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08 Jun 2000 Live issue from the Mannheim Supercomputer Seminar, June 2000Primeur Live! is published during major High-Performance Computing and Networking events in Europe
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The Mannheim Supercomputer Seminar is the main HPCN event in Europe. This year we publish two live issues from the event:
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In the turbulent field of supercomputing, everything changes from year to year at a fast pace. Everything? Not everything: one constant over 15 years is the Supercomputer Seminar in Mannheim, organised by Hans Meuer, which has grown over the years, slowly but steady, into the major event in supercomputing in Europe This year over 260 participants attended the conference. The exhibtion attached to the conference attracted almost 20 companies and the major German supercomputer centres have a combined booth.
The use of supercomputers is indispensable to generate polymer chain models which allow to explore the three-dimensional structure of the genome and the dynamics of the cell nucleus. The Mannheim Supercomputer 2000 audience attentively listened to Dr. Joerg Langowski, head of the Division for Biophysics of Macromolecules at the Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum in Heidelberg. Scientists from universities in Muenchen, Heidelberg and Grenoble, and the biophysical research institute in Prague teamed under the direction of Dr. Langowski to perform genome simulations on three different levels. As a result, the obtained models could be used to compute the distribution of chromosome territories in the cell nucleus and to compare the outcomes with experimental observations regarding the diffusion of fluorescent probes inside the nucleus.
The second speaker at the Supercomputer 2000 Seminar tackling the protein folding issue, apart from Dr. Langowski, was Dr. William Pulleybank, who is Director of the IBM Deep Computing Institute. The determining of the 3D structure formed by a protein whenever placed in water constitutes a fundamental problem encountered in computational biology and modern pharmaceutical design. The computational power of today's computers and methods is far from adequate to solve this matter but Dr. Pulleybank introduced to the audience the Blue Gene project, which was launched in late 1999 at IBM Research. The aim of Blue Gene consists in constructing a million node petaflop general purpose computer which will be applied to the protein folding problem. The planned architecture is thought to form an excellent platform for the integration of an ab initio molecular dynamics approach.
During the afternoon session of the Supercomputer 2000 Conference, Dr. Chris Johnson, head of the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute at the University of Utah, addressed the topic of ASCI-machines used for modelling and visualisation in cardiology and neuro-surgery, for adaptive finite elements applied to atmospheric research, and for fire simulation. Five university centres in the USA are involved in the ASCI project. The architecture used in this scientific research constitutes the ASCI Blue Mountain, hosted at Los Alamos National Laboratories.
In 1979, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft IPP installed the first Cray in Germany in Garching. Some years later, in 1981/1985, industrial early adopters ran their CDC 205, Fujitsu or Cray vector supercomputers. The time was ripe to start the Mannheim Supercomputer Seminar series in 1986 by an "old fashioned" triumvirat: Hans Meuer, Lutz Richter and Hans-Martin Wacker. At that time, less than 200 supercomputers -- millions of dollars worth -- were in use worldwide. No one believed at the first seminar that we would be celebrating the conference's 15th anniversary in 2000. Hans Meuer deserves special credit for navigating this uniquely German Supercomputer ship through dangerous shoals of financial challenges, competitors, and divisive arguments to become the premier European event that it is today.
Compaq and his new partners Delta and ParTec presented in a press meeting their offerings in the entry level cluster environment based on a Myrinet system area network. Compaq additionally presented its Alpha roadmap, the high-end clusters based on Quadrics, their roadmap and the new SMPs, the GS320 and the followers as a cluster node.
During the Friday morning session of the Supercomputer 2000 Conference, Dr. Victor Alessandrini, professor of theroretical physics at the University of Paris and director of IDRIS, shared his experiences in vector processing with the NEC SX5 cluster. This cluster has been implemented at IDRIS since November 1999. After an extensive period of testing, the system started operating in May 2000. The machine will be used to perform gang scheduling for parallel and Message Passing Interface (MPI) jobs across nodes, as well as to generate mixed programming models with use of MPI and OpenMP or P-threads.
Dr. Gene M. Amdahl kicked off the Supercomputer 2000 Conference, offering a survey of the innovative approaches to achieve a high speed signal transmission in computers. For over five decades, semiconductors have reigned the field of informatics with popular circuit families, known as Complementary Metal Oxide Silicon (CMOS) and Emitter Coupled Logic (ECL). Since both circuits have their drawbacks, new ways have been sought either to enhance the performance of existing techniques, or to introduce advanced technologies to replace silicon with compound materials for logic signal transmission. Today however, the future of magically sounding alternatives such as DNA, quantum devices, and photons still remains unsure.
The first three positions of the TOP500 of the most powerful supercomputers remain unchanged: First is the Intel ASCI Red machine at Sandia, second is the IBM ASCI Blue Pacific at Lawrence Livermore and third is the SGI Asci Blue Mountain at Los Alamos, all in the USA. The first non USA machine is the Hitachi at the Leibniz Rechenzentrum in Munich. Surprisingly, Hitachi has 3 machines in the TOP10, the same number as Cray Inc, IBM has two machines and SGI and Intel each one.
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© 2000, Genias Benelux