Reed's Ruminations: The Past, Present, and Future
Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience
Tag: exascale
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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).
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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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Language Shapes Behavior: Our Poor Cousin, Data
One of the major lessons from web search and cloud data centers is the power of truly massive scale, near real-time data analysis. When anyone with a cheap cell phone and a web browser can extract data and insights from a non-trivial fraction of the human knowledge base, behavior and culture are transformed. I would…
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Microsoft Extreme Computing Group (XCG)
The Extreme Computing Group (XCG) at Microsoft was formed to develop radical new approaches to ultrascale and high-performance computing hardware and software. The group’s research activities include work in computer security, cryptography, operating system design, parallel programming models, cloud software, data center architectures, specialty hardware accelerators and quantum computing.
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HPC: Making a Small Fortune
There is an old joke in the high-performance computing community that begins with a question, “How do you make a small fortune in high-performance computing?” There are several variations on the joke, but they all end with the same punch line, “Start with a large fortune and ship at least one generation of product. You…