggestion was "Performance Matters. Trust NAG." Close second was "Productivity Matters. Trust NAG."

Thursday, 17 March 2011

The Addictive Allure of Supercomputing

The European Medical Device Technology (EMDT) magazine interviewed me recently. InsideHPC also has pointed to the interview here.

The interview discusses false hopes of users: "Computers will always get faster – I just have to wait for the next processor and my application will run faster."

We still see this so often - managers, researchers, programmers even - all waiting for the silver bullet that will make multicore processors run their application faster with no extra effort from them. There is nothing now or coming soon that will do that excpet for a few special cases. Getting performance from multicore processors means evolving your code for parallel processing. Tools and parallelized library plugins can help - but in many cases they won't be a substitute for re-writing key parts of the code using multithreading or similar techniques.

Thursday, 10 March 2011

Meeting HPC people

About a year ago, I wrote this article for ZDNet UK, describing what I thought were some of the key events in the supercomputing/HPC community.

I said: "Many people have rightly remarked that the HPC community really is that — a community — and that there is still a relatively high degree of connection between the various practitioners. In other words, despite its growing size and global reach, it feels like a small community. People know each other. Consequently, networking, whether technical or commercial, goes a long way to helping your business."

And: "Whatever your scale of technical computing, from multicore workstations to multi-thousand-node supercomputers, getting involved with the active HPC community can help you with your parallel computing goals. Online resources can help, but by far the most effective way of benefiting from the wider HPC community is by participating at the right events."

I listed some key events, with a comment about the nature and value of each.

I have now added a survey to this website (top right) to find out which events people plan to attend in 2011.

I may have missed out your favourite conference in the original article, or in the survey above, in which case I would like to hear about it too - maybe via the comments page here, or directly.

I hope to meet soome of you when out and about in the coming year ...

NAG out and about

[Originally posted on The NAG Blog]

The NAG website has a section called "Meet our experts - NAG out and about", which gives a list of upcoming events worldwide that NAG experts will be attending or presenting at.


The page also notes: "We regularly organise and participate in conferences, seminars and
training days with our customers and partners. If you would like to talk
to us
about hosting a NAG seminar at your organisation or any training
requirements you might have email us at
sales@nag.co.uk
".


In my own focus of high performance computing (HPC), I have previously written (for ZDNet UK) about some key supercomputing events. For those of you interested in meeting up with HPC experts (especially from NAG!), I have set up a survey of HPC events - please let us know which events you plan to attend in 2011 - and see which events other readers of The NAG Blog are attending.

Saturday, 30 October 2010

Comparing HPC across China, USA and Europe

[Originally posted on The NAG Blog]

In my earlier blog post today on China announcing the world's faster supercomputer, I said I'd be back with more later on the comparisons with the USA, Europe and others. In this morning's blog, I made the point that the world's fastest supercomputer, in itself, is not world changing. But leading supercomputers, critically matched with appropriate expertise in programming and using them, togther with the vision to ensure use across basic research, industry and defence applications can indeed be strategically beneficial to a nation - including real economic impact.



There are plenty of reports and studies describing the strategic impact of HPC within a given organisation or at national levels (some are catalogued by IDC here), so let's take it as a premise for the following thoughts.


Friday, 29 October 2010

Why does the China supercomputer matter to western governments?

[Originally posted on The NAG Blog]

There is a lot of fuss in the mainstream media (BBC, FT, CNET, even the Daily Mail!) the last few days about the world's fastest supercomputer being in China for the first time. And much ado on Twitter (me too - @hpcnotes).



But much of the mainstream reporting, twitter-fest, and blogging is missing the point I think. China deploying the world's fastest supercomputer is news (the fastest supercomputer has almost always been American for decades, with the occasional Japanese crown). But the machine alone is not the big news.


Thursday, 23 September 2010

Is power-hungry supercomputing OK now?

[Article by me on ZDNet UK, 23 September, 2010]

We may be planning for a 1,000-fold increase in compute power in the next decade, but what about the extra power consumption ...

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/emerging-tech/2010/09/23/is-power-hungry-supercomputing-ok-now-40090137/