Tuesday
Peter Dzwig, Concertant
Tuesday has seen the show start. Now, with perhaps three or four thousand people milling around the trade, academic, governmental and other stands that fill the floor of the several large rooms that comprise the exhibition Hall.
Following on yesterday's meeting there has been quite a lot of “will they, won't they, when will they implement OpenCL?” Intel, AMD and NVIDIA maintain the positions they had at the previous evening’s meeting. That it will happen. Plenty of people were asking about whether it will run on Larrabee, to which of course unsurprisingly there has been no public response!
One of the surprises of the show was that HyperWerkz claimed to be very close to being able to automatically unroll complex FFT loops... this is a proposition that is to be viewed with a degree of scepticism!
Steve Wallach has received many plaudits for his role in Convey which some feel to be the best new kid on the block of all those showing here. His track record lead to him receiving the coveted Seymour Cray award. There will be more about Convey on these pages later this week.
Microsoft are talking a lot about HPC++ as their contribution to HPC and large scale server-based systems via Windows 2008. They see their role as being to deliver the power of HPC to the programmer in the street – or as he (sic) has become known at SC08 "Joe the Programmer". From what we understand they don't appear to have a plan to deal with the evolution of processors that will happen over the next ten years. Yes, they realise that it is going to happen, but they will rely on their clever backroom guys to deal with it as and when. Virtualisation will feature, that much they acknowledge as a way to hide the hardware from the programmer. They accept that they will have to deal with heterogeneous systems but they don't have a clear strategy. Yet. Try as we might we couldn't shine a light into the nooks and crannies of Microsoft's corporate mind on that subject.
That they are here shows how seriously they take the whole HPC area, which is one in which they had no presence until recently. They are making great play of the fact that they Windows had run on at least one Top500 machine and that it had worked well – in fact a representative claimed that it ran faster than Linux...
Finally, present in one corner were Pervasive. SC08 is not perhaps the obvious place for them to be, but
theirs is after all an application that is targetted at the doing very large searches very quickly with
analytics executed on the fly. There would seem to be a natural link between many of the applications
areas represented here. The medical applications are particularly relevant. In fact any of the cases in
which there are streams of real-time or near real-time data to be analysed. HPC in a sense that is
seriously under-represented here. It is an area which SC0x should focus on. Data intensive in that
sense