NetApp
HPCwire

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

Language Flags
Translation Disclaimer

Subscribe | Sign In

Visit additional Tabor Communication Publications

Datanami
Digital Manufacturing Report
HPC in the Cloud
Green Computing Report

Tabor Communications
Corporate Video

Blog: HPC Community Voices

HPC Community Voices | Main Blog Index

June 23, 2010

Singing Exascale in Italy

A lighter side of the International Advanced Research Workshop on HPC, Grids and Clouds in Cetraro, Italy
Charlie CatlettMany of you know Charlie Catlett as one of the elite HPC scientists in the world, and indeed he is. From his days at NCSA and directing the TeraGrid to his current role as CIO of Argonne National Labs, his career is evidence of his ability to capture the complexities of HPC, garner a consensus, integrate the technologies across many institutions and lead. I've followed Charlie for many years and in every instance he has been successful.

What many of you may not know about Charlie is that he is one of the nicest guys in our HPC world and he's a rock drummer/musician with a penchant for the Rolling Stones!

This week Charlie is at the International Advanced Research Workshop on HPC, Grids and Clouds in Cetraro, Italy. This event has quickly become one of those "must be at" events for the ruling HPC elite. There are just over 100 attendees, but the list reads like a who's who in HPC, or more accurately, like HPCwire's People to Watch list. Indeed many serious discussions abound regarding the challenges of HPC, but there is also some friendly levity. Our good friend Charlie is at the heart of forming a playful tradition at the event.

Charlie has created a singing panel where he recruits four or five colleagues, gets them up on stage, rewrites the lyrics to a well-known rock and roll song, then gets the panel to lead the whole audience in singing his HPC version. In 2008 he did "With Some Middleware from my Friends" to the tune of the Beatles' "With a Little Help From My Friends." Last year he did the Rolling Stones' "Hey, You, Get Off of My Cloud." And today, again to a Rolling Stones tune, he did the very appropriate "You Can't Always Get What You Want." In true techie form, the sing along was accompanied by iPhone owners in the audience playing the melody using the Ocarina "flute like" App.

Who says HPCers aren't cool? At the very least they're having some fun. Well done Charlie!

Here are the lyrics and Charlie's slides for this year's "Singing Panel":

You Can't Always Get What You Want

(Lyrics by Charlie Catlett)

We talked of Exascale at the reception
perfect for our science plans
We knew we'd create some heat convection
For cooling we would need a million fans

But you can't always get what you want (3x)
But if you try sometimes, well you might find
You get what you need

When it comes time for demonstration
A million cores with full memory slots
We'll need to call the power station 
Telling them we're gonna need 2 gigawatts

You can't always get what you want (3x)
But if you try sometimes, well you just might find
You get what you need

We'll seek computational experts
To get our algorithms fixed
I was standin' in line with Gandinetti
He said 'you will need some very clever tricks'

We decided that we'd have some sake
My favorite flavor, blowfish blue
I sung my song to the Satoshis
They said "by 2018?" try 2032

I guess you can't always get what you want (3x)
But if you try sometimes, well you just might find
You get what you need

Posted by Tom Tabor - June 23, 2010 @ 4:16 PM, Pacific Daylight Time

Sponsored Links

Accelerate your science with Seneca
One of the first HPC providers installing a 4X NVIDIA Kepler K-20 cluster. Invites you to a free evaluation on Seneca’s NVIDIA K20 Kepler cluster, pre-loaded with AMBER, NAMD, LAMMPS

High-Performance Computing in Action
Businesses that want to be on the cutting edge of their industries are increasingly turning to high-performance computing (HPC) solutions to handle complex compute processes and speed up their rate of innovation. Download this Executive Brief to see how businesses in energy, life sciences and entertainment put HPC solutions to work in their operations.

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic


Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type


Subscribe to All Content

Tom Tabor

Tom Tabor

Tom is the publisher of HPC in the Cloud. He has over 30 years of experience in business-to-business publishing, with the last 22 years focused primarily on High Productivity Computing (HPC) technologies.

More Tom Tabor


Recent Comments

No Recent Blog Comments

Feature Articles

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...

"No Exascale for You!" An Interview with Berkeley Lab's Horst Simon

Although Horst Simon was named Deputy Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he maintains his strong ties to the scientific computing community as an editor of the TOP500 list and as an invited speaker at conferences.
Read more...

Supercomputing Vet Champions Quantum Cause

Supercomputing veteran, Bo Ewald, has been neck-deep in bleeding edge system development since his twelve-year stint at Cray Research back in the mid-1980s, which was followed by his tenure at large organizations like SGI and startups, including Scale Eight Corporation and Linux Networx. He has put his weight behind quantum company....
Read more...

Short Takes

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...

HPC and the True Cost of Cloud

May 08, 2013 | For engineers looking to leverage high-performance computing, the accessibility of a cloud-based approach is a powerful draw, but there are costs that may not be readily apparent.
Read more...

Sponsored Whitepapers

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.

Sponsored Multimedia

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.

Blogs by Topics

Blogs by Author

HPC Blogroll


Featured Events


  • June 16, 2013 - June 20, 2013
    ISC'13
    Leipzig,
    Germany

  • June 17, 2013 - June 18, 2013
    Forecast 2013
    San Francisco, CA
    United States





HPCwire Events
Home | News | Features | Blogs | HPC Markets | Whitepapers | Multimedia | Events | Job Bank | Academia & Research | Financial Services | Government | Life Sciences | Manufacturing | Oil & Gas | Retail | Applications | Developer Tools | Interconnects | Middleware | Networks | Processors | Storage | Systems | Visualization | Subscribe | About HPCwire | Contact Us | Site Map | Editorial Calendar | Reprints
HPCwire
Tabor Communications | Tabor Publications & Events
Tabor Communications