The Georgia Institute of Technology, a new leader in high-performance computing research and education, will be showcasing scientific research on the road to exascale at next week’s SC10, the international conference on high-performance computing, networking, storage and analysis scheduled for Nov. 13-19, 2010, at the New Orleans Convention Center in New Orleans, LA. A Gordon Bell Prize finalist, a new heterogeneous system built on NVIDIA Tesla GPUs, the DARPA UHPC team, over 30 experts from across a range of scientific and application domains are just a few of the ways Georgia Tech will feature multidisciplinary, cross-industry research efforts focusing on the road to exascale in Booth 1561.

Technical Papers/Panels/Birds-of-a-Feather

Technical papers, panels, and Birds-of-a-Feather discussions featuring researchers from Georgia Tech include (activities held at the New Orleans Convention Center unless otherwise noted):

MONDAY, NOV. 15, 2010

1. PANEL: Emerging Architectures in HPC – presented on Monday, Nov. 15 1:30pm – 3:00pm in ROOM 291-292
a. Georgia Tech’s Jeffrey Vetter (joint with Oak Ridge National Labs) is discussing the background on emerging system architectures, such as GPUs, and how they are being used in HPC.

TUESDAY, NOV. 16, 2010

1. TECHNICAL PAPER: Exploiting 162-Nanosecond End-to-End Communication Latency on Anton (Best Paper Finalist) – presented on Tuesday, Nov. 16 3:30PM - 4:00PM in ROOM 391-392
a. Georgia Tech’s Edmond Chow is co-author of a paper presenting techniques used to mitigate latency in Anton, a massively parallel special-purpose machine that accelerates molecular dynamics (MD) simulations by orders of magnitude compared with the previous state of the art. This research was conducted during Dr. Chow’s tenure at D.E. Shaw Research prior to Georgia Tech.

2. GORDON BELL FINALIST PRESENTATION: Petascale Direct Numerical Simulation of Blood Flow on 200K Cores and Heterogeneous Architectures – presented on Tuesday, Nov. 16 2:00PM - 2:30PM in ROOM 394
a. Georgia Tech’s George Biros, Rich Vuduc, Jeffrey Vetter (joint with Oak Ridge National Labs), Abtin Rahimian, Ilya Lashuk, Aparna Chandramowlishwaran, Dhairya Malhotra, Logan Moon and Aashay Shringarpure present their success demonstrating the simulation of blood flow using heterogeneous architectures and programming models at the petascale using CPU and hybrid CPU-GPU platforms, including the new NVIDIA Fermi architecture and 200,000 cores of ORNL's Jaguar system.

3. BIRDS-OF-A-FEATHER: Critically Missing Pieces in Heterogeneous Exascale Computing – presented on Tuesday, Nov. 16 5:30PM – 7:00PM in ROOM 389
a. Georgia Tech’s Jeffrey Vetter (joint with Oak Ridge National Labs) will be joining presenters to discuss what needs to be solved in order for heterogeneous parallel machines to move beyond the hype to a truly successful high performance computing platform.

4. BIRDS-OF-A-FEATHER: Preparing for Extreme Parallel Environments: Training and Education – presented on Tuesday, Nov. 16 5:30PM – 6:30PM in ROOM 280-281
a. Georgia Tech’s Matthew Wolf is co-chairing this BOF on parallel education in undergraduate and graduate curricula, and will be announcing a new project joint with ACM.

WEDNESDAY, NOV. 17, 2010

1. BIRDS-OF-A-FEATHER: Ubiquitous, Heterogeneous, Manycore Platforms: Challenges and Opportunities presented on Wednesday, Nov. 17 11:15AM - 12:00PM in ROOM 293-294
a. Georgia Tech’s Matthew Wolf will discuss the kinds of training and retraining that will be necessary as parallel computing comes to terms with the rapid advancement of exascale computing hardware.

2. TECHNICAL PAPER: Scalable Graph Exploration on Multicore Processors presented Wednesday, Nov. 17 11:30AM - 12:00PM in ROOM 393
a. Georgia Tech’s David A. Bader is a co-author with IBM Research on a paper asserting a new methodology for large-scale graph analytics combining a high-level algorithmic design that captures the machine-independent aspects, to guarantee portability with performance to future processors, with an implementation that embeds processor-specific optimizations. The experimental study uses state-of-the-art Intel Nehalem EP and EX processors and up to 64 threads in a single system.

3. BIRDS-OF-A-FEATHER: The XMT User Community presented on Wednesday, Nov. 17 12:15PM - 1:15PM in ROOM 390
a. Georgia Tech’s David A. Bader will discuss massive multithreaded computing results, current status, and future machine designs driven by application requirements. The meeting will feature talks on application performance, demonstrations of programming tools, and position papers on expectations of next-generation multithreaded systems.

4. PANEL: Toward Exascale Computing with Heterogeneous Architectures presented Wednesday, Nov. 17 1:30PM - 3:00PM in ROOM 384-385
a. Georgia Tech’s Jeffrey Vetter (joint with Oak Ridge National Labs) leads this panel that will discuss the multiple challenges on the road to Exascale including issues of performance, scalability and productivity, and the relatively new priorities of energy-efficiency and resiliency. Systems like Vetter’s new high performance computer Keeneland illustrates that scalable heterogeneous computer (SHC) systems can provide innovative solutions to these challenges, however, SHC systems have their own challenges impeding the adoption of new architectures by erecting a very high entry barrier to application teams and their scientific productivity. This panel will discuss the future of SHC architectures, and how future changes might lower this barrier.

5. TECHNICAL PAPER: Managing Variability in the I/O Performance of Petascale Storage Systems presented Wednesday, Nov. 17 2:00PM - 2:30PM in ROOM 393
a. Georgia Tech’s Karsten Schwan, Matthew Wolf, Jay Lofstead and Fang Zheng are co-authors on a paper presenting interference effects measurements for two different file systems at multiple supercomputing sites.

6. BIRDS-OF-A-FEATHER: Unveiling the First Graph 500 List presented Wednesday, Nov. 17 5:30pm – 7:00pm in ROOM 394
a. Georgia Tech’s David A. Bader co-presents the first Graph 500 list – a new benchmarking metric on the suitability of supercomputing systems for data intensive applications in order to guide the design of hardware architectures and software systems intended to support such applications and to help procurements.

THURSDAY, NOV 18, 2010

1. TECHNICAL PAPER: Diagnosis, Tuning and Redesign for Multicore Performance: A Case Study of the Fast Multipole Method presented Thursday, Nov. 18 10:30AM - 11:00AM in ROOM 391-392
a. Georgia Tech’s Richard Vuduc, Aparna Chandramowlishwaran and alumnus Kamesh Madduri (currently with Berkeley National Lab) are co-authors on a paper describing their process by which a multisocket, multicore system understands and improves its performance and scalability using an approach in the context of improving within-node scalability of the fast multipole method (FMM).

2. BIRDS-OF-A-FEATHER: NSF Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation (SI2) presented on Thursday, Nov. 18 12:15PM - 1:15PM in ROOM 398
a. Georgia Tech’s David A. Bader will share the results of a community building workshop on data-intensive computing with accelerators, as part of NSF’s next call for research proposals for its new program to establish Scientific Software Innovation Institutes (S2I2) as long-term community-wide hubs of sustained software excellence.

3. PANEL: Parallel I/O: Libraries and Applications, Making the Most of Resources presented Thursday, Nov. 18 1:30PM - 3:00PM in ROOM 384-385
a. Georgia Tech’s Jay Lofstead is a leading developer of parallel IO libraries used in the scientific computing community and will discuss how they can be best used by developers (such as climate modelers) producing prodigious amounts of data and how will the libraries change to meet future needs.

Booth Events and Activities at SC10

Georgia Tech researchers and staff will be on hand at Booth 1561 to demonstrate and discuss the latest research and institutional investments in the race to exascale including heterogeneous systems, GPU computing, massive data analytics, parallel computing, scientific applications and plans for new physical infrastructure on campus and elsewhere.

The Georgia Tech research display will feature updates on current research projects, video conversations with Georgia Tech experts in high performance computing, and an interactive display unlike any other – a virtual field trip to the world's largest aquarium, the Georgia Aquarium, and a concert with Shimon, the perceptual and improvisational robotic marimba player live from the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology. Utilizing a high bandwidth (1Gbps) channel connecting Atlanta to the SC10 show floor, visitors to the Georgia Tech booth will be able to interact with researchers, fish and robot musicians live through this one-of-a-kind tradeshow experience.

• Georgia Aquarium Live Feed at 11am CT and 2pm CT Tuesday - Thursday, November 16-18, 2010

• Shimon Live Feed Tuesday – Thursday, November 16-18, 2010. See booth 1561 staff for times.

Technical Program Leadership at SC10

• George Biros (Applications Area Committee Co-Chair)
• Edmond Chow (Applications Area committee member)
• Hyesoon Kim (Applications Area committee member)
• Rich Vuduc (Applications Area committee member)
• Jeffrey Vetter (Architectures/Networks Area committee member)
• Karsten Schwan (Storage Area committee member)
• Matthew Wolf (Storage Area committee member, and Tutorial committee member)

About the Georgia Institute of Technology
The Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the nation's premier research universities. Ranked seventh among U.S. News & World Report's top public universities, Georgia Tech's more than 20,000 students are enrolled in its Colleges of Architecture, Computing, Engineering, Liberal Arts, Management and Sciences. Tech is among the nation's top producers of women and African-American engineers. The Institute offers research opportunities to both undergraduate and graduate students and is home to more than 100 interdisciplinary units plus the Georgia Tech Research Institute.