Andy Bechtolsheim to Keynote Sun HPC Consortium in Dresden

The preliminary agenda for the Sun HPC Consortium has been published on their conference site. Andy Bechtolsheim, Sun co-founder and Chief Architect, will keynote the event.

The Sun HPC Consortium is an independent, volunteer-organized, international group of member organizations that own or use Sun computer systems with emphasis on high-performance, technical computing, and visualization.

Participants represent a broad range of computing applications and environments. The meeting format is designed to give participants the opportunity to present HPC developments, discuss applications and needs with their peers, and to hear and provide feedback on Sun's engineering plans.

Who should attend:
All Sun scientific, engineering, or research computing customers or anyone interested in high-performance computing on Sun technologies. Each meeting is designed to address a wide range of intrests from application developers to CIOs and VPs of Research. Registration site

Registration open: Sun HPC Consortium, Dresden June

Sun customers and partners are invited to attend the semi-annual HPC Consortium event June 15-17 in Dresden, Germany. Early Bird Registration is $249 USD if you register before 15 May, 2008. Registration site.

The Sun Global Education and Research High Performance Computing Consortium (SHPCC) is an independent, volunteer-organized, international group of member organizations that own or use Sun computer systems with emphasis on high-performance, technical computing, and visualization.

SHPCC's mission is to provide the high performance computing community with leadership and provide a forum for information exchange to enable the development and effective use of Sun computational tools in achieving the business and research objectives of member organization

Participants represent a broad range of computing applications and environments. The meeting format is designed to give participants the opportunity to present HPC developments, discuss applications and needs with their peers, and to hear and provide feedback on Sun's engineering plans. <

Previous agendas and presentations are on line.

Who should attend:
All Sun scientific, engineering, or research computing customers or anyone interested in high-performance computing on Sun technologies. Each meeting is designed to address a wide range of intrests from application developers to CIOs and VPs of Research. Registration site.

TACC to Host Summer Supercomputing Institute

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin today announced that it will host its second annual five-day Summer Supercomputing Institute in Austin from July 28 through Aug. 1. The institute will provide researchers with an intensive introduction to TACC’s computing resources. Senior TACC staff will deliver presentations and lead interactive labs focused on using TACC’s resources and technologies, including:

* High performance computing systems
* Visualization systems and advanced display environments
* Massive storage systems
* Grid computing technologies

In addition, leading computational scientists will discuss their work, including examples of how they apply TACC’s resources in their research. Full Story

HPC Sessions at CommunityOne

Two HPC sessions will be featured as part of the CommunityOne Developer conference in San Francisco on June 5. Sun's Dan Templeton will lead the following sessions:

* Getting Started with the Sun Grid Engine Hardware Open Source Project. Session ID: S297262
* Building a Web-Scale Open Source High-Performance Computing Stack. Session ID: S297260

CommunityOne is a free, one-day event that allows developers and students to benefit from the innovation and choice of the free and open source ecosystem. The conference program is the result of a public call for papers, which received more than 200 submissions. CommunityOne will offer more than 70 sessions led by contributors and committers of more than 30 different open source and community projects; from chip design to operating systems, to web servers and databases, to scripting languages and tools. CommunityOne will also offer “unconference” sessions, led by the analysts from RedMonk, in which participants will determine the topics they wish to discuss, exchange ideas and identify best practices.

The CommunityOne Session Catalog is now online. Register today!

Andy B. to Keynote Lustre User Group Meeting

Please join us for the sixth annual Lustre User Group meeting in Sonoma, California, April 28-30, 2008. The agenda will feature a keynote by Andy Bechtolsheim, Sun co-founder and Chief Architect.

Hurry! Early-bird registration rates end on March 31.

The Lustre User Group meeting is the premier event for learning new technical information, acquiring best practices, and sharing knowledge about Lustre Technology. It's a once-a-year opportunity for users to get answers, advice, and suggestions regarding their specific Lustre implementations. With active members from some of the world's largest HPC installations, the Lustre user community is a terrific resource for in-depth learning and performance enhancement. Attendees will have access to experts and peers who will share their real-world experiences. You will also be able to meet with Lustre engineers from the development team to discuss upcoming enhancements and capabilities. Full Story

Mainstream HPC Event with John Fowler: Toronto, March 25

On March 25, CIO Magazine will host John Wall, Chief Technology Officer of Symcor and, John Fowler, Executive Vice President of Sun Microsystems to discuss the implementation of HPC in commercial enterprises. This breakfast seminar will take place in Toronto, Canada.

This discussion will explore the use of HPC in a broad range of applications, including Symcor’s drive towards increased efficiency and improved customer service through its adoption of High-Performance Computing to push the envelope in transaction processing and data management. CIO Event Invitation

Andy B. to Keynote Open Fabrics Workshop, April 6

Andy Bechtolsheim will kick off the fourth-annual International Sonoma Workshop on April 6, 2008.

The OpenFabrics Alliance is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to expanding and accelerating the adoption of RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) technologies for server and storage connectivity. These high-speed, data-transport technologies are used worldwide in corporate data centers, high-performance computing facilities, research institutes, and industries as diverse as bioinformatics, electronic design, engineering, entertainment & media, financial services, and oil & gas.

A preliminary agenda of the workshop is available on the OFA site. Event Registration

HPC Horizons Community Kicks Off

Sun was pleased to sponsor the first-ever meeting of HPC Horizons community this week. The two-day conference had 125 attendees and featured speakers that represented both traditional and emerging HPC applications. Tabor Communications, the parent company of HPCwire and Tabor Research and the founders of HPC Horizons, billed the event as a prelude to ongoing online discussions among a wider member audience. Full Story.

Four Reasons to Attend the Open Source Grid and Cluster Conference

The Grid Gurus blog brings us four reasons to attend the Open Source Grid and Cluster Conference.

Sponsored in part by Univa UD and Sun Microsystems, the conference will include tracks dedicated to Globus (GlobusWorld), Grid Engine (Grid Engine Workshop), and Rocks (Rocks Cluster Workshop). Other sessions will cover related open source grid and cluster software, and present cross-cutting material focused on end-user applications and grid and cluster operations.

"Here's why you should come to the Open Source Grid and Cluster Conference:

* Great Speakers: We're going to have the rock stars of the grid world speaking and teaching.
* Great Topics: Dedicated tracks to each of the communities being hosted.
* Community Interaction: The grid community is spread all over the world, this will be a meeting place to get face time with the people you know by name only.
* You Can Speak: We're currently accepting agenda submissions for 90 minute panels and sessions." Full Story

HPCC to focus on the "Challenge and the Promise"

Sun is pleased to sponsor the National High Performance Computing and Communications Council's 22nd annual conference, which will take place March 25-26, 2008, at the Hyatt Regency located on Goat Island, Newport, Rhode Island. This year's HPCC conference theme is "Supercomputing: The Challenge and the Promise" and is once again expected to draw an intimate group of elite HPC stakeholders to discuss leadership challenges and accomplishments highlighting the applications of high performance computing.

As one of the featured speakers, Sun's Peter Bojanic will present an update on Sun’s Lustre open source strategies on March 26. Full Story

Sun HPC Customers to Keynote ISC'08

Sun HPC customers will keynote the the International Supercomputing Conference, June 17-19 in Dresden, Germany.

* Dr. John Salmon, D. E. Shaw Research, USA will present the Friday keynote address with the title "Toward Millisecond-Scale Molecular Dynamics Simulation of Proteins."

* Prof. Dr. Satoshi Matsuoka from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Global Scientific Information and Computing Center. Professor Matsuoka will describe why "Everybody Supercomputes in the Next Generation Cyber-Science Infrastructure".

In other news, the latest newsletter is now available with these highlights:

- ISC'08 Program
- ISC'08 Keynote Lectures
- Online Registration will open March 1, 2008
- Call for Birds-of-a-Feather Sessions (BoFs)
- Call for Research Posters
- Hotel Booking Now Open

At ISC'08, more than 50 invited speakers from high-level research, industry and business organizations will share their expertise and experiences. ISC'08 Newsletter

HPCC Event to Spotlight Lustre

Sun's Peter Bojanic will present an update on Sun’s Lustre 0pen source strategies at the upcoming National High Performance Computing and Communications Conference in Newport, RI, on March 25.

Now in its 22nd year, the HPCC is a limited attendance, high-level conference and a well-respected forum for government IT managers, computer scientists, engineers, strategists, technology and business decision makers, suppliers, end users and eco-system partners involved in high-end computing and communications technologies. The audience, which includes senior professionals from DOD, DOE, government agencies, industry and academia, convenes each year to discuss topics of interest to the HPC community. Topics typically include: computing, information technology, national cyber-infrastructure, cyberspace security; government and industry plans related to systems, software, applications and tools; updates on government programs, policy and initiatives; and discussions of the latest advances in high performance computing, grid computing, cluster technology, computer security and university and industry research. Conference Site.

Sun to Sponsor Open Source Grid and Cluster Conference, May 12-16

Sun Microsystems welcomes you to the Open Source Grid & Cluster Conference 2008. This all-new conference will take place on 12-16, 2008 at the Marriott City Center in Oakland, California.

At the 2008 Open Source Grid & Cluster Conference, current and potential users, administrators, and developers of open source grid and cluster software in research and industry can:

* Learn the latest best practices for using, managing and building grids and clusters
* Hear the experiences of real users in a wide range of commercial, research, educational, and biomedical environments.
* Meet the developers responsible for leading open source grid and cluster software.
* Interact with others facing and addressing challenges similar to your own.

Sponsored in part by Univa UD and Sun Microsystems, the program will include tracks dedicated to Globus (GlobusWorld), Grid Engine (Grid Engine Workshop), and Rocks (Rocks Cluster Workshop). Other sessions will cover related open source grid and cluster software, and present cross-cutting material focused on end-user applications and grid and cluster operations.

With a combination of in-depth tutorials, user experiences, technical architecture reviews, discussions of future directions, and much more, there will be something for everyone at this unique event.

We are also still accepting conference sponsors. Information about these opportunities is posted on our web site.

Call For Participation coming soon. We look forward to seeing you in Oakland!

Register Now: SunHPC 2008 Performance Workshop in Aachen, Germany

Registration has opened for SunHPC 2008, a one week, no-fee workshop held March 3-7, 2008, at the RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany.

The first two days are dedicated to Sun. The focus is on the Sun Studio compilers and tools. In particular automatic parallelization and OpenMP. In addition to the talks there are 2 lab sessions.

The second part is a more general workshop, be it with a strong Sun signature. It is a collaboration with the VI-HPS institute. Several short talks on various tools are given. Attendees get the opportunity to work on their own application, using these tools on various systems. Experts are available to advise them.

There is no fee for this event.

Registration has just opened. The workshop page (including the registration procedure) is: http://www.rz.rwth-aachen.de/sunhpc

Registration Now Open for 2008 Lustre User Group!

Please join us for the sixth annual Lustre User Group meeting in Sonoma, California, April 28-30, 2008. Acquired by Sun last year as part of Cluster File Systems, Lustre is the high-performance parallel I/O software used on many of the world's largest HPC clusters:

Sun Microsystems welcomes you to the Lustre User Group meeting, the premier event for learning new technical information, acquiring best practices, and sharing knowledge about Lustre Technology. It's a once-a-year opportunity for users to get answers, advice, and suggestions regarding their specific Lustre implementations. With active members from some of the world's largest HPC installations, the Lustre user community is a terrific resource for in-depth learning and performance enhancement. Attendees will have access to experts and peers who will share their real-world experiences. You will also be able to meet with Lustre engineers from the development team to discuss upcoming enhancements and capabilities. Full Story

TACC Ranger Training

The Texas Advanced Computing Center is hosting Ranger-specific training classes on February 7-8 at New York University, and February 27-28 at Arizona State University.

TACC offers various training classes in high performance computing (HPC), scientific visualization (SciVis), distributed and grid computing (DGC), and computational cluster management. TACC training classes teach the programming principles and techniques in HPC and SciVis as well as how to use TACC's high-end systems most effectively. Full Story

London Mathematica HPC Conference Jan 17

Sun Microsystems is pleased to be a sponsor of the 2008 London Mathematica HPC Conference, presented by Wolfram Research on Thursday, January 17. This years conference will focus on how Mathematica users easily can take advantage of the latest multi-core hardware to make High Performance Computing simple. Featured speakers from Wolfram Research include *Roman Maeder*, Director of Parallel Computing Technology and *Tom Wickham-Jones*, Director of Kernel Technology. Full Story

OGF22 Call for Participation

Session proposals are now being accepted for OGF22, which will be held in Cambridge, Mass. from Feb. 25-29, 2008. OGF events are a great way to gain recognition for your work with the international grid community. They provide an open forum to collaborate, network and establish relationships based on areas of common interest; to inform and educate about grid uses, best practices, and requirements; and to develop standards for grid and distributed computing adoption. The OGF committee is particularly interested in content related to Pharma/Life Sciences and Financial Services. Full Story

OpenMP in a New Era of Parallelism: IWOMP 2008

The 2008 International Workshop on OpenMP (IWOMP 2008) will be held on the campus of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana May 12 to 14, 2008 at Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA. IWOMP (www.iwomp.org/) is the premier opportunity to learn more about parallel programming with OpenMP and to interact with OpenMP users and developers. The workshop also serves as a forum to present the latest research ideas and results related to OpenMP. IWOMP 2008 will be a three-day event. The first day will consist of tutorials focusing on topics of interest to current and prospective OpenMP developers, suitable for both beginners as well as those interested in learning of recent developments in the evolving OpenMP standard, including the 3.0 specification that is currently in draft release. The second and third days will consist of technical papers and panel session(s) during which research ideas and results will be presented and discussed. Full Story

Call for Papers: Exploiting Parallelism at EPHAM 2008

EPHAM 2008 (Workshop on Exploiting Parallelism with Transactional Memory) has issued a call for papers:

EPHAM 2008 will provide a forum for compiler and processor architecture researchers to exchange ideas for leveraging hardware assistance to break down traditional barriers to exploiting parallelism. The workshop will focus on compilation techniques for exploiting parallelism in emerging multi-core and multi-threaded architectures with a particular focus on the use of transactional memory to overcome traditional barriers to parallelization. Current trends in micro-processor architecture clearly point to a tapering off of clock frequencies, and a shift toward supporting many cores and threads. This change makes the compiler's task of extracting and exploiting parallelism in applications even more important. Recognizing various difficulties in parallelization, implementations are emerging that attempt to provide various forms of hardware assist for the same. One of these techniques, transactional memory, has drawn significant interest in both industry and academia. Transactional memory will be a focus, but other techniques to solve this problem are also of interest. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following.

• Novel optimizations using transactional memory
• Speculative parallelization and other speculative methods
• Ideas for implementing transactional memory in hardware or software
• Hybrid techniques for designing and using transactional memory
• Language constructs to enable programming with transactional memory
• Run-time techniques to overcome memory aliasing using transactional memory
• New ideas for transaction failure control and avoidance
• Debugging programs that exploit transactional memory
• Performance analysis and tools related to transactional parallelization
• Other hardware-assisted methods for extracting and exploiting parallelism

Important Dates

• Extended abstract due: Monday, January 28, 2008
• Acceptance Notification: Monday, February 18, 2008
• Final version due: Monday, March 3, 2008

Submission Guidelines

Extended abstracts of 6-10 pages may be submitted using any format. The abstract should clearly state the problem being studied, the methods used, and the results. If the results are preliminary, the authors should state their expectation for the final results. To submit, please send a pdf of your submission to epham@acm.org Final submissions should use the standard ACM conference format (two columns with 9 pt Times Roman font, etc.).

More Information

• EPHAM 2008 website: http://www.opensparc.net/conf/epham2008/
• CGO 2008 website: http://www.cgo.org/

Questions? Send e-mail to: ephami @ acm.org

Project Black Box at SC07

SC07 attendees are invited to visit and tour Sun's datacenter in a box at the Reno Sparks Convention Center on Tuesday, Nov 13 during the SC07 conference.

"Project Black Box is ideal for HPC," said, Bjorn Andersson, Director of HPC at Sun Microsystems. "We want SC07 attendees to see for themselves how this virtual datacenter provides very high-density computing, rapid, easy deployment, and breakthrough efficiency."

Project Black Box will be at SC07 for one day only: Nov 13. Take the tour and receive a complementary T-shirt.

Free SC07 Exhibit Passes Available

Sun Microsystems has a large number of SC07 exhibit guest passes to give away. These passes are good for entry into the exhibit hall Nov 13-15 at the Reno Sparks Convention Center. Note that these passes are not good for the exhibits opening reception Nov 12.

To obtain a guest pass, please send an email to:
hpc-news@sun.com

Be sure to include your full name and preferred email address.
And don't forget to visit us at the Sun booth, #514!

SC07 Panels: From Quantum Computing to Exotic Architectures

How does one celebrate the 50th birthday of the most popular programming language in supercomputing? Industry experts in high performance computing, communications and storage technologies will explore this question and others in a handful of select panels at SC07 in Reno, Nev., Nov. 10-16, 2007. Full Story

Panels include:

* 50 years of Fortran
* The Return of the HPC Survivor -- how to outwit, outlast and outcompute.
* Supercomputing with Exotic Architectures -- how to use FPGAs, GPUs, game processors and other non-conventional approaches to computing.
* Operating system wars: What is the right kernel for your supercomputer?
* Quantum computing: What is happening in this revolutionary field?
* How to Get a Better Job in Computing -- and Keep It!
* HEC energy crisis: How shall we cope with a world in which computing is limited by power consumption?

Sun customers attending SC07 are invited to join us for the Sun HPC Consortium on November 10-11 in Reno, Nevada.

HPC User Forum Wrap-Up

In this week's HPC Wire, John E. West writes up an interesting summary of IDC's recent HPC User Forum, where he offered his own views on the future:

"Finally, your very own John West gave a talk discussing what HPC systems will look like approximately ten years in the future. After talking to multiple industry sources, I envision a multicore future with general-purpose HPC systems of the 2017 era comprised of chips containing hundreds of computational cores per chip (not thousands), among other interesting features." Full Story

Agenda: Sun HPC Consortium-Reno

The agenda for Sun HPC Consortium in Reno Nov. 10-11 is now online. The event will feature keynotes by Andy Bechtolsheim, Marc Tremblay, and a number of Sun HPC customers.

Who should attend:

All Sun scientific, engineering, or research computing customers or anyone interested in high-performance computing on Sun technologies. Each meeting is designed to address a wide range of interests from application developers to CIOs and VPs of Research. Sun is again demonstrating its commitment to HPC by including in the audience our worldwide HPC Aces members, which will ensure a high level of interaction between our customers and partners, and the Sun technical HPC community. Registration site