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Live from EuroPar 98

3 September 1998

Primeur will report Live! from the EuroPar 1998 conference in Southampton, September 2-4 1998.

Conference of workshops offers state-of-the-art in HPCN and parallel computing
  The Europar '98 conference in Southampton, held September 2-4, brings together some 300 people active at the technological edge of parallel computing, supercomputing, distributed computing, etc. Instead of having only plenary sessions with one speaker and all the others listening, the EuroPar event is organized as a collection of workshops each focusing in-depth on a certain topic, which have only the coffee breaks in common. With two isses of PrimeurLive! we will give you a glimpse of what is happening in Southampton and of the direction where high-performance computing is heading.

Trends in EC funded HPCN towards more integration
The Europan Commission's research programme is now in between two major cycles. The so-called Fourth Framework, within which HPCN was an important item, has issued its last call. Results are available from the first projects that were approved a few years ago, the bulk of the projects is just starting to produce results. The next Framework five programme is in the process of being approved by the European Union parliament and research council. First calls for R&D proposals are expected early next year. At EuroPar in Southampton, Khalil Rouhana from the European Commission gave his personal impression on the trends and the shift in focus from the early Fourth Framework HPCN projects to the last ones approved. He also told the HPCN audience where to look in the Fifth Framework actions for interesting topics: HPCN itself will not return.

Getting the airline crew in the right place at the right time
A large airline company, like Lufthansa, has hundreds of planes and thousands of crew members to fly that planes. The scheduling of the airplanes is already difficult, but straight forward because once you have a schedule, you can keep it for a certain period. For crew planning, defining a schedule and adapting it when someone gets ill, or a plane gets delayed, is a formidable computing task when you want to have a cost efficient crew schedule that is ready in a reasonable time span with reasonable computing costs. Computers are expensive, but what are all those workstations doing at night when there are no passengers to check in? If that large inexpensive computing power base could be put to use... That is exactly what PAROS is doing.
Squeezing the most performance out of your computer
Achieving the highest possible applications performance has always been one of the main goals of parallel computing. Unfortunately, most often the real performance is less by a factor of 10 and even worse from the advertised available peak power. Thus the usual picture when porting a production code is a "slow" application on a "fast" supercomputer. Is there a solution? Experts lecturing at the EuroPar conference in Southampton think there is. They consider parallel performance evaluation, analysis and optimisation an area of priority in high-performance parallel computing.

Quantum Cryptography's uncrackable keys lead to ultimate security
According to Paul Townsed of BT Laboratories, new quantum cryptography techniques that radicaaly differ from security systems in use today, will lead to unbreakable keys in the near future. Progress in his lab reveals already a glimpse of the secure future.
High Performance Fortran takes off slowly
High Performance Fortran (HPF) is an informal standard for extensions to Fortran to assist its implementation on parallel architectures, particularly for data-parallel computation. Among other things, it includes directives for expressing data distribution across multiple memories, extra facilities for expressing data parallel and concurrent execution, and a mechanism for interfacing HPF to other languages and programming models. How useful is this sepcialized verson of Fortan in a time when Java seems to rule? Some background information was provided in an overview session at EuroPar in Southampton.
The Italian skeleton approach: programming from bare bone basics
At EuroPar in Southampton, Professor Marco Vanneschi, University of Pisa, reported on the experience of the Italian national project SkIE (Skeleton-based Integrated Environment) programming environment. SkIE favours performance portability across different platforms, to manage the heterogeneity of components and to integrate the variety of standard software tools into a uniform environment in which compile-time optimizations are done according to the skeleton model. A first industrial version of SkIE is now operating on Italian developed PQE2000 supercomputers and on workstation clusters. The skeleton approach is succesfully used in scientific and industrial applications.