HPCwire: Who's the Dinosaur Here?

Since 1986 - Covering the Fastest Computers
in the World and the People Who Run Them

Translation Disclaimer

Subscribe | Sign In

Visit additional Tabor Communication Publications

Tabor Communications
Corporate Video

Blog: HPC Matters

HPC Matters is a joint blog consisting of contributors from the Tabor Communications team on their observations and insights into HPC matters.

HPC Matters | Main Blog Index

June 12, 2008

Who's the Dinosaur Here?

I recently asked my son, a first year Ph.D. Neuroscience student at a leading New England university, what he knows about high performance computing or supercomputing. His first response was (somewhat kidding), "Do you mean like the old Cray computer that was used in Jurassic Park?"

Well, yeah... but I would have thought that a young researcher might have run across HPC in his post-baccalaureate science courses at Harvard, or during the three years he worked as a senior research technologist in the MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease (MIND) doing mouse brain research, or during his first year of doctoral work. Wouldn't you? Turns out he's never heard anyone on any of his research teams talk about HPC or supercomputers. Nor has the technology's role in the hard sciences been incorporated into the curricula.

I happen to know that his undergraduate institution, the University of Massachusetts, is the same one whose physics department assembled the PS3Gravity Grid, a sixteen PS3 cluster, to explore black holes, and that his current academic institution is home to an advanced computing center with great resources. We won't even discuss Harvard.

Every conference I have attended in the last year has included discussions on the next generation of HPC users, and researchers and vendors alike bemoan the fact that we are not preparing this next generation to use the high performance computing technology all of you rely on. To quote from the announcement for the upcoming International Advanced Research Workshop on High Performance Computing and Grids, June 30-July 4 in Cetraro, Italy: "HPC is viewed as one of the most important technologies of the 21st Century.... Significant amounts of energy and financial resources have been invested by governments and private sectors for building adequate infrastructures and human skills to enable the expected benefits. Yet, despite many spectacular accomplishments of HPC, this tool is still underutilized by many academic schools, industrial companies and businesses."

As the person who's been helping with the tuition for the last eight years, I have a vested interest in raising awareness of the underutilization of HPC in academia, particularly among the undergraduate and graduate student populations. You all have a vested interest as well. So, the question is, what can we, all of us in the HPC community, do to raise awareness and get this knowledge and skill set into the hands of tomorrow's scientists, researchers and engineers?

Posted by Diane Lieberman - June 11, 2008 @ 9:00 PM, Pacific Daylight Time

Discussion

There are 4 discussion items posted.

Dinosaur HPC
Submitted by David on Jun 13, 2008 @ 12:44 AM EDT

Jurassic Park used a Thinking Machines computer, not a Cray. Of course, it wasn't a real computer but it had the largest number of lights of any machine produced by TMC. Los Alamos had the largest one of its actual machines.

Post #1

Education and HPC
Submitted by Matt on Jun 13, 2008 @ 9:03 AM EDT

First, academia and industry must deploy accessible and useful machines where students can get to them. Big behemoths need not apply, we're talking thousands of machines here.

Second, deploy them so that they can be used interactively: Big behemoths need not apply, unless they chuck the PBS/LSF/IronGateWithArmedGuard
scheduling discipline.

Finally, make them available outside as well as inside the curriculum. Our best engineers weren't motivated by grades and merit badges, they were turned on by the technology and what they could do with it.

--matt reilly www.bigNcomputing.org

Post #2

Actually, they're both right
Submitted by JohnWest on Jun 17, 2008 @ 5:08 AM EDT

In the book the computers used by park researchers were Crays. In the movie Thinking Machines model CM-5 systems are shown (along with Macs and SGIs, including an old Crimson that wasn't plugged in).

Post #3

The missing link
Submitted by icehawk on Jun 21, 2008 @ 7:47 AM EDT

I have spoken with several HPC colleagues about the lack of a proper interface between HPC Systems and the scientists that use them. Just because you’re an expert in (fill in the blank) doesn’t mean you can, or even have a willingness, to learn how to port your science into some mathematical algorithm that a computer can understand, or even to use the existing codes that are currently available.

There needs to be a class of people out there that understands the science enough to interface properly with the researcher, while at the same time has a deep enough understanding of HPC systems to properly help port code to that platform. Contrary to popular belief, not all supercomputers are super for all codes. (-:

We don’t need a dedicated HPC systems analyst, nor a dedicated researcher, but instead someone somewhere in between. Someone who won’t go all geek on the researcher and yet at the same time ask questions like, what’s a cache hit?

Imagine a supercomputing center with a staff of dedicated computational experts in Biology, chemistry, physics, etc that are there strictly to interface with the researchers. It would be nice.

Rich

Post #4

Join the Discussion

Become a Registered User Today!

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Subscribe to All Content

All

Diane Lieberman

More Diane Lieberman

Feature Articles

NSF Forges Further Beyond FLOPs

In a recent solicitation, the NSF laid out needs for furthering its scientific and engineering infrastructure with new tools to go beyond top performance, Having already delivered systems like Stampede and Blue Waters, they're turning an eye to solving data-intensive challenges. We spoke with the agency's Irene Qualters and Barry Schneider about..
Read more...

CERN, Google Drive Future of Global Science Initiatives

Large-scale, worldwide scientific initiatives rely on some cloud-based system to both coordinate efforts and manage computational efforts at peak times that cannot be contained within the combined in-house HPC resources. Last week at Google I/O, Brookhaven National Lab’s Sergey Panitkin discussed the role of the Google Compute Engine in providing computational support to ATLAS, a detector of high-energy particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Read more...

Saddling Phi for TACC’s Stampede

The Xeon Phi coprocessor might be the new kid on the high performance block, but out of all first-rate kickers of the Intel tires, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) got the first real jab with its new top ten Stampede system.We talk with the center's Karl Schultz about the challenges of programming for Phi--but more specifically, the optimization...
Read more...

Read more HPCwire features...

Short Takes

Building Supercomputers with Raspberries

May 22, 2013 | At some point in the not-too-distant future, building powerful, miniature computing systems will be considered a hobby for high schoolers, just as robotics or even Lego-building are today. That could be made possible through recent advancements made with the Raspberry Pi computers.
Read more...

Running Computational Fluid Dynamics in the Cloud

May 16, 2013 | When it comes to cloud, long distances mean unacceptably high latencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany examined those latency issues of doing CFD modeling in the cloud by utilizing a common CFD and its utilization in HPC instance types including both CPU and GPU cores of Amazon EC2.
Read more...

Computing the Physics of Bubbles

May 15, 2013 | Supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have worked on important computational problems such as collapse of the atomic state, the optimization of chemical catalysts, and now modeling popping bubbles.
Read more...

Internet2 Awards Program Seeks Innovative Applications

May 10, 2013 | Program provides cash awards up to $10,000 for the best open-source end-user applications deployed on 100G network.
Read more...

Floating Funding to Exascale Island

May 09, 2013 | The Japanese government has revealed its plans to best its previous K Computer efforts with what they hope will be the first exascale system...
Read more...

Read more headlines...

Best Practices in Big Data Storage

05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.

Progress in Parallel: the Bull Parallel Programming Center

04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.

View the White Paper Library

SGI DMF ZeroWatt Disk Solution

In this demonstration of SGI DMF ZeroWatt disk solution, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, discusses a function of SGI DMF software to reduce costs and power consumption in an exascale (Big Data) storage datacenter.

Cray CS300-AC Cluster Supercomputer Air Cooling Technology Video

The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.