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I would recomend the super computing conference ( http://sc14.supercomputing.org... ). The location changes from year to year. It is in New Orleans this year. It is a large conference and it will be easy for you to find activities of interest to you and your boss.

Bunch of papers at SC13 presented this year. Suggest sunny look them up.

http://sc13.supercomputing.org/content/papers

http://sc13.supercomputing.org/sites/default/files/PostersArchive/post161.html

Fermilab does a lot of research in exascale applications.

http://sc12.supercomputing.org/schedule/event_detail.php?evid=post171

http://computing.ornl.gov/workshops/scidac2010/presentations/j_amundson.pdf

Any chance of providing a link. The site http://sc12.supercomputing.org/ doesn't appear to have downloadable papers.

I assume a "+1 funny" as otherwise I'd have to assume that you're oblivious to the numerous scientific contributions for which Europeans have received recognitions like the Nobel Prize or the Fields Medal. You've got a point though: research around the globe is tightly coupled and so the funded projects resemble each other. You could add Japan to the mix. Their K computer isn't just a copy of some IBM BlueGene or such. And it's currently the fastest machine, at least until BlueGene/Q results are in.

Europe on the other hand doesn't have a serious computer hardware industry. The only chip manufacturers left (e.g. IBM, AMD, Nvidia, Fujitsu etc.) are all non-european. For a layman, this may make it kind of hard to imagine what Europe would spend its funding on, if they can't build the hardware themselves. Well, it turns out that software is a major part of exascale computing because at that scale effects (e.g. reliability of the hardware, scalability of IO) play a major role, but didn't hurt as much on the Petaflop machines. Now, when you turn your face to the software aspect, then you will see that a sizeable part of the papers published at the relevant conferences (e.g. http://sc11.supercomputing.org/ ) are European, and in many aspects they set the benchmark in terms of scalability and performance.

That said, it's hard to find a purely European or US project nowadays as many research institutions collaborate

You can get that kind of Internet connection in the US, and it's done every year for the ACM/IEEE SC trade show.

http://sc11.supercomputing.org/?pg=scinet.html

Regaining the #1 spot on the Top500 is merely a convenient side effect. The real reason for building these machines is that they are a key enabler for numerous science projects ranging from astrophysics to climate modeling to atomic phasefield simulation of crystal growth. This type of research can only be done on machines which offer Petabytes of RAM and Petaflops of performance. They cost hundreds of millions to build and operate. And if you can cut this cost down to a fraction by reusing Jaguar's existing housing, cooling and networking facilities, then this is financially a very clever move.

I would be willing to agree with you 110% here on your justification model here, save for one tiny little thing. We also happen to hold the #1 spot in the world regarding debt, which tends to question the overall benefit of building systems that cost "hundreds of millions to build and operate", regardless of the use.

I DO understand and respect the advances we've made and will continue to make in science due to these types of systems, but the title of this article tends to scream a childish "king of the hill" statement as to the underlying justification, and I keep reading it over and over again as entire countries fight to regain the top spot about every six months.

Regaining the #1 spot on the Top500 is merely a convenient side effect. The real reason for building these machines is that they are a key enabler for numerous science projects ranging from astrophysics to climate modeling to atomic phasefield simulation of crystal growth. This type of research can only be done on machines which offer Petabytes of RAM and Petaflops of performance. They cost hundreds of millions to build and operate. And if you can cut this cost down to a fraction by reusing Jaguar's existing housing, cooling and networking facilities, then this is financially a very clever move.

...Stony Brook University, and the piece that's missing from the summary is 26 amps@120v, (dual circuits, soft capped at draw of 13 each)

Links to more info from the conference: SC10 CC Page, rules, and app list.

The competition is harder than it sounds, you have to build a cluster from the ground up, fit it into the power requirement (which means stripping out redundancies among other things), strip down a distro (we used Debian as a starting point), get the apps optimized, and then run through the data sets. Your team needs to *understand* the apps, the OS, and the hardware in order to win. There are several people from various teams from past years who have moved on to doing their PhDs in comp sci based on work from this competition (At Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and UMich off the top of my head).

It's important too, in a few ways. For one I know I learned more about clusters the first day I started working on the team for this competition back in 2007 than I ever knew before. That knowledge has led to research fellowships, jobs, and knowledge of what I want to (biochemical modeling). It's an experiance that very few undergrads get, and I think that's a shame.

For the industry it's an important highlight of what can be done with a lot of dedication and a focus on wringing the most from your hardware and software. and in doing that we showcase a lot of work that people dont think about. For example our cluster last year ran off a single disk, plus a large ramdisk as scratch exported over QDR infiniband to the compute nodes. No, it's not new, but it was novel to a lot of people who dropped by our booth.

For another, the ASU team was the first time *I* and many others ever saw a windows cluster in the wild.

Competitions like this are important, they showcase technology and introduce it to undergrads early, with positive benefit!

...Stony Brook University, and the piece that's missing from the summary is 26 amps@120v, (dual circuits, soft capped at draw of 13 each)

Links to more info from the conference: SC10 CC Page, rules, and app list.

The competition is harder than it sounds, you have to build a cluster from the ground up, fit it into the power requirement (which means stripping out redundancies among other things), strip down a distro (we used Debian as a starting point), get the apps optimized, and then run through the data sets. Your team needs to *understand* the apps, the OS, and the hardware in order to win. There are several people from various teams from past years who have moved on to doing their PhDs in comp sci based on work from this competition (At Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and UMich off the top of my head).

It's important too, in a few ways. For one I know I learned more about clusters the first day I started working on the team for this competition back in 2007 than I ever knew before. That knowledge has led to research fellowships, jobs, and knowledge of what I want to (biochemical modeling). It's an experiance that very few undergrads get, and I think that's a shame.

For the industry it's an important highlight of what can be done with a lot of dedication and a focus on wringing the most from your hardware and software. and in doing that we showcase a lot of work that people dont think about. For example our cluster last year ran off a single disk, plus a large ramdisk as scratch exported over QDR infiniband to the compute nodes. No, it's not new, but it was novel to a lot of people who dropped by our booth.

For another, the ASU team was the first time *I* and many others ever saw a windows cluster in the wild.

Competitions like this are important, they showcase technology and introduce it to undergrads early, with positive benefit!

...Stony Brook University, and the piece that's missing from the summary is 26 amps@120v, (dual circuits, soft capped at draw of 13 each)

Links to more info from the conference: SC10 CC Page, rules, and app list.

The competition is harder than it sounds, you have to build a cluster from the ground up, fit it into the power requirement (which means stripping out redundancies among other things), strip down a distro (we used Debian as a starting point), get the apps optimized, and then run through the data sets. Your team needs to *understand* the apps, the OS, and the hardware in order to win. There are several people from various teams from past years who have moved on to doing their PhDs in comp sci based on work from this competition (At Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and UMich off the top of my head).

It's important too, in a few ways. For one I know I learned more about clusters the first day I started working on the team for this competition back in 2007 than I ever knew before. That knowledge has led to research fellowships, jobs, and knowledge of what I want to (biochemical modeling). It's an experiance that very few undergrads get, and I think that's a shame.

For the industry it's an important highlight of what can be done with a lot of dedication and a focus on wringing the most from your hardware and software. and in doing that we showcase a lot of work that people dont think about. For example our cluster last year ran off a single disk, plus a large ramdisk as scratch exported over QDR infiniband to the compute nodes. No, it's not new, but it was novel to a lot of people who dropped by our booth.

For another, the ASU team was the first time *I* and many others ever saw a windows cluster in the wild.

Competitions like this are important, they showcase technology and introduce it to undergrads early, with positive benefit!

While it certainly doesnt apply to a smaller, less vendor-sponsored conference like pycon, Supercomputing's SCinet is always a rather impressive feat. The wireless reception off the main conference floor this past year sucked on 2.4 (I dont know if it was the fault of the convention center's construction plus maybe policies that limited router placement or something), but if you had a device that could do 5 (like most people at the conference), you were golden. Speeds were quite good too, and SCinet handles a *lot* of traffic.

These guys make fast storage units. Delta-V was announced last week, and they showed it off at SC08 a few weeks ago. I saw their 3U unit in some booth. It was attached to a Windows machine as an iSCSI target, and the guy running the demo was the company founder, and had IOmeter running on it. He got 500 MB/s across the iSCSI link. He said it hooks to anything, windows, linux, Mac, and unix.

At Supercomputing 2006, they had a wonderful panel where they discussed the future of computing in general, and tried to predict what computers (especially Supercomputers) would look like in 2020. Tom Sterling made what I thought was one of the most insightful observations of the panel -- most of the code out there is sequential (or nearly so) and I/O bound. So your home user checking his email, running a web browser, etc is not going to benefit much from having all that compute power. (Gamers are obviously not included in this) Thus, he predicted, processors would max out at a "relatively" low number of cores - 64 was his prediction.

Disclaimer: I work with SGI, so I can shed some light on their customer's perspective (NASA, gov't, research labs, etc.) and solution to this problem.

The increasing density of servers is exacerbating the problem of power and cooling in every data center. This week is the SuperComputing trade show where the the new top 500 supercomputers edition was released with "Big Turnover Among the Top 10 Systems," where you can see the first examples to address these issues.

SGI's new ICE blade system was launched a few months ago, it was designed to address the power consumption, real estate density, and cooling issues everyone will probably experience on their next server cycle. ICE has shipped and one installation is now #3 on the Top 500. It's a welcome sign that SGI is back from bankruptcy. I'm sorry if this seems like an advert, so I'm not going to link to SGI -- you can go find out more easily if you want.

They've been pimping it the last 2-3 years at their booth at the Supercomputing Conference - note that I'm not sure whether it's been released or not, because other than staring at the awesome projection units they use and laughing at the MS employees trying to boot up their systems ( nothing makes you realize how bad the windows guys have things until you watch them trying to reconfigure one of their systems and arbitrarily failing, though 2K/XP is an order or magnitude better than their previous attempts at an operating system ), I stay the hell away from that booth.

Bill Gates is scheduled to give the keynote at the Supercomputing 2005 (or SC05) conference, which is going on right now.

Bill Gates is scheduled to give the keynote at the Supercomputing 2005 (or SC05) conference, which is going on right now.

I heard this at SC a couple of years back:

"There has never been a supercomputing company that the US National Labs couldn't drive out of business"

http://sc05.supercomputing.org/