In order get to know our HPC Horizons members a little better, we have started this new column. For the first edition of HPC Horizons Community Member SPOTLIGHT, we introduce Laurence Liew, the Open Source Grid Development Centre Director at Platform Computing in Singapore. Laurence is a new member to HPC Horizons who’s currently developing a new generation of HPC cluster management tools to make it easier for end users to build their own clusters.
I recently spoke to Laurence to see what motivated him to join HPC Horizons and what he’d like to accomplish. As a new member, he expects to participate, contribute and learn from the HPC Horizons community. And to start, the first question he’d like to post is “What is the number ONE issues people are having with their departmental HPC clusters. Is it systems management? Applications? Programming? File systems? etc?” Be sure to login and post your replies!
In response to another member’s query titled “Your Five for the Future”, where you’re asked to outline your own agenda for supercomputing (without constraint), Laurence listed 1. Better integrated tools for building and managing HPC clusters. 2. Use of virtualization in HPC clusters. 3. Standardization of HPC and cluster management tools to enable wider adoption of HPC and HPC applications. 4. HPC education for pre-university to encourage future generation of HPC researchers and users. And 5. Better programming tools for multicore and petascale computing. What would your top five be?
Laurence plans on attending SC08 and would like to meet users of Platform Computing tools to learn what HPC issues they’re facing as they build their multicore, petascale clusters and what’s required to achieve their goals. If you plan on attending SC08 and would like to talk to Laurence, login and let him know!
You can also visit his Web site at http://www.hpccommunity.org.