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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Serial Dismay, Parallel Excitement
Cloud services now operate on the largest computing systems we have ever built on this planet, with service reliability expectations far higher than what we demand from scientific applications. Thus, I also believe there are lessons from cloud computing that are potentially applicable to computational science applications.
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Two, Five, Ten …
We tend to forget the real reason the Cray-1 was so successful. It was not the innovative vector architecture and memory system, nor was it the plethora of great software. Despite our love of self-similarity, orders of magnitude really matter. It’s worth remembering this as we contemplate future exascale computing system designs and digest the…
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Cray and Fernbach Awards Redux
I am delighted that the 2009 Seymour Cray Award will be presented to Kenichi “Ken” Miura and that Roberto Car and Michele Parrinello are joint recipients of the 2009 Sidney Fernbach Award. I look forward to presenting the awards at SC09.
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It’s the Sum, Not the Parts
Computer architects create something of functional beauty, just as do their cousins who work in the more tangible media of rock and stone. Consider John Cocke and the IBM 801, Ken Batcher and the Goodyear MPP, Tadashi Watanabe and the NEC SX. Similarly, Seymour Cray’s designs balanced many aspects of power engineering, packaging and cooling,…
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I Could Smell the Smoke
Why didn’t we leave a high value target area, you might ask? The Washington Metro was closed, taxis were non-existent, there was a security cordon around the area, and it was too far to walk.
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Luck Is a Fickle Friend
As an enterprising young faculty member, I asked Professor Slotnick if he had any words of wisdom to offer a young parallel computing researcher, based on his experience with ILLIAC IV. He simply said, “Choose your risks carefully.”