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| News digest 24 June 2005 |
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| PrimeurLive! from ISC2005 in Heidelberg |
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This year we again report Live! from Europe's main supercomputing event. See the issues for each day:
As last year we start each issue with an "blog" giving you some personal impressions. The next sections provide traditional reporting. The last section "Company news" provides mainly press release type of information from the companies. Hence, a few items are brought to you from three different view points.
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| Blog |
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| It cannot be done |
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"It cannot be done" is a thread going through this year's conference. First in his keynote presentation, Horst Simon reminded us that just a few years ago, people said: "Scaling to a thousand processors? It cannot be done! Look at Amdahl's law!" The invent of "scaled speedup", however, enabled to overcome "this cannot be done", despite most of the HPC community was convinced of the opposite. Another "it cannot be done" is breaking the dominance of commodity of the shelf (COTS) components based systems. A wide spread believe is that all systems have to be like that, because it is too expensive to build something else. However, the success of the BlueGene system in the TOP500 and the announcement of SGI of building systems with FPGA's (Cray already did that) show it can be done. COTS systems will not go away, but rather be the basis which by modification or addition of attached processors reach high-end supercomputer performance. A third "It cannot be done" is building supercomputers in Europe. After Suprenum, Parsytec, Acri and Meiko stopped building supercomputers, the community was, and still is for most part, sure there is no room for a supercomputer industry in Europe. However, several small companies have been formed the last years. At the conference dinner yesterday, at the Neckarbischofsheim, I had the opportunity to talk to Yulia Plavunova from Moskou based T-platforms. A company founded two years ago and currently having some 30 employees. They build high-performance clusters, discuss about computer lay-out, choose network interconnect, are concerned about the heat output, and sell large systems into Russia, Ukrain and Belarus. One of the systems made it to the TOP500. There are other companies like these in Europe that sell large custom made clusters that sometimes even make it to the TOP500. So yes, in supercomputing, a lot of things cannot be done, until someone goes out and does it.
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| Where are the Grids? |
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This year, Grids had a prominent place on the ISC2005 stage. Yes, there was the DEISA project, but more positioned as a cooperation between HPC centres, and yes, there was Lofar, a sensor Grid and the closing keynote by Wolfgang Gentzsch. And there is still the confusion: is it a cluster? Is it a Grid? A little more on ZIB-DB: a meta data augmented "Grid enabled" file system and Lofar.
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| Hardware |
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| Three ISC Award winners celebrated at Gala Event in Neckarbischofsheim |
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During the wonderful and enjoyable cultural and culinary ISC2005 Gala Event on Thursday Evening on the grounds of a former bishop's residence in Neckarbischofsheim, IBM granted its ISC Award Certificates to the winners of the three selected papers. All three winners received a two-way rack mountable IBM eServer OpenPower system fully configured as a building block for a cluster. In the category "Tools and Techniques for Code Optimization on HPC Systems", Jean-Pierre Panziera from SGI received the certificate for "A highly efficient Linpack implementation based on shared-memory parallelism". In the category "Data Management on Distributed Systems and Grids", the Award was handed to John Wu of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for "Grid Collector: Facilitating Efficient Selective Access from Data Grids". In the category "Integrated Data and High Performance I/O", Kenin Coloma from Notrhwestern University in Evanston received the certificate for "DAChe: Direct Access Cache System for Parallel I/O".
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| Hot Seat Session: Sun Grid, a matter of executing the strategies |
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For Sun Microsystems, just like for other supercomputer vendors, innovation matters. In this way Steve Campbell introduced Sun's vision and mission to the ISC2005 audience. In the case of Sun, the focus lies on the network: everyone and everything has to be connected to the network. As such, Sun's aim is to solve complex network computing problems and to support governments and enterprises.
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| Hot Seat Session: Microsoft's Computer Cluster Pack is targeted to the industry |
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Brad Bassio from Microsoft presented his company's Windows Server Compute Cluster solution to the inquisitors and the ISC2005 audience. He stated that Microsoft builds for engineering, bioinformatics, finance, oil and gas, and government. Microsoft wants to leverage volume markets of industry standard hardware. In the TOP500 trends, Mr. Bassio clearly sees that industry usage is increasing. Clusters already represent 60% of systems in the list. For Microsoft, this is excellent.
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| The Grid |
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| "Beam us up, Scotty!" or the Grid Engine travelling machine |
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At the closing day of ISC2005, Dr. Wolfgang Gentzsch from MCNC Grid Computing and Networking Services in North Carolina, gave a keynote presentation on the future of Grid computing both in research and business. Although still in its early stages, the Grid will very soon become the model of utility computing offering the academic and commercial space the opportunity to remotely access the resources you need whenever you want without needing to bother about the underlying infrastructure and paying only for what you use. The Grid will become the democratic platform for global education, economy and social welfare in the 21st century.
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| Company news |
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| The Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) has ordered a Cray XD1 supercomputer |
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The Alfred Wegener Institute( AWI) in germany selected the Cray XD1 system to run advanced polar and marine research applications related to climate and environmental studies, including global circulation models, regional atmospheric models and others. The new Cray system has been installed and taken into production at AWI's facility in Bremerhaven.
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