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Super Computing '06 - Tampe Florida - day 3

The day's highlight was a talk by Andy,  primarily how to create a peta scale computing infrastructure and what new problems/ challenges we will face when we head to sustained petascale FLOP rates. Assuming a four year ownership the cost of power is estimated to a number in tens of millions of dollar, far exceeding the procurement cost of the system. Andy gave many ideas, areas to look/ explore where cuts can be made. There was an interesting distribution among various consumers of power in a data center, like the compute nodes, air conditioning, chillers etc. Overall extremely impressive. Yet another engineer at heart senior executive member at Sun !

There were sessions on optimization, code analyzers and tool for detecting data race condition. Also learnt that SunStudio is free with all the goodies packed in there, more at the following url http://developers.sun.com/sunstudio/ . There was a session on visualization as well. The afternoon at Sun HPC event was a Sun only event wherein there was an open discussion on Sun's HPC software stack.  This also was the end of the Sun HPC event and we later moved to the Tampa Convention Center in downtown Tampa where the main SC'06 event is being held.

Me being a "systems management" soul was walking the floor looking for anything to do with management, visited the cisco, microsoft and some other hardware switch vendor stalls to see what management solutions are being offered in the HPC space. I was digging in for features and underlying protocols one thing that stood out among quite a few others was the fact that with exception of one switch vendor I am yet to meet a person who either doesn't ask back what is WS-MAN and CIM or they pause for a moment and give a standard stall answer "in a future release" ;-). That said the floor is full of many vendors and I have only scratched the surface, am yet to make a complete sweep of the floor.

Met with many application developers, university PhDs, who are one of the primary consumers of such systems or represent one major segment in scientific computing - literally the who's and who amongst the best in the world universities with their supercomputing solutions are there on the floors. Tomorrow will be my last day in Tampa and I have a lot of ground to cover, the conference will go on through the week but I need to return to my day job :-).

I already am feeling that I have been drinking from a firehose for the last three days.

Posted at 09:41PM Nov 13, 2006 by adikhit in General  |  Comments[0]