Reed's Ruminations: The Past, Present, and Future
Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience
Tag: HPC
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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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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.”
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Matryoshka Dolls and Data Centers
If your “data center” is located in the nearest available space to your laboratory — a retrofitted janitor’s closet – and cooled by two box fans from Walmart, odds are you are not a paragon of PUE virtue, even if your aggregate computing power is small.
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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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IT’s Not Easy Being Green (Actually, It Is Easy If You Try)
In the interview, I pointed out that the most obvious way to reduce computing-related energy consumption is simply to power down and turn off those systems not being used – QED. However, that is insufficient alone. After all, one presumably wants to do some computing. Thus, systems and infrastructure must be designed for energy and…
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The Fallacy of Rankings
The latest, semi-annual Top 500 ranking of the world’s fastest supercomputers will be revealed at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in June. Last year, two systems broke the petascale barrier using a GPU/game accelerator processor cluster (LANL’s Roadrunner) and a cluster of commodity microprocessors (ORNL’s Jaguar). As always, we can expect the latest announcement to…