LSU Hosts First Meeting of National Science Foundation-Funded Workgroup Detailing Next-Generation Supercomputers
Currently, the world’s fastest supercomputers are at the petascale level, meaning they are capable of running 1,000 trillion calculations per second. But, what will happen when supercomputers move from petascale to exascale and become even faster, capable of running a million trillion calculations per second? What architecture and interfaces will the research community need to use these next-generation machines effectively?
A new research group comprised of scientists and engineers from LSU, University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Delaware and Sandia National Laboratories is addressing those questions to prepare scientific research for exascale supercomputers.
The National Science Foundation, or NSF, has funded this group, called the Exascale Point Design Study, to have a series of collaborative meetings throughout the next year to determine what needs to happen to develop large-scale computing systems.
NSF selected members of this group based on their accomplishments and expertise in various areas of computational science. Together, the group discusses programming, hardware, applications, systems design and other challenges researchers will need to overcome to use exascale machines effectively.
LSU hosted the first of these meetings on Thursday, March 19 and Friday, March 20, on campus. The lead researcher from LSU on this study is Thomas Sterling, a professor in the LSU Department of Computer Science. Sterling is a former NASA and Cal Tech scientist who invented the Beowulf computing cluster. At LSU, he leads a research group within the LSU Center for Computation & Technology, or CCT, working on the ParalleX project to develop parallel computing systems and architecture for large-scale supercomputers.
At the end of this series of meetings, the Exascale Point Design Study group will produce a report with their conclusions for NSF, which will serve as a prototype to build and design exascale machines for scientific research.
“We are about to enter a new era of scientific computing, and it is an exciting and rewarding challenge to work with distinguished researchers from institutions around the country to determine what the next supercomputers need to be,” Sterling said.
CCT in the News:
• Fault tolerance workshop getting underway today
SOURCE: Inside HPC.com
Dan Katz at Louisiana State University sent me a note this morning letting us know that the TeraGrid’s 2009 Fault Tolerance Workshop, “Fault Tolerance for Extreme-Scale Computing” started this morning in Albuquerque.
http://insidehpc.com/2009/03/19/fault-tolerance-workshop-getting-underway-today
• Animation festival brings back Pitch! Contest
Source: 2theadvocate.com
Future Trey Parkers and Matt Stones will have a chance to present their ideas for an animated television series or a feature film to a panel of studio decision-makers during the fifth annual Red Stick International Animation Festival, April 22-25.
http://www.2theadvocate.com/entertainment/41460532.html
Upcoming Lectures:
• Dentcho A. Genov from Louisiana Technical University will be speaking as a part of the Colloquium Series on “Nanophotonics: From Imaging with Super Resolution to Mimicking Celestial Phenomenon in the Lab.” The lecture will take place Friday, Mar. 27 at 11:30 a.m. in Johnston 338.
• Lisa J. Fauci of Tulane University will be speaking as a part of the Frontiers of Scientific Computing Lecture Series on Tuesday, March 31. The event will take place at 11 a.m. in 338 Johnston.
Please Note:
• The LSU Center for Computation & Technology (CCT) will host the Fifth Gulf Coast Gravity Meeting on the LSU campus April 17 & 18, 2009. There is no conference fee to attend the meeting, but registration is required. Register at: http://www.cct.lsu.edu/GCGM2009
• LSU's Information Technology is sponsoring "Love Your Computer Day" in Middleton Library Wednesday, March 25, from 9 a.m. until 3 p.m. CCT and the AVATAR Initiative will host a table during this event, which showcases the IT resources available to students, faculty, researchers and staff. The event is free and open to the campus community, so stop by!
• Training for this week includes:
Debugging with Totalview:http://www.hpc.lsu.edu/training/tutorials/ - spring09totalview
Introduction to Open Source Visualization Software: http://www.hpc.lsu.edu/training/tutorials/ - spring09viz
• 2009 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing (Cluster 2009) conference will take place in New Orleans, Louisiana, Aug. 31-Sept. 4, 2009. Cluster 2009 welcomes paper and poster submissions on innovative work from researchers in academia, industry, and government, describing original research in the field of cluster computing. More information available at: http://www.cluster2009.org
o Important Dates:
Tutorial proposal deadline: March 31
Technical paper submissions: April 14
Tutorial notification: May 31
Technical paper notification: June 5
Poster submissions: June 12
Poster notification: July 17
Poster camera ready deadline: July 31
Paper camera ready deadline: July 31
• ALL CCT meetings of the Spring 2009 semester will take place Wednesdays at 3 p.m. in Johnston 338. If you have any information, news or announcements you wish to include at the meeting, please notify Karen Jones, kjones@cct.lsu.edu. ALL CCT meetings for this semester are scheduled for April 15 and May 20. Please make every effort to attend.
• If you have any news for the CCT Weekly, please e-mail PR Manager Kristen Sunde directly at ksunde@cct.lsu.edu.
Upcoming Grant Deadlines:
Note: Please see the CCT deadline Web site, as many NSF deadlines are listed here:
http://www.cct.lsu.edu/about/grants/deadlines/events.php
Publish Date:
03-24-2009
