News and Announcements
Summit
Even as Titan, ORNL’s Cray XK7 supercomputer and current No. 2 on the TOP500, keeps churning away at ~18 PetaFLOP/s, the DOE and the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) are making plans for the next push towards Exascale. This push comes from a new machine, Summit, which is being designed and built through a partnership between NVIDIA, IBM, and Mellanox, which will provide the accelerators, CPUs, and interconnect, respectively.
Summit will arrive sometime in 2018 as part of a three-pronged attack by the DOE called the Collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne, and Livermore (CORAL). As the name suggests, ORNL, ANL, and LLNL will all host new supercomputers, each striving towards 150 PetaFLOP/s with a possible expansion to 300 PetaFLOP/s or more.
Things are about to get interesting, especially since the Chinese have announced their five year plan to achieve Exascale (1000 PetaFLOP/s) in 2020. Stay tuned.
Conference Reports
ASC16 Student Supercomputer Challenge
ICL’s Jack Dongarra served as co-chair of the Expert Committee and judge of the Asia Supercomputing Community’s 2016 Student Supercomputing Challenge (ASC16). The challenge, hosted by the Huazhong University of Science and Technology on April 18-22, 2016, is billed as the world’s largest supercomputing hackathon.
For 2016, 16 finalists were selected from 175 registered teams worldwide after two months of rigorous evaluation in the preliminary contest. For the final round, the finalists designed and built a cluster to run HPL, HPCG, surface wave numerical model MASNUM, material simulation software ABINIT, deep learning algorithm DNN, and a Mystery Application under 3000W. The Inspur Group provided all necessary hardware.
Each team presented system designs, the final result, and analysis to the Judge Committee, of which Jack was a member. The team from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (home team) won the day and were crowned champions of ASC16. A full listing of the results is available here.
GPU Technology Conference
On April 4th, 2016, ICL sent a small contingent of the MAGMA research and development team to NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC 2016) in San Jose, CA. GTC 2016 is billed as the largest and most important event of the year for GPU developers, and showcases the bleeding edge applications that utilize GPU technology, including artificial intelligence and deep learning, virtual reality, and self-driving cars.
Stan Tomov and Azzam Haidar co-presented a talk/tutorial on High-Performance Batched Computations for GPUs: Approaches and Applications, outlining techniques for efficient batched computations on GPUs, where small and independent computations must be grouped and executed together to obtain high performance.
Ahmad Abdelfattah presented a poster describing Cholesky Factorization on Batches of Matrices with Fixed and Variable Sizes, wherein he describes a high performance solution for Cholesky factorization on batches of relatively small matrices; the proposed solution outperforms most of the existing state-of-the-art techniques for solving batched problems.
Interview
Cindy Knisley
Where are you from, originally?
I was born right here in Knoxville (at the old St. Mary’s Hospital). I grew up out in the county—in the Corryton community.
Can you summarize your educational background?
I went to Gibbs High School in Corryton, where I had the second highest GPA in my class. After high school, I went to Walters State Community College in Morristown, Tennessee. I graduated Summa Cum Laude with an Associate’s degree in Accounting. Six years later, I went back to school at night and graduated Magna Cum Laude from Tusculum College with a degree in Business Management.
Where did you work before joining ICL?
I started my career as an assistant controller with a local wholesale building supply company. After being there three years, I took a job at Kimberly-Clark Corporation. I worked there for ten years, then I stayed home for about eight years when we lived in Middle Tennessee. I worked a couple of little jobs to get me back in the workforce before coming to UT in 2011.
How did you first hear about the lab and what made you want to work here?
I first heard about the lab from the UT recruiting site. I had been working in the Biology Business Office and was looking for more of a challenge.
What is your primary role here at ICL? What are you working on?
I am, of course, the Financial Specialist at ICL. What that means is that I make sure we spend our grant and gift money wisely and appropriately. We have different rules from each funding agency, as well as the ever-changing policies and procedures set forth by UT. I may seem like the policy patrol, but that is why I am here! I try my best to keep us on the straight and narrow.
What are your interests/hobbies outside of work?
For years, my interests and hobbies all revolved around my three children. Since we are empty-nesters now, I am trying to discover what I enjoy doing. I have always loved the water. Two of the things I enjoy most, but rarely get to do, are swimming and fishing. When we lived in Middle Tennessee, we were surrounded by Kentucky Lake. We lived two miles from Pebble Isle Marina where we kept a pontoon boat. We were also near rivers and creeks. I loved it!
I also like the idea of making things myself, like crocheting and sewing. I built a “doggie condo” last fall with insulation, shingled roof, partitioned room, and a covered deck. It doesn’t look so great, but I really enjoyed building it.
Tell us something about yourself that might surprise people.
You can’t tell by looking at me now, but I was an athlete. I played softball from 5 years old, and was a pitcher in my later years. I was pretty good, even if I do say so myself. I played basketball until the 8th grade, when I stopped growing. (Go ahead and laugh!). After that, I was a cheerleader the next four years. But, probably the most surprising is that I can beat any one of you in a watermelon seed spitting contest! I learned when my siblings and I would have seed spitting wars, where if your seed stuck on someone else’s face, they were out of the game. Yes, I am from the country!
If you weren’t working at ICL, where would you like to be working and why?
If I were not working at ICL, I would like to be working anywhere with an office overlooking the ocean (and accessible to the beach and swimming pool).
