Monday 5 October 2015

HPC Bingo

A big part of SC (Austin in 2015) is actually getting there. Most attendees will have to navigate the joys of long distance air travel. If you travel enough, or play the game wisely, you can secure frequent flyer elite status which helps make the air travel more bearable. Here is a version of elite status bingo for HPC. I listed some categories and "achievements" required for each. Can you claim elite HPC status?

HPC System User category


There have been lots of systems in HPC over the years, but we should stick to options that even a recent recruit to HPC might be able to claim. You can award yourself this category if you have used (logged into and run or compiled code) each of these systems:
  • IBM Power system
  • Cray XT, XE, or XC
  • SGI shared memory system - Origin, Altix or UV
  • x86 cluster
  • A system with any one of Sparc, vector, or ARM, GPU, Phi, or FPGA

HPC Programmer category


Award yourself this category if you have written programs to run on a HPC system in each of these:
  • Fortran 77
  • Fortran 90 or later
  • C
  • MPI
  • OpenMP
  • Any one of CUDA, OpenACC, OpenCL, Python, R, Matlab

HPC Talker/Buzzword category


Buzzwords seem to be an integral part of HPC. To be awarded this category, you must have used each of these in talks (powerpoint etc.) since SC14:
  • Big Data
  • Any of green computing, energy efficient computing, or power aware computing
  • One of my HPC analogies?
  • "it's all about the science" (but then just talked about the HPC like everyone else!!)
  •  Any reference to "FLOPS are free, data movement is hard" or similar
  • Exascale