Tag: sc11

When NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang delivered his keynote at SC11 this week, it was easy to forget that a few short years ago, the company and its GPU products had absolutely nothing to do with supercomputing. Today, of course, the technology is a driving force in the HPC ecosystem and is challenging the entrenched interests of chip makers Intel, AMD, and IBM.

With a number of government and commercial exascale projects in full swing, SC11 has provided a convenient venue for vendors, academics and government types to tout their vision of the future of supercomputing. To get a broad perspective on these efforts, we spoke with Thomas Sterling, Professor of Informatics and Computing Indiana University, and one of the foremost experts on supercomputing architectures.

Advances in silicon photonic integration will present an opportunity for hardware engineers to reconsider basic computer designs. That topic is the theme of a Disruptive Technology session at SC11 on Thursday conducted by Keren Bergman of Columbia University and Nadya Bliss of MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Prior to the conference, we asked Bergen and Bliss to discuss the technology issues surrounding integrated photonics and how it could impact computer systems, including HPC machines.

There are a number of young companies at SC11 this week debuting novel technologies. One of them, Advanced Cluster Systems, recently launched its first software product, with the rather bold name of Supercomputing Engine Technology. It promises one of the Holy Grails of HPC: to turn sequential applications into parallel ones.

Although women comprise the majority of the United States labor force, 60 percent of college graduates in developed countries, most of the internet users, and start more than half of the new companies created each year in the US, they have made surprisingly few inroads into high performance computing. On Thursday at SC11, there will be two sessions where HPC community members can discuss these issues and exchange ideas on how to change the status quo.

At SC11 in Seattle, Intel showed off an early silicon version of Intel’s Many Integrated Core (MIC) “Knight Corner,” the codename for its first commercial product based on their MIC architecture. The demonstration was performed for the benefit of reporters and analysts, who got to see the new chip in action at a press briefing here on Tuesday afternoon.