HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING
HPC industry to scale the heights in Denver
A selection of the activities and talks on offer at the largest supercomputing conference in the USA
In November the supercomputing industry will descend on Denver for SC17, with thousands of attendees arriving to learn about the latest advances in high performance computing. This is the first time that
SC has been in Denver since 2013, and the conference will feature a keynote address discussing the progress and computing challenges associated with the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) project. There will also be the
usual exhibition and a comprehensive technical programme dedicated to showcasing work in high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis by the international HPC community. The annual event, created and sponsored by the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) and the IEEE Computer Society, attracts HPC professionals and educators from around the globe to participate in its complete technical education programme, workshops, tutorials, a world-class exhibit area, demonstrations and hands-on learning.
Opportunities for students For a number of years the SC conference has been developing a strong HPC student community at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. SC17 will host several sessions aimed at engaging students with HPC through professional development programmes, opportunities to learn from mentors, and
engagement with SC’s technical sessions and the Student Cluster competition. The competition allows students and their educational institutions to push their HPC skills on a global stage as part of a team-based competition for undergraduates or high school students to build, operate and tune powerful cluster computers. This year the conference will host a ‘Doctoral Showcase’ to provide students near the end of their PhD with the opportunity to present a summary of their dissertation research in the form of short talks about their thesis project. The Doctoral Showcase highlights the entire contents of each dissertation, including previously published results, to allow for a broad perspective.
Overcoming scientific challenges The conference features Professor Philip Diamond, director general of the SKA project, as keynote speaker. SKA is an international
collaboration to build the world’s largest radio telescope. Diamond, accompanied by Dr Rosie Bolton, SKA regional centre project scientist, will describe the SKA’s international partnership, which will map and study the entire sky in greater detail than has ever been possible. When completed, the
SKA telescope will be at the forefront of research, investigating how the very first stars and galaxies formed and helping scientists understand the evolution of the universe and the nature of dark energy. As director-general of the
SKA, Diamond coordinated the global effort to establish and
16 Scientific Computing World October/November 2017
”Like wi-fi and the world wide web, some of these innovations will trickle down”
now oversee 12 international engineering consortia, bringing together over 100 companies and research institutes and 600+ experts to design the SKA. ‘The SKA is one of the most ambitious science enterprises of our times,’ said Bernd Mohr, SC17 conference chair, from Juelich Supercomputing Centre. ‘Professor Diamond and Dr Bolton’s visually stunning and information rich- presentation will captivate, as they describe one of the largest scientific endeavours in history, incorporating the world’s largest scientific instrument – a global science project of unprecedented size and scale, and a prime example of our conference’s HPC connects theme.’ Thousands of antennas distributed across two continents will generate petabytes – quadrillions of bytes – and eventually exabytes (one exabyte is a quintillion bytes) of data. The
SKA is a cutting-edge project in the era of big data. ‘Like wi-fi and the world
wide web, some of these innovations will trickle down to society in other fields,’ said Diamond. ‘Spin-offs in areas linked to the SKA’s computing activities could benefit other power-efficient systems that need to process large volumes of data in remote areas from geographically dispersed sources.’ Dr Bolton is looking at how
to distribute hundreds of petabytes of data products per year to thousands of scientists around the world and also determine best practices based on how the community will interact with that data. The SKA is already driving
technology development in collaboration with industry to act as a test bed of emerging technologies. Potential areas of innovation include data management techniques; data mining and analytics; and imaging algorithms, remote visualisation, and pattern matching – which can impact areas such as medicine, transportation, and security. The project is also committed to outreach, education, and training in developing countries.
@scwmagazine |
www.scientific-computing.com
EdgeOfReason/
Shutterstock.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36
