Industry Leaders Speak Out on Future of High-Performance Computing at SuperComputing '99 Conference

"The high-performance computing community is at a critical juncture in its history. The community will either continue down its familiar path of company proprietary software and RISC processor building blocks or begin to move toward a new model of high-performance computing based on commodity, high-volume parts and common software building blocks," said Larry Smarr, Director, National Computational Science Alliance and its leading-edge site, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). "The NCSA will aggressively pursue this new model." <

Smarr was recently designated by the President's Information Technology Advisory Council (PITAC) to lead a subcommittee study of open source HPC software. In this role, Smarr will oversee an investigation into the potential of the open source model and will make recommendations to PITAC based on his findings. "The model of high-performance computing using standard computing building blocks offers a compelling vision of lower computing costs and accelerated innovation, but it means organizing the community in a radical new fashion. This could be a defining year," said Smarr.

Smarr spoke at the event along with Stephen L. Smith, Vice President, IA-64 Products Division, Intel Corporation, and John R. "Beau" Vrolyk, Senior Vice President, Product Group, SGI. In addition, a demonstration of a cluster of Itanium processor-based systems running Linux® provided an early glimpse at the future of high-performance computing. This demonstration achieved a number of public firsts, including the first Itanium processor-based cluster and the first technical computing application successfully run on the Linux platform for IA-64.

The Intel Itanium processor will provide scalability, floating-point performance and architectural features to address the needs of the high-performance computing market and e-business applications with the price/performance advantages of industry-standard components.

The technology demonstration on the Itanium processor-based cluster was comprised entirely of open source software, including Cactus (a general simulation toolkit that will be computing collisions of black holes), 64-bit Linux kernel (based on the porting effort of Project Trillian), NFS, and MPICH, with visualization by Amira on an IA-32 node. SGI views open source solutions on IA-64 platforms as a means to accelerate the arrival of faster, more affordable and more accessible technical computing solutions.

About the NCSA

The National Computational Science Alliance is a partnership to prototype an advanced computational infrastructure for the 21st century and includes more than 50 academic, government and industry research partners from across the United States. The Alliance is one of two partnerships funded by the National Science Foundation's Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program and receives cost-sharing at partner institutions.

The NCSA is the leading-edge site for the National Computational Science Alliance. The NCSA is a leader in the development and deployment of cutting-edge, high-performance computing, networking and information technologies. The National Science Foundation, the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, industrial partners, and other federal agencies fund the NCSA.

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