Allow me to introduce myself. Mike Ball has been inviting me to join in the conversation here, and I'm finally able to jump in, once we dispense with a few formalities.

I'm Michael Van De Vanter, and I've been working with Mike and others at Sun on the DARPA-funded supercomputer project for about a year and a half. It is a real privilege to participate in such an ambitious program. We've been chartered to do no less that rethink completely, from the ground up, how computing systems help people get real work done. The focus of the program is very specifically about the HPC world, but that doesn't take away from the scope of the challenge.

I'm part of the Core Productivity Team, along with Larry Votta (our lead), Susan Squires (our anthropologist), and most recently Victoria Livschitz; we work with lots of other HPCS groups inside Sun to build an understanding of Productivity as a relationship between a whole system (not just the various hardware and software parts) and the context (human, organizational, political) in which it is deployed. We're also chartered to take a deeper look into programmability, which is one of the key aspects of Productivity, and that's where my background comes into play. I've been writing software, teaching programming, and doing research into how to build tools that help people write software for many years (but not in HPC, where I'm a newbie). You can learn more about my background on my personal home page.

I've just returned from the Third Workshop on Productivity and Performance in High-End Computing held last Sunday in Austin, TX. It was a great chance to talk with some of the other folks looking at these questions, not only from the other HPCS Program Vendors (IBM and Cray) but also the broader research community. There are lots of people right now working on this big question, and we're all trying to learn as much from one another as we can.

I'll say more about the workshop and the paper we write for it in a subsequent post; I'll also mention what a pleasure it was to visit Ira Baxter, CEO of Semantic Designs while I was in Austin.