September 2011

Titan Summit at ORNL

The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) hosted a summit on August 15-17th, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), which provided a forum for current and prospective users to meet with OLCF staff and industry vendors to discuss Titan, the next-generation leadership-class computational resource.  Titan, built by Cray, will utilize the upcoming “Kepler” GPU co-processor from NVIDIA.

Users were encouraged to present their application plans for exascale computing, and our own Stan Tomov presented ICL’s efforts with the MAGMA project.  His talk, “MAGMA: LAPACK for HPC on heterogeneous architectures,” covered what ICL provides, through MAGMA, for the exascale software stack on heterogeneous architectures.  In particular, the talk focused on two of MAGMA’s strengths: highly optimized kernels as building blocks of HPC applications, and runtime systems that will take “sequential-like” algorithms, described in terms of computational tasks, and efficiently schedule their execution on large scale parallel systems.

CScADS Workshop ’11

This year’s Center for Scalable Application Development Software (CScADS) workshops were held at Lake Tahoe, in the Granlibakken lodge.  Jack Dongarra, Jakub Kurzak, and Dan Terpstra all attended workshops.  Jack gave the introduction talk for the Autotunning workshop and Jakub gave a talk about autotuning GEMMs for Fermi (ASTRA). Dan gave a talk about porting PAPI to the cloud, Performance Tools Workshop.

There were many others in attendance, of course, including Clint Whaley from the University of Texas, Jim Demmel from Berkeley, and Rich Vuduc from Georgia Tech.  The HPC industry was also well represented with  Michael Garland from NVIDIA, John Levesque and Keita Teranishi from Cray, and Greg Henry from Intel.  Clint Whaley, Greg Henry and Keita Teranishi are ICL alumni.

ICL Annual Retreat

This year’s ICL retreat was held on August 11th and 12th in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Over forty ICL folks were present and more than 30 talks were given about ICL research and operations. There were many new faces, alongside longtime ICL veterans, who enjoyed the new surroundings of the Lodge at Buckberry Creek in the Great Smoky Mountains.

Computational Science Kickoff

On Friday, August 19th, leaders of our campus computational science community invited students, faculty, and staff to the University Center’s Shiloh Room to discover some of the exciting developments in computational science at UTK during the Computational Science Kickoff.  The kickoff was a success, and those in attendance began the academic year by learning about the exciting intellectual, educational, and professional opportunities in computational science and engineering.

China: A Quick Ascent

Jack Dongarra was interviewed on the August 2nd episode of NPR’s All Things Considered.  During the episode, Jack weighed in on China’s Tianhe-1A supercomputer—the fastest supercomputer in the world from November 2010 to June 2011—and China’s new-found position as a formidable contender in high performance computing.

The striking thing is, back in 2001, China had zero computers on the [Top 500] list.  So China very quickly grew its high-performance computing capabilities, and are now No. 2 on the list in terms of the number of high-performance computers deployed.

But hardware isn’t everything.  As Jack explains, the machine is nothing without the proper software:

This is a critical thing.  They have a race car; now you have to build something around the race car to effectively use it.  You can’t just invest in hardware.  You need to make an investment across the board. Sometimes these ecosystems are out of balance, and as a result of that, the computer would be very hard to use.