Reed's Ruminations: The Past, Present, and Future
Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience
Category: High-Performance Computing
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Simple HPC Wins – Usually
You want to be the first person to design a successful, transistorized computer system, not the last person to design vacuum tube computer. As I frequently told my graduate students at Illinois, the great thing about parallel computing is the question never changes – “How can I increase performance?” – but the answers do. Babbage…
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Lessons from the Gulf of Mexico
The computational demands of an integrated, fully multidisciplinary, parametric simulation study of the oil spill and all of its effects would make today’s complex models seem like child’s play on an abacus by comparison.
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In Vivo, In Vitro, In Silico
The wide dynamic range of temporal and spatial scales of systems biology models, from picosecond first principles molecular dynamics to the geological timescales of environmental shifts, is a full employment act for computational scientists. In many ways, we are attempting to come full circle, from in vivo observations to in vitro experiments to holistic, in…
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Modeling the World
Today, Microsoft publicly launched a new technical computing vision, Modeling the World. The web site contains vignettes about computing from a variety of technical computing leaders, both inside Microsoft and across the broader community.
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Volcanoes, Travel and Social Networks
Many of us have had family, friends, colleagues or acquaintances stranded far from home by the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano. At one point, I joked with one friend that he should consider a land route to central Europe, catch the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok, kayak across the Bering Strait to Alaska, then drive down…
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SC09 Reflections
The SC09 conference set an attendance record this year – roughly 10,000 attendees at the combined conference and tradeshow – despite the economic malaise of the technology industry and the global economy. One suspects the strong resilience of the conference may be due in part to substantial government investments in very high-performance computing (HPC).