Secrets, lies, women and money: the definitive summary of SC16 - Part 2

I'm usually not shy of speaking my opinions (if you read Part 1 of my summary of SC16, then you’ll know that marketing departments through the land of HPC are busy taking my name off their Christmas card lists 😀), but this Part 2 blog is probably sticking my neck out even further than normal, with some potentially uncomfortable opinions.

SC is arguably the main event of the year for the HPC/supercomputing community. And so it becomes an annual cauldron, relentlessly bubbling to the surface those issues that are most topical for the HPC world. In 2016, two of those issues were women and money.

SC15 Preview

SC15 - the biggest get-together of the High Performance Computing (HPC) world - takes place next week in Austin, TX. Around 10,000 buyers, users, programmers, managers, business development people, funders, researchers, media, etc. will be there.

With a large technical program, an even larger exhibition, and plenty of associated workshops, product launches, user groups, etc., SC15 will dominate the world of HPC for a week, plus most of this week leading up to it. It is one of the best ways for HPC practitioners to share experiences, learn about the latest advances, and build collaborations and business relationships.

So, to wet your appetites, here is the @hpcnotes preview to SC15 - what I think might be the key topics, things to look out for, what not to miss, etc.

New supercomputers

It's always one of the aspects of SC that grabs the media and attendee attention the most. Which new biggest supercomputers will be announced? Will there be a new occupier of the No.1 spot on the Top500 list? Usually I have some idea of what new supercomputers are coming up before they are public, but this year I have no idea. My guess? No new No.1. A few new Top20 machines. So which one will win the news coverage?

New products

In spite of the community repeatedly acknowledging that the whole system is important - memory, interconnect, I/O, software, architecture, packaging, etc., judging by the media attention and informal conversations, we still seem to get most excited by the processors.

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

Essential guide to HPC on twitter

Please read the updated version of this post at:
https://www.hpcnotes.com/p/hpc-on-twitter.html

(Original kept here for reference)

Who are the best HPC people on twitter?

A good question posed by Suhaib Khan (@suhaibkhan) - which he made tougher by saying "pick your top 5". A short debate followed on twitter but I thought the content was useful enough to record in a blog post for community reference. I also strongly urge anyone to provide further input to this topic and I'll update this post.

Some rules (mine not Suhaib's):

1. What are the minimum set of accounts you can follow and still expect to catch most of the HPC news, gossip, opinion pieces, analysis and key technical content?
2. How to avoid too much marketing?
3. How to access comment and debate beyond the news headlines?
4. Which HPC people are not only active but also interactive on twitter?

I cheated a little on the "top 5" by suggesting 4 themes:

Supercomputing - the reality behind the vision

My opinion piece "Supercomputing - the reality behind the vision" was published today in Scientific Computing World, where I:

• liken a supercomputer to a "pile of silicon, copper, optical fibre, pipework, and other heavy hardware [...] an imposing monument that politicians can cut ribbons in front of";
• describe system architecture as "the art of balancing the desires of capacity, performance and resilience against the frustrations of power, cooling, dollars, space, and so on";
• introduce software as magic and infrastructure and a virtual knowledge engine;
• and note that "delivering science insight or engineering results from [supercomputing] requires users";
• and propose that we need a roadmap for people just as much as for the hardware technology.

Read the full article here: http://www.scientific-computing.com/news/news_story.php?news_id=2270.

A review of 2012 in supercomputing - Part 2

This is Part 2 of my review of the year 2012 in supercomputing and related matters.

In Part 1 of the review I re-visited the predictions I made at the start of 2012 and considered how they became real or not over the course of the year. This included cloud computing, Big Data (mandatory capitalization!), GPU, MIC, and ARM - and software innovation. You can find Part 1 here: http://www.hpcnotes.com/2012/12/a-review-of-2012-in-supercomputing-part.html.

Part 2 of the review looks at the themes and events that emerged during the year. As in Part 1, this is all thoroughly biased, of course, towards things that interested me throughout the year.

The themes that stick out in my mind from HPC/supercomputing in 2012 are:

• The exascale race stalls
• Petaflops become "ordinary"
• HPC seeks to engage a broader user community
• Assault on the Top500

The exascale race stalls

The global race towards exascale supercomputing has been a feature of the last few years. I chipped in myself at the start of 2012 with a debate on the "co-design" mantra.

Confidently tracking the Top500 trend lines, the HPC community had pinned 2018 as the inevitable arrival date of the first supercomputer with a peak performance in excess of 1 exaflops. [Note the limiting definition of the target - loosely coupled computing complexes with aggregate capacity greater than exascale will probably turn up before the HPC machines - and peak performance in FLOPS is the metric here - not application performance or any assumptions of balanced systems.]

Some more cautious folk hedged a delay into their arrival dates and talked about 2020. However, it became apparent throughout 2012 that the US government did not have the appetite (or political support) to commit to being the first to deploy an exascale supercomputer. Other regions of the world have - like the USA government - stated their ambitions to be among the leaders in exascale computing. But no government has yet stood up and committed to a timetable nor to being the first to get there. Critically, neither has anyone committed the required R&D funding needed now to develop the technologies [hardware and software] that will make exascale supercomputing viable.

The consensus at the end of 2012 seems to be towards a date of 2022 for the first exascale supercomputer - and there is no real consensus on which country will win the race to have the first exascale computer.

Perhaps we need to re-visit our communication of the benefits of more powerful supercomputers to the wider economy and society (what is the point of supercomputers?). Communicating the value to society and describing the long term investment requirements is always a fundamental need of any specialist technology but it becomes crucially essential during the testing fiscal conditions (and thus political pressures) that governments face right now.

Supercomputers are for dreams

I was invited to the 2012 NCSA Annual Private Sector Program (PSP) meeting in May. In my few years of attending, this has always been a great meeting (attendance by invitation only), with an unusually high concentration of real HPC users and managers from industry.

NCSA have recently released streaming video recordings of the main sessions - the videos can be found  as links on the Annual PSP Meeting agenda page.

Bill Gropp chaired a panel session on "Modern Software Implementation" with myself and Gerry Labedz as panellists.

The full video (~1 hour) is here but I have also prepared a breakdown of the panel discussion in this blog post below.

HPC Insiders - The Newport Gathering

The warm up for the annual HPCC meeting in Newport RI (March 26-28) has started - Are You an HPC Industry Insider?.

"The National High Performance Computing and Communications Conference (NHPCC) will highlight several exciting changes this year. Also known as the Newport Conference, the elite gathering that started 26 years ago as a one-day event to bring vendors together with government agency personnel has expanded its focus this year to include a more global perspective."

"Another significant change this year is the emphasis on manufacturing and competitiveness."

I have a page on this blog site the main HPC events of the year. Many people have rightly remarked that the HPC community really is that - a community - and that there is still a relatively high degree of connection between the various practitioners. In other words, despite its growing size and global reach, it feels like a small community. People know each other. Consequently, networking, whether technical or commercial, goes a long way to helping your business. Whatever your scale of technical computing, from multicore workstations to multi-thousand-node supercomputers, getting involved with the active HPC community can help you with your parallel computing goals. Online resources can help, but by far the most effective way of benefiting from the wider HPC community is by participating at the right events.

I enjoy this Newport event - I think it is one of the best annual events for the HPC community - and am looking forward to great discussions and meeting the many friends in the international HPC community. See you there!

Cloud computing or HPC? Finding trends.

I posted "Cloud computing or HPC? Finding trends." on the NAG blog today. Some extracts ...

Enable innovation and efficiency in product design and manufacture by using more powerful simulations. Apply more complex models to better understand and predict the behaviour of the world around us. Process datasets faster and with more advance analyses to extract more reliable and previously hidden insights and opportunities.

... and ...

High performance computing (HPC), supercomputing, computational science and engineering, technical computing, advanced computer modelling, advanced research computing, etc. The range of names/labels and the diversity of the audience involved mean that what is a common everyday term for many (e.g. HPC) is an unrecognised meaningless acronym to others - even though they are doing "HPC".

... and then I use some Google Trends plots to explore some ideas ...

Read the full article ...

My SC11 diary 7

As a cursory glance at #SC11 on twitter today will tell you, it is now only two weeks until SC11 (or less if you count the parts of the show that start over the weekend).

So perhaps this is a good time to consider the many supercomputing people who won't be joining the hordes in Seattle this year.

What is this HPC thing?

[Originally posted on The NAG Blog]


I’m sure something like this is familiar to many readers of this blog. The focus here is HPC, but there is a similar story for mathematicians, numerical software engineeers, etc.


You've just met an old acquaintance. Or a family member is curious. Or at social events (when social means talking to real people not twitter/facebook). We see that question coming. We panic. Then the family/friend/stranger, asks it. We freeze. How to reply? Can I get a meaningful, ideally interesting, answer out before they get bored? What if I fail to get the message across correctly? Oops, this pause before answering has gone on too long. Now they are looking at me strangely. They are thinking the answer is embarrassing or weird. This is not a good start.


The question? “What do you do then?” Followed by: “Oh! So what exactly is supercomputing then?”

Summer season big changes - football or supercomputing?

The world of supercomputing has gone mad.

So it seems as I catch up on the news around the HPC community after a week's vacation. Just today the news of IBM walking away from half a decade's work on Blue Waters and the story of an unknown organisation [now revealed to be NVidia] tempting Steve Scott to leave his Cray CTO role have been huge news but thinking back over the summer months there has been more.

The immediate comparison to me is that of the European football summer season (soccer for my American readers). Key players are signed by new clubs, managers leave for pastures new (or are pushed), and ownership takeover bids succeed or fail. It feeds a few months of media speculation, social gossip, with occasional breaking news (i.e. actual facts) and several major moves (mostly big surprises, but some pre-hyped for long before). But clubs emerge from the summer with new teams, new ambitions, and new odds of achieving success.

The world of HPC has such a summer I think.

Meeting HPC people

About a year ago, I wrote this article for ZDNet UK, describing what I thought were some of the key events in the supercomputing/HPC community.

I said: "Many people have rightly remarked that the HPC community really is that — a community — and that there is still a relatively high degree of connection between the various practitioners. In other words, despite its growing size and global reach, it feels like a small community. People know each other. Consequently, networking, whether technical or commercial, goes a long way to helping your business."

And: "Whatever your scale of technical computing, from multicore workstations to multi-thousand-node supercomputers, getting involved with the active HPC community can help you with your parallel computing goals. Online resources can help, but by far the most effective way of benefiting from the wider HPC community is by participating at the right events."

I listed some key events, with a comment about the nature and value of each.

I have now added a survey to this website (top right) to find out which events people plan to attend in 2011.

I may have missed out your favourite conference in the original article, or in the survey above, in which case I would like to hear about it too - maybe via the comments page here, or directly.

I hope to meet soome of you when out and about in the coming year ...

NAG out and about

[Originally posted on The NAG Blog]

The NAG website has a section called "Meet our experts - NAG out and about", which gives a list of upcoming events worldwide that NAG experts will be attending or presenting at.


The page also notes: "We regularly organise and participate in conferences, seminars and
training days with our customers and partners. If you would like to talk
to us
about hosting a NAG seminar at your organisation or any training
requirements you might have email us at
sales@nag.co.uk".


In my own focus of high performance computing (HPC), I have previously written (for ZDNet UK) about some key supercomputing events. For those of you interested in meeting up with HPC experts (especially from NAG!), I have set up a survey of HPC events - please let us know which events you plan to attend in 2011 - and see which events other readers of The NAG Blog are attending.

Events guide: What's on in supercomputing

[Article by me on ZDNet UK, 24 February, 2010]

The key events in the supercomputing calendar can provide real insights and a chance to network ...

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/it-strategy/2010/02/24/events-guide-whats-on-in-supercomputing-40041925/