High Performance Computing: From the Clouds to Exascale
Peter Beckman (CSIRO)
CSIRO ICTDATE: 2010-07-01
TIME: 14:00:00 - 15:00:00
LOCATION: CSIT Seminar Room, N101
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ABSTRACT:
High-performance computing is changing rapidly. Systems such as Intrepid, Argonne National Laboratory's IBM Blue Gene/P and Jaguar, the Cray XT at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have shown that tightly coupled systems once again are dominating high-end architecture. Research groups are now beginning to design exascale hardware and software systems that will be 1000 times faster than the world's largest supercomputers by the year 2018. However, GPGPU-based systems, such as those built using NVidia processors, have emerged as a new, disruptive paradigm. The technology is poised to radically change the face of HPC. China now has the 2nd fastest system in the world -- built from GPGPUs. While many scientists in the technical computing field have focused on these new architectures, cloud computing has become a viable solution for many businesses, and some scientists. Argonne's Magellan cloud computing testbed has seen many new cloud applications, from bioinformatics to high energy physics. These three architectures -- tightly coupled HPC systems looking toward exascale, GPGPU platforms, and cloud computing -- will change more than just scientific computing. As the world turns to simulation and modeling to understand the Earth's climate in light of our new deluge of sensor data, design new materials, and understand how molecular biology, scientific computing models will similarly change. This presentation will focus on the key computer science issues and impacts for simulation and modeling, from exascale to the cloud computing.
BIO:
Pete Beckman is a expert in high-end computing systems. During the past 20 years, he has designed and built software and architectures for large-scale parallel and distributed computing systems. After receiving his Ph.D. degree in computer science from Indiana University, he helped found the university's Extreme Computing Laboratory, which focused on parallel languages, portable run-time systems, and collaboration technology. In 1997 Pete joined the Advanced Computing Laboratory at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he founded the ACL's Linux cluster team and launched the Extreme Linux series of workshops and activities that helped catalyze the high- performance Linux computing cluster community. Pete also has been a leader within industry. In 2000 he founded a Turbolinux-sponsored research laboratory in Santa Fe that developed the world's first dynamic provisioning system for cloud computing and HPC clusters. The following year, Pete became Vice President of Turbolinux's worldwide engineering efforts, managing development offices in the US, Japan, China, Korea, and Slovenia. Pete joined Argonne National Laboratory in 2002, and worked as Director of Engineering, and later as Chief Architect for the TeraGrid. He led the design and deployment team that created the world's most powerful Grid computing system for linking production HPC computing centers for the National Science Foundation. After the TeraGrid became fully operational, Pete started a research team focusing on petascale high-performance software systems, Linux, and the SPRUCE system to provide urgent computing for critical, time-sensitive decision support. In 2008 he became the Director for the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, which is home to one of the world's fastest open science supercomputers in production. He also leads Argonne's exascale computing strategic initiative and explores system software and programming models for exascale computing.
