February 13, 2013
URBANA-CHAMPAIGN, Ill., Feb. 13 – Computer Science Professor William Gropp has been appointed the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, one of only two such chairs in the United States. The chair is the result of a $2 million gift from the Thomas and Stacey Siebel Foundation.
Gropp, along with collaborators at Argonne National Laboratory, pioneered the design of the Message Passing Interface (MPI). This standard—and its software implementation, also developed by Gropp and company—is essential to the parallel processing at the heart of supercomputing today.
“There’s no better place than the University of Illinois to advance the revolution in computational science. You need people who understand computing, math, and the particular problem area you’re studying—whether its drugs interacting with our body or black holes interacting with each other. Illinois’ College of Engineering brings those people together, and they’re really ready to collaborate,” said Gropp.
“I’m lucky to be here, and it’s an honor to be Illinois’ first Thomas M. Siebel Chair in Computer Science.”
MPI allows large-scale computations to be run on thousand to millions of processor cores simultaneously and for the results of those computations to be efficiently shared as the overall computing job progresses.
“MPI is the glue that integrates thousands of parallel computing tasks. Scientific computing as we know it simply wouldn’t exist without Bill Gropp and MPI,” said Rob A. Rutenbar, head of the Department of Computer Science at Illinois. “Companies wouldn’t be designing airplanes or automobiles in the same way. Climate change wouldn’t be understood to the degree it is. Drug design would look very different. You name it.”
Gropp is an accomplished scholar, having published more than 250 journal articles, books, chapters, and conference papers that have been cited more than 21,000 times. A key part of the management team for Illinois’ Blue Waters petascale supercomputer, which is one of the world’s most powerful, Gropp joined the University of Illinois in 2007.
He’s also a great teacher.
“Bill understands just how high our students should be aiming when they’re among the world’s best. He opens his door to young undergraduates and PhD students alike, teaches them what they need to know, and connects them to state of the art research experiences,” Rutenbar said. (Example: “Illinois wins greenest self-built cluster.”)
“Illinois’ computer science program is remarkable—one of the top five in the world—and Bill Gropp has distinguished himself there. I’m very pleased to see someone of his stature help lead the way at Illinois, and it’s my pleasure to help support his success and the success of the program,” said Thomas Siebel.
Thomas M. Siebel serves on the College of Engineering’s Board of Visitors and has served as a director of the University of Illinois Foundation.
-----
Source: University of Illinois
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.