Conference examines the future of high performance computing
The future of high-performance computing as seen by the leading information technology manufacturers and independent hardware vendors is the theme of the Virginia Tech High Performance Computing Conference on Wednesday and Thursday, May 25 and 26, at the Donaldson Brown Hotel & Conference Center on campus.
Speakers from Intel, Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI), Apple, and IBM will provide a broad perspective on development in High Performance Computing (HPC) hardware and software.
The keynote speaker, at 9:15 a.m. Wednesday, will be Eng Lim Goh, SGI senior vice president and chief technology officer. Goh's 14-year tenure with SGI has included work in computer graphics algorithms and HPC architectures. He oversees Project Ultraviolet, the company's next generation science-driven computer architecture. His research is the relationships between human visual perception and visual computing. Goh is leading research on application-transparent, massively-parallel advanced rendering.
Cal Ribbens, computer science faculty member at Virginia Tech and director of the Laboratory for Scientific Computing and Applications, will speak at 10:45 a.m. about the Virginia Tech research applications run the university's 1,100-node Apple cluster, System X. The talk will be followed by a tour of the university's Andrews Information Systems Building and System X.
Alex Grossman, director of hardware storage in Apple's Worldwide Product Marketing Group, will speak at 2 p.m. He has contributed to several patents associated with storage technology and led the team that developed the first FireWire-based Storage Area Network.
Rob Pennington, chief technology officer for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), will speak at 3:15 p.m. Pennington leads NCSA's Integrated Cyberservices Directorate, driving the center's efforts to develop the world's largest academic-based Linux cluster computing systems and providing strategic direction to NCSA's software development, computing operations, and data and information management efforts. He also leads NCSA's TeraGrid site and the TeraGrid cluster, and is a member of the open source cluster group.
Eric P. Kronstadt of IBM will speak at 4.p.m. He is director of Exploratory Server Systems and director of the Deep Computing Institute, responsible for advanced operating systems research, highly performance computing architectures including BlueGene, and emerging high performance applications, including computational biology.
On Thursday, Steve Modica, SGI principal engineer for Reconfigurable Application Specific Computing, will be the opening speaker at 9 a.m.
David Barkai, Intel HPC computational architect, will speak at 10:15 a.m. He has been a member of the Distributed Solutions Lab of Intel's Corporate Technology Group, a content architect for the Intel Developer Forum Conference, and a software scientist in the Microcomputer Software Lab. Before joining Intel in 1996, Barkai spent 25 years in scientific and engineering supercomputing for Control Data Corporation, Cray Research Inc., Supercomputer Systems Inc., and NASA Ames Research Center.
The final speakers will be Jeff Crowder, director of strategic initiatives in IT at Virginia Tech, and Malathi Veeraraghavan, director of computer engineering at the University of Virginia. They will describe development of the National LambdaRail and Vortex research network infrastructure and the perspective of a researcher using it.
Events are scheduled from 9 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, May 25, and from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on Thursday, May 26. There will be a vendor reception from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. Wednesday. Event sponsors are SGI, Intel, James River Technical Inc., and Apple
There is no cost, but registration is required since space is limited to 100 participants. Register at http://www.jrti.com/htdocs-new/registration/vt_hpcconf.html. For questions or additional information, contact Terry Herdman, Virginia Tech Director of Research Computing and Professor of Mathematics, at herdman@icam.vt.edu or (540) 231-7667; or Joe Buchanan, James River Technical Territory Manager, joe@jrti.com or (804) 521-3050.
