http://www.concertant.com/supercomputing2008Articles.html The RSS2.0 feed of articles written by Concertant focused on Supercomputing 2008. Sat, 26 Feb 2011 11:33:01 GMT en-gb http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/why_SC08.html http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/why_SC08.html Tue, 11 Nov 2008 18:00:00 GMT Why should Concertant be interested in attending SC08 (or Supercomputing as it used to be known)? Concertant is after all a consultancy whose primary domain of activity lies in parallel and multicore computing. http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/sixCriticalQuestions.html http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/sixCriticalQuestions.html Sun, 16 Nov 2008 10:00:00 GMT The microprocessor industry has some important questions to answer this week. As it moves towards higher core counts, not only does the architecture become more complex, but so do the necessary software and management technologies. Hardware manufacturers and software developers face several critical issues: http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/openingDay.html http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/openingDay.html Tue, 18 Nov 2008 03:45:00 GMT As of Monday morning there were some 10,023 registrations for SC08, a record. What do they come for? There are a variety of reasons. There are tutorials for learning new things, posters and workshops for learning about research work in progress, paper presentations for learning about the more mature research and work, and, of course, it is a trade show. http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/rollYourOwn.html http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/rollYourOwn.html Tue, 18 Nov 2008 03:45:00 GMT We stand at a crossroads in the development of computing. 20 years of a stable microprocessor architecture are coming to an end. A host of new technologies: GPGPUs, multicores, and FPGAs are already being deployed in real-world applications. All these new technologies usher in a new age of parallel computing. Both big and small players are making announcements about hardware which will change the face of computing. Quite how these changes will come about depends not only on the architecture of these new devices, but also on the underlying models of parallelism and memory and on the consequent new computer languages. The industry is in a state of flux and the jury still out on which of these models and languages will be successful. http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/isThereAProgrammabilityGap_definitely.html http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/isThereAProgrammabilityGap_definitely.html Tue, 18 Nov 2008 03:45:00 GMT The organizing committee has announced that SC08 has 10,023 registered attendees, an all time record number for the conference. It seems then that more people than ever are interested in supercomputers – even though they are hardly everyday machines. Of course, what happens in high performance computing today will be what mainstream programmers are doing in 2 or 3 years time, so there is some importance to the content of SC08! http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/isOpenCLTheNextAPIOfFashion.html http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/isOpenCLTheNextAPIOfFashion.html Tue, 18 Nov 2008 03:45:00 GMT The Khronos Group held a technical briefing at SC08 to present the current state of play and plans for the OpenCL standard. The Khronos Group is a non-profit consortium whose members are all the major players in the dynamic media business – think graphics cards manufacturers and media-based systems manufacturers (televisions, PDAs, phones, music payers, etc.). Its members include Apple (who were the moving force), IBM, AMD, NVIDIA, Intel, Nokia, Freescale and so on. We estimate 100+ participants in the Khronos consortium based on the presentation slides. The purpose of the Khronos Group is to create industry-wide, open standards for all things media centric. The best known standard coming from the Khronos Group to date is OpenGL. http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/followUpOnOpeningDay.html http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/followUpOnOpeningDay.html Wed, 19 Nov 2008 03:00:00 GMT The final figures appear to be as follows http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/hasHPCBecomeMoribund.html http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/hasHPCBecomeMoribund.html Wed, 19 Nov 2008 03:00:00 GMT High Performance Computing (HPC) traditionally has the image of being vibrant and cutting edge, of being a temple which only the priests may enter. Supercomputing is supposedly the absolute pinnacle of HPC, with only the high priests allowed. Certainly, the hardware on show at SC08 in the exhibition is extremely impressive, and the applications on show definitely have great pizzazz, and many of them great usefulness. But it is all seems very much the same as last year – except that the hardware supports more memory, more disc space, and has more flops (in the floating point operations per second sense not the failure sense, though there have probably been a few of those as well). Apart from a mention on the Intel stand, and one or two other minor vendors of software tools, there is very little mention of multicore. The “Multicore Revolution” appears to be being ignored fairly widely. It is not as though since HPC has always had parallelism multicore is an irrelevant change: multicore changes the way parallelism works even in a traditionally parallel field – the properties of the parallelism are different. http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/theRiseAndRiseOfTheGPGPUs.html http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/theRiseAndRiseOfTheGPGPUs.html Wed, 19 Nov 2008 03:00:00 GMT It all started as a game! The emergence of computer gaming has been one of the defining social phenomena of the last thirty years. The transition from Space Invaders to photo-realistic action games has both captivated generations and driven a break-neck pace of innovation within the computer industry. http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/tuesday.html http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/tuesday.html Wed, 19 Nov 2008 03:00:00 GMT 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. http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/itsGolfJimButNotAsWeKnowIt.html http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/itsGolfJimButNotAsWeKnowIt.html Wed, 19 Nov 2008 03:00:00 GMT As most people in the computing industry will know, Microsoft has not traditionally been a player in the HPC world. Over recent years they have been trying to become a player in this arena. They seem to be spending rather a lot of money, and not just on advertising. At SC08 though they are spending a lot of advertising money, mostly on being the comedy stand of the show. http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/messageOfTheDay_cacheSucks.html http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/messageOfTheDay_cacheSucks.html Thu, 20 Nov 2008 03:30:00 GMT Over the last few years processors have been accreting more and more cache, structured in more and more elaborate ways. What is the problem that means cache has become so important? Processors are fast and memory access is slow. So to avoid having processors wait for memory to deliver data (twiddling their thumbs as it were) they each have caches – very fast access copies of a selection of data stored in memory, connected directly to the processor. The observation that drives the design and implementation of cache is that programs generally want to make use of data they just made use of. This is the principle of locality. http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/theBestSoftwareIsYetToCome.html http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/theBestSoftwareIsYetToCome.html Thu, 20 Nov 2008 03:30:00 GMT One of the highlights of the show for me was Wednesday's invited talk By David Patterson of Berkeley. To a lot of people his paper (written with a huge amount of asistance from a raft of colleagues) “The Landscape of Parallelism: The view from Berkeley” (see: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EECS-2006-183.html) is a modern classic, whether or not you agree wih its point of view and some don't. http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/softwareIsKey.html http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/softwareIsKey.html Thu, 20 Nov 2008 03:30:00 GMT Over the last 30 or more years advances in supercomputing have largely come through innovations in hardware. Examples of this include the freon cooling in the Cray-1, the fast ECL of FPS array processors, the NEC SX vector processors, the INMOS Transputer, the Connection machine internal network, the Meiko CS-2 communication subsystem and the KSR-2 heirarchical memory. Over time, many of these and other innovations have found their way into more general purpose computing. It is interesting to note that over the past decade or so, the traffic has been in the other direction as commodity processors have become commonplace in high-performance computers systems. http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/supercomputingGetsPersonal.html http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/supercomputingGetsPersonal.html Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:30:00 GMT The significant government funding that has supported supercomputing for the last 30 years or more has been based on the premise that it stimulates the economy. This is clearly demonstrated by the impact that intensive processing has had on exploration in the oil and gas industry and simulation in the automobile and aerospace industries. A further economic benefit has been the diffusion of technology into the mass market. Advances in memory, storage, networking and software tools, developed initially for high-end computing, have then percolated down to benefit the PC marketplace. For the last decade, however, the traffic has mostly been the other way with advances in commodity microprocessors enabling the construction of ever more powerful multiprocessor supercomputers. It is clear from discussions at SC08 that the direction of this traffic is about to change again. http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/whatAboutTheSixQuestions.html http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/whatAboutTheSixQuestions.html Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:30:00 GMT At the beginning of SC08 we asked six critical questions about how prepared the industry is for multicore processors. To recap they were:

• Can the threads model really be made to work as core counts get into the tens and beyond?
• Which programming and memory models are going to work?
• How will processor architectures evolve?
• How will the processor arrays be managed?
• What languages are required to program these systems and where are they going to come from?
• How will software innovations track hardware developments?

So what state do we feel the industry is in in this regard as SC08 comes to an end? http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/supercomputingTurnsTwenty.html http://www.concertant.com/Supercomputing2008Articles/supercomputingTurnsTwenty.html Mon, 24 Nov 2008 17:20:00 GMT So the Supercomputing conference has been going twenty years, and looks set for another twenty! Whilst the trade show and the conference sessions got most attention and attendance, there was a corner of the conference that took a lot of effort to put together, was fascinating, but seemed sadly under observed: the twentieth anniversary exhibition.