|
|
||
|
22 June 2002 Live issue from the Heidelberg Supercomputer Conference, ISC2002, June 2002Primeur Live! is published during major Supercomputing and Grid events in Europe
Advertisement
Advertisement
The Heidelberg Supercomputer Conference (ISC2002) is the main supercomputing event in Europe. This year we publish two live issues from the conference:
Advertisement
|
Advertisement
Looking back to 50 year Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Dona L. Crawford, Associate Director of Computation, gave an outlook into the year 2005. She listed important issues for a scientific computing centre.
In the early 1990s discussions began in the United States to consider the technology paths that could lead to the development of petaflops computer systems capable of sustaining over one quadrillion (1015) floating-point operations per second. The results of these discussions were well documented in a book and in a series of workshop reports (PetaFLOPS Workshop Series 1994-1999).
Rüdiger Wolff in his talk stressed the importance of the SGI scalable ccNUMA architecture as well as SGI's long-term plans with MIPS and IRIX.
Markus Fischer of Myricom introduced the scalable Myrinet Cluster Interconnect to the participants of the ISC2002 Conference. He also gave an overview of the software and technology roadmap of this high-performance, packet communication and switching solution.
Doug Johnson from Western Scientific ran through the different criteria which are needed for a customer to qualify the right cluster manufacturer. There are seven criteria to consider defining whether the manufacturer has cluster experience and technical expertise. Is he a single source supplier for total system requirements? Can he offer scalability? What is the company background? What about services and support, not to mention value?
Jochen Krebs started his ISC2002 talk by mentioning the recent merger between Compaq and HP. Both company presentations were programmed one right after the other to symbolise the new vendor entity which has been born out of the merging process.
Dr. Frank Baetke insisted on sorting things out with regard to the Hewlett-Packard company organisation after the recent merger with Compaq. There are no such things as a separate HP and Compaq divisions. Within the new company structure, everything is fully integrated.
Jamshed Mirza from IBM was eager to deny the rumour which was running among the ISC2002 audience that IBM would do everything to regain the first place in the TOP500. IBM happily settles for position no. 2 since the company is still the number one when it comes to installing teraflops.
Stephen Perrenod of Sun Microsystems highlighted the potential of the Sun Fire server family for Grid computing to the ISC2002 audience.
The Grid is providing companies around the world, quantifiable economical benefits today! There is no hype in the real monetary benefits companies are seeing today in their bottom lines.
The ISC2002 Tutorial on Clusters and Grids was the best attended tutorial ever, as stated by Professor Dr. Hans Meuer on June 19th. The presentations of academic researchers and vendors attracted no less than 98 participants which was mainly due to the interesting topic and the well known speakers. The general perspective in the field of supercomputing is that the two fields of cluster and grid computing are merging together.
Domenico Laforenza from the Advanced Computing Department at the Institute of the Italian National Research Council and also attached to the Department of Computer Science at the University of Pisa, offered the ISC2002 audience an overview about the current status of grid computing in Europe.
In his talk at ISC2002, Ian Foster from Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago discussed the architectural concepts underlying Grid systems. He also described the Globus Toolkit which has emerged as the de facto standard for Grid computing, and outlined recent progress towards the integration of Grid and Web services technologies in the proposed Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA).
In his introduction to the Grid Session at ISC2002, in Heidelberg, Wolfgang Gentzsch described the Grid as the Time Machine of this century.
Alfred Geiger presented T-Systems as an international IT/TC service provider for market-oriented e-business solutions with operations in more than 20 countries. The company is serving research and development with HPC. T-Systems provides services for the industrial development process and for public and industrial research.
The 19th TOP500 Supercomputers List, which ranks the fastest supercomputers in the world, includes three new supercluster systems built with the Dolphin WulfKit high-speed interconnect. The three systems, ranking 94, 163 and 416, are installed at Umea University (Sweden), University of California Santa Cruz (California, USA) and STAAG Imaging (Houston, Texas USA), respectively. The announcement was made at the International Supercomputer Conference in Heidelberg, Germany.
To keep up to date with Supercomputing and Gird Computing news in Europe, subscribe to Primeur/EnterTheGrid weekly. Primeur Weekly is published per e-mail. Check out the subscription information for more details how to subscribe. You can find the back issues on the Primeur web site.
© 2001, Genias Benelux