News and Announcements
Jack to Receive ACM-IEEE Ken Kennedy Award
On November 19th, Jack Dongarra will receive the ACM-IEEE Ken Kennedy Award at an SC13 ceremony in Denver, Colorado. The award recognizes Jack for his leadership in designing and promoting standards for mathematical software used to solve numerical problems common in HPC, and for his work in the development of major software libraries that boost performance and portability in HPC environments.
ACM President Vint Cerf cited Dongarra’s role in anticipating the staggering challenges facing the HPC world: “Jack saw the need to keep pace with the evolution in HPC hardware and software in a world that demands higher speeds and performance levels. His innovations have contributed immensely to the steep growth of high performance computing and its ability to illuminate a wide range of scientific questions facing our society.”
IEEE Computer Society President David Alan Grier said Dongarra’s work remains authoritative: “I’m so pleased to see this award go to Jack Dongarra because he did such foundational work in scientific computing. That work was important in my early career and it remains an influential body of work.”
Supercomputing ’13
This year’s Supercomputing Conference will be held on November 17th – 22nd at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, CO. As usual, ICL will have a considerable presence at the conference with BoFs, papers, tutorials, and talks. Additionally, the University of Tennessee will again have its own booth where ICL’s research will be featured alongside other UT research centers. Below is a schedule of ICL related activities. For an entire list of activities, visit the SC13 schedule page.
| Monday, 18th | 8:30AM – 5:00PM – Tutorial: Linear Algebra Libraries for HPC: Scientific Computing with Multicore and Accelerators; Rm 407; Jack Dongarra, James Demmel, Michael Heroux, and Jakub Kurzak |
| 9:00AM – 5:30PM – Workshop: 4th Workshop on Latest Advances in Scalable Algorithms for Large-Scale Systems (ScalA); Rm 507; Vassil Alexandrov, Jack Dongarra, Al Geist, and Christian Engelmann | |
| 1:30PM – 5:00PM – Tutorial: An Overview of Fault-Tolerant Techniques for HPC; Rm 301; Thomas Herault and Yves Robert | |
| 7:30PM – Talk: The State of HPC; UT Booth (836); Jack Dongarra | |
| Tuesday, 19th | 12:15PM – 1:15PM – BoF: Open MPI State of the Union; Rm 301/302/303; Jeffrey Squyres and George Bosilca |
| 1:30PM – 3:00PM – Awards: Cray/Fernbach/Kennedy Awards; Mile High Room; Dan Reed is chairing, Jack Dongarra will speak and receive the Ken Kennedy award. | |
| 5:00PM – 7:00PM – BoF: TOP500 Supercomputers; Mile High Room; Erich Strohmaier. | |
| Wednesday, 20th | 7:00PM – ICL Alumni Dinner; Tom’s Urban 24, 1460 Larimer Street, Denver, CO. |
| Thursday, 21st | 10:30AM-11:00AM – Paper: Parallel Reduction to Hessenberg Form with Algorithm-Based Fault Tolerance; Rm 401/402/403; Yulu Jia, George Bosilca, Piotr Luszczek, and Jack Dongarra |
| 11:30AM – 12:00PM – Paper: An Improved Parallel Singular Value Algorithm and Its Implementation for Multicore Hardware; Rm 401/402/403; Azzam Haidar, Jakub Kurzak, and Piotr Luszczek | |
| 12:15PM – 1:15PM – BoF: The 2013 HPC Challenge Awards; Rm 201/203; Piotr Luszczek and Jeremy Kepner | |
| 7:00PM – 10:00PM – Technical Program Reception, Denver Museum of Nature and Science |
NICS HPC Seminar Series
The National Institute for Computational Sciences invites you to a Seminar Series on High Performance Computing, every Tuesday and Thursday from 2:10pm to 3:10pm in Claxton 233, starting on Tuesday October 1st. This is a joint effort between different leadership organizations (NICS, JICS, OLCF, ICL) to increase HPC awareness within the academic community.
Different topics will be introduced starting with the most basic and building up to more advanced topics in HPC. No registration is required for the seminar.
Calendar of topics to be covered in November:
| Date | Title |
|---|---|
| 5 | How to transfer files |
| 7 | Intro to shell programming |
| 12 | HPC in Engineering |
| 14 | Intermediate shell programming |
| 19 | XSEDE Science Gateways |
| 21 | Text Editing on Unix |
| 26 | HPC for Life Sciences |
| 28 | (Thanksgiving) |
Conference Reports
Automatic Application Tuning for HPC Architectures
The Automatic Application Tuning for HPC Architectures seminar, hosted by Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz Center for Informatics on September 29th through October 4th, brought in HPC specialists from all over the world to discuss problems and possible solutions for challenges in auto-tuning HPC applications.
Jakub Kurzak attended the seminar and gave a talk about the plans for the BEAST project, aimed at analyzing and autotuning HPC kernels for hardware accelerators, such as GPUs and Xeon Phi co-processors.
There were also a couple of ICL alumni at Dagstuhl, including Shirley Moore and Felix Wolf.
Interview
Daniel Lucio
Where are you from, originally?
I am from Mexico City, Mexico, a “mega city” where the lifestyle is very different from what you see here in Knoxville.
Can you summarize your educational background?
I earned my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from one of the largest public universities in Mexico, U.A.M. in Mexico City. I then pursued my Master’s degree in Computer Science at UTK after learning about Jack Dongarra and ICL. I also hoped to join ORNL after graduating, given the lab’s close relationship with the university.
How did you get introduced to ICL?
I was introduced to ICL after working with Shirley Moore in an independent study on dynamic slicing techniques for profiling programs. I think she was impressed enough with my final paper that she asked me if I would be interested working at ICL. I, of course, immediately said, “Yes!”
What did you work on during your time at ICL?
I did work for the PET project under Dave Cronk writing documentation and quick start guides for compilers and scientific libraries.
What are some of your favorite memories from your time at ICL?
Some of the best memories are from the Friday lunch talks and listening to Jack share his experiences from his travels all over the world.
Tell us where you are and what you’re doing now.
I am still here in Knoxville, working for the NICS group at ORNL providing user assistance to NICS and XSEDE users.
In what ways did working at ICL prepare you for what you do now, if at all?
Working at ICL helped me to see a different view of what scientific computing really is, and allowed me to learn about cutting edge projects (like MAGMA) that are big players in HPC.
Tell us something about yourself that might surprise some people.
I speak French and have been performing as an audio engineer for more than 10 years now.
