Al Gore - Speaking at SC09

Vice President Al Gore is speaking at SC this morning. Got here early to make sure I got a seat - lots of seats left at the moment, but its going to fill up fast I suspect...

A quiet SC 09 show floor?

It is hard to ever describe the SC show floor as quiet, but all things are relative. The overall feel I get from the show floor this year is that things are much more sedate this year, with less people in the booths and less technology on the floor. This seems to be particularly true across my domain of interest, visualization. None of the system vendors have a large visualization presence on the show floor, with only HP having a "visualization pod". The biggest company presence in visualization is the nVidia booth (not too surprising), and they do have a lot of nice technology on show. Comparably, the ATI presence within the AMD booth (WRT visualization at least) is relatively small.

The "big" academic players also seem to have scaled down booths, with what appears to be less people and less technology. It is hard to quantify if this is really true, but it is certainly my initial feeling... From a visualization perspective, I was expecting lots of high res displays (4K, tiled displays), high res visualizations, visualization clusters, and high resolution video streaming. Certainly, this all exists at SC this year, but my guess is that there is less on the show floor this year than there was last year.

I always come to SC looking for the "next big thing", and quite often I come away with some ideas and thoughts in this direction. This year, so far, not so much... Two more days to go - we will see.

Coast-to-Coast live at SC 09 in Portland

Richard Vaughn's Coast-to-Coast (C2C) seminar was seen live at the Compute Canada and CANARIE booth at SC 2009 in Portland. It was timely that the C2C seminar was being held during a time slot that did not have any demos in the booth, so we put it up on the big screen. An impromptu live research seminar on "World-mediated robot intelligence", attended live by 15 sites and 50 people across Canada, not including the audience that attended at SC09...

3D Web Future of HPC?

Justin Ratner, CTO of Intel talked about the 3D web and the future of HPC. Hypothesis was that the HPC industry needs to step outside the box and not rely only on the big science funding model. He mentions three fundamental aspects of what he describes as the 3D web:

• Continually simulated
• Multi-view animated
• Immersive and collaborative

Some key issues and technologies mentioned:

• ScienceSim (www.sciencesim.org)
  
  • 3D web platform for scientific simulation
  • Based on OpenSim (www.opensimulator.org)
    
• Demonstrated/discussed several interesting applications
  
• Bio-diversity and fern population distribution
• Fashion design - cloth simulation
• Discussed several computational challenges in physical simulations
  
  • Physically accurate cloth simulation
    
  • Physically accurate sound generation
    
• Interoperability is key
• Merging of HPC and Cloud worlds
• Architecture - collision of CPU and GPU
  
• Larrabee
  
• Computational co-processor
• Many cores, many threads
• Memory management
• Showed actual code running on hardware
• Ct - High-level data parallel programming (RapidMind)
• CPU-GPU interaction inefficiency - copy over PCI-Exp
• Shared memory between Xeon and Larrabee
• Mine-yours-ours (MYO) sharing
• Demo of physics simulation (soft body dynamics) running on Larrabee using MYO sharing
  
• SGEMM performance - overclocked Larrabee 1006 GFlops - we think it was real hardware!!!
  

ParaView/Sage Integration

EVL and TACC presented an interesting integration of ParaView with Sage. Takes advantage of ParaView's parallel rendering capabilities and SAGE's ability to stream visualization to very high resolution tiled displays. Remote rendering of ParaView applications, rendered at TACC and displayed on the EVL tiled display.

nVidia CUDA - Fermi chipset

A couple of interesting features on the Fermi chipset from nVidia.

• 512 CUDA cores
• ECC memory available on Fermi - This is an important one...
• ECC can be turned on or off
  
  • I wonder if this has a performance impact?
  • If it didn't, why wouldn't it just be turned on all the time???
• 8x double precision performance increase
• IEEE 754-2008: Fused multiply-add for single/double precision support

Welcome to my new blog

Hello,

Welcome to my new blog... I decided to create this as a mechanism to easily post info about the cool stuff that I see at the SC09 conference. We will see where it goes from there...