News and Announcements
UT Professor Leads World Effort in Developing Next Generation of Supercomputers
Jack discusses the importance of supercomputing and the drive to exascale in this interview in Tennessee Today.
Jack provides additional comments in this HPCWire article, Scientific Community Behind Push to Exascale and European Exascale Project Drives Toward Next Supercomputing Milestone. In other news, Jack comments on benchmarking in Better Benchmarking for Supercomputers and White House says supercomputing ‘arms race’ could prove costly.
ICL is Hiring
In addition to a need for graduate student assistants, we also have full time, research job openings in the following research areas: numerical software, linear algebra, performance tuning, evaluation and benchmarking. We are also looking for a replacement for Scott Wells with ICL’s communications and research infrastructure group. For more information, visit the ICL Employment web page.
ICL Now Fully Participating in FutureGrid
ICL’s work with the NSF’s $10.1M FutureGrid (FG) project is now officially underway. Although the project launched in October 2010, with ICL was one of its founding members, funding for ICL’s effort in this five year project was not scheduled to begin until year two, after FG had passed its year-one review. In mid-January, Piotr Luszczek and Terry Moore represented ICL at the NSF site visit in Bloomington, IN, and the results of the review were positive. ICL’s schedule of work with FG will focus on two main items. First, we will be helping the FG software team deploy PAPI-C across the FG infrastructure and to educate the FG community in its use. Second, we will be developing a new benchmark suite, called the Grid Benchmark Challenge, which is based on the general model of HPCC but specifically designed for grid and cloud infrastructures, like FutureGrid.
EuroMPI 2011 Call for Papers
Santorini Greece, site of EuroMPI 2011
EuroMPI is the primary meeting where the users and developers of MPI and other message-passing programming environments can interact. The 18th European MPI Users’ Group Meeting will be a forum for the users and developers of MPI, but also welcome hybrid programing models that combine message passing with programming of modern architectures such as multi-core, or accelerators. Through the presentation of contributed papers, poster presentations and invited talks, attendees will have the opportunity to share ideas and experiences to contribute to the improvement and furthering of message-passing and related parallel programming paradigms. See the EuroMPI 2011 site for topics of interest, important dates, etc.
ICL 2011 Winter Reception
Bridgeview Grill
The ICL 2011 Winter Reception for current ICL employees has been set for Friday, February 18 at the Bridgeview Grill on Neyland Drive from 5:30-7:30pm. Please reserve this date on your calendars, and RSVP to Leighanne by February 4. You are welcome to bring a guest, but please, no children.
Recent Releases
PAPI 4.1.2
This is a minor release of PAPI-C. It addresses a number of bugs and other issues that have surfaced since the 4.1.1 release. This version bump is a recommended upgrade for anyone using PAPI, but if you aren’t seeing any problems with your current installation, it is not required. See the News section of the PAPI website for more information on this release.
MAGMA 1.0RC3
This release includes the MAGMA sources! MAGMA 1.0 RC3 is intended for a single CUDA enabled NVIDIA GPU. It extends version 0.2 by adding support for the Fermi GPUs (see the sample performances for LU, QR, and Cholesky factorizations and LS solvers in complex arithmetic). For more details see the MAGMA 1.0 presentation. See the News section of the MAGMA website for more information on this release.
ICL Resources
Ganglia
Have you ever wanted to check on the status/load/information on a machine and are just to lazy to ssh? Well I’ve got a new resource for you to be able to use. The software is called ganglia which I’m sure many of you are familiar with and I’ve installed it on a few of our servers. You can check the ganglia web interface by visiting http://icl.eecs.utk.edu/ganglia/
Intel Compiler Update
Our Intel compilers have been updated to the latest version which Intel has renamed to Intel Composer XE and also changed the version scheme to help confuse things even more. This compiler suite includes the Intel Integrated Performance Primitives, MKL, and Threading Building Blocks packages. The latest version is in /mnt/scratch/sw/intel/2011.1.107 and the older version 11.1.069 is still in that directory as well in case you still need it.
PGI Compilers
Did you know we have the PGI Accelerator Fortran/C/C++ Compiler Suite as well? The newest version was released at the end of January and is now publicly available as well in /mnt/scratch/sw/pgi/11.1 along with the older versions as well.
These software packages are included on most of our servers such as pluto, ig, mordor8 already for you to use along with many other packages all found in /mnt/scratch/sw/.
Interview
Bonnie Browne
Where are you from, originally?
Well I was born in Indiana, but my family moved to East Tennessee when I was 5 and that is where I grew up. I identify myself as a southerner for the most part, but I believe my lack of an accent confirms my family’s midwestern roots.
Can you summarize your educational background?
I graduated from Clemson University in May 2009 with a Bachelors in Economics, minoring in Health Science.
What are your research interests?
I am only 23 and my interests are growing constantly. While my education and possible career interests lean more towards economic development and public health policy, I enjoy the subjects I am currently working on at ICL.
What made you want to work for ICL?
I jumped at the opportunity to work for ICL because I believe it is a wonderful research group with a friendly environment. I felt it would be a good job for me to work on something different and interesting while also gaining practical experience.
Can you describe what your currently working on at ICL?
I am working on the IIA project. My job is to look at how well or in what ways DOE funded researchers are linking their publications to their research datasets. Currently there is not a very good system for doing this, which makes it difficult for supporting data to be found or replicated by other researchers. I meet with IIA and our client, OSTI, to direct my research and report my findings.
If you weren’t working at ICL, where would you like to be working and why?
I honestly do not know where I would be working if I were not at ICL! My ideal job would be something with health economics or health policy research but my primary goal is to first earn my Masters in Public Health Policy so I can find a job like this.
What are your interests/hobbies outside work?
Creating things is a huge passion of mine. I design and sell jewelry, throw pottery, make mosaics, sew, knit, refinish furniture, do woodworking and try any other project I can think of. I also enjoy reading, playing with my dogs, and I love traveling to new places.
Tell us something unique about yourself that might surprise some people.
I can never again donate blood because I got malaria a few years ago while volunteering in Tanzania.
