Tuesday June 17, 2008

My notes from Burton Smith's talk in the Cluster session at ISC 2008 in Dresden.

The Killer Micros II: The Software Strikes Back
Dr. Burton Smith , Microsoft Corporation, USA

Spent 30 years in High Performance Computing, but not his day job at Microsoft though he does some night work. His day job is parallel computing on clients -- general purpose parallel computing -- multicore.

Cluster Software is Primitive. Programming is at too low a level (C++, OpenMP, MPI.) Tools are too few and too thinly supported -- cluster market is not big enough. Applications are too cluster-specific because the infrastructure is different on various clients--islands of cluster specificity.

Big Changes are Coming. First, the many-core inflection point--parallel computing comes to the mainstream. Second, cloud and corporate computing--better data searches and access and service-based application software. SOAP, AJAX, XML. Yes, partly. But it is really about breaking applications into communicating pieces and distributing them.

At SC '89, Eugene Brooks predicted mainstream hardware would dominate the HPC area, "None will survive the attack of the killer micros!" Now it is software's turn. Meaning that HPC will soon be dominated by software from outside of HPC.

Client Many-Core Parallelism. Client computing will soon be parallel, even on mobile devices and phones. Why? More absolute performance, and more performance per watt. Parallel languages and tools are underway--they are need to use the new hardware well. And this does not mean adding parallel for-loops to C++.

Cluster versus mainstream software. SPMD parallelism with OpenMP versus mixed task/data parallelism; fixed processor counts versus variable processor counts; MPI versus Internet and MPI; C++ versus C#, F#, Excel, SQL, C++; file system versus databases, cloud, file system;

Emerging mainstream software has richer capabilities.

Software as a Service. Software services will run everywhere-- in clients, on servers, in the cloud. Which brings distributed computing to the forefront. Service-based apps are distributed with data intensity where data are and computational intensity where processors are.

Conclusions. Cluster software is still primitive because the market is so small. Two major revolutions now underway in computing that will change the landscape. Clusters will be affected by these changes.