Cloud Computing: Supercomputing Conference Offers Up Smorgasbord of HPC Sessions
November 9, 2012
Grazed from HPCWire. Author: Michael Feldman.
The epic supercomputing event of the year, SC12, will be booting up next week in Salt Lake City, Utah, attracting HPC digerati, vendors, press, and analysts from around the world. And even though the DOE won’t be there in full force this year, big crowds are still expected. This year’s event should deliver plenty of fodder for those looking to keep up on the latest and greatest in the field, especially in the cutting edge areas of accelerators, big data, cloud computing, exascale supercomputing, and green HPC.
In fact if you take a look the SC12 conference schedule, those five topics just mentioned dominate much of the technical program this year. Eye-balling the listed sessions, there are 48 on accelerators (GPUs, Xeon Phi, DSPs and FPGAs), 37 on big data, 32 on cloud computing, 20 on exascale, and 19 on green computing. Of course, there’s also the usual fare of presentations on interconnects, parallel programming, storage technology (although curiously, not much specifically on flash storage), software development tools, and various HPC use cases…
The session distribution reflects the big drivers in the HPC space today. I would argue the top three on this list — accelerators, big data, cloud computing — are the technologies that will matter most to high performance computing, not just in the next year or two, but also several years down the road. For example, accelerators like GPUs and Intel’s Xeon Phi are not just revamping the basic structure of supercomputing hardware, but the programming tools underneath (CUDA, OpenCL, OpenACC, and OpenMP). Big data is opening up the space a new set of vendors and broadening the horizons for ones that used to be confined to HPC. Finally, cloud computing promises to change to delivery model for at least a subset of HPC users and offer a path for others who have been excluded from high performance computing altogether…
Read more from the source @ http://www.hpcwire.com/hpcwire/2012-11-09/supercomputing_conference_offers_up_smorgasbord_of_hpc_sessions.html