Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience


The U.S. lacks a coherent strategy for developing future high-performance computing systems, ones critical for national security, economic growth, and scientific discovery.

We need a concord and strategic research investment plan that recognizes the shared importance of HPC and big data. Both warrant investments in basic research, and both need investments in large-scale infrastructure deployments.

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…

“Cloud” was undoubtedly the buzz word of the conference. Like the word Grid in the past, cloud is now a tabula rasa on which research groups and companies are projecting their own definitions and spins. I was also pleased that HPCWire awarded its Editor’s Choice Award for best industry/government collaboration to the Microsoft/Intel Universal Parallel…