LBNL Researchers Contribute to All Aspects of SC08 Conference

Researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are making significant contributions to the SC08 Conference Technical Program, contributing four technical papers and one research poster, organizing two workshops, participating in two panel discussions, and hosting or co-hosting six birds-of-a-feather sessions (BoFs). SC08, the international conference on high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis, will be held Nov. 15–21 in Austin, Texas.

Additionally, UC Berkeley Prof. David Patterson, who has a joint appointment in LBNL’s Future Technologies Group, is one of four invited speakers; and Dale Sartor of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division will give a Masterworks presentation on energy-efficient computing.

As a leader in energy-efficient computing, LBNL staff co-organized the Nov. 16 workshop, “Power Efficiency and the Path to Exascale Computing,” and will participate in the panel discussion, “Will Electric Utilities Give Away Supercomputers with the Purchase of a Power Contract?” Sartor’s presentation will tell how to “Save Energy Now in Computer Centers”; and Sartor and Bill Tschudi, along with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Moe Khaleel, are co-hosting a BoF looking at “High Energy Performance for High Performance Computing.”

 LBNL staff will also be on hand in Booth 540 to demonstrate and discuss technologies behind “Green Flash,” a new concept for energy-efficient high-performance scientific computer systems. The joint effort with Tensilica is focused on novel processor and systems architectures using large numbers of small processor cores, connected together with optimized links, and tuned to the requirements of highly parallel applications such as climate modeling.

Here is a list of contributions to SC08 by LBNL staff.

Technical Papers

• “Stencil Computation Optimization and Autotuning on State-of-the-Art Multicore Architectures,” Kaushik Datta et al., 11–11:30 a.m. Tuesday, Nov. 18.
• "Accelerating Configuration Interaction Calculation for Nuclear Structure,” Philip Sternberg et al., 2–2:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 18.
• “Characterizing and Predicting the I/O Performance of HPC Applications using a Parameterized Synthetic Benchmark,” Hongzhang Shan et al., 11–11:30 a.m. Wednesday, Nov. 19.
• “High Performance Multivariate Visual Data Exploration for Extremely Large Data,” Oliver Rübel et al., 2:30–3 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 20.

ACM Gordon Bell Prize Finalist

• “Linear Scaling Divide-and-Conquer Electronic Structure Calculations for Thousand Atom Nanostructures,” Lin-Wang Wang et al., 11:30–noon Thursday, Nov. 20.

Workshops

• “Power Efficiency and the Path to Exascale Computing,” co-organized by John Shalf, 8:30 a.m.–5 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 17.
• “The Fourth International Workshop on High Performance Computing for Nano-Science and Technology” (HPCNano08), co-organized by Andrew Canning and Lin-Wang Wang, 8:30 a.m.–5 p.m. Friday, Nov. 21.

Invited speakers/Masterworks

• “Parallel Computing Landscape: A View from Berkeley,” invited talk by David Patterson, University of California Berkeley and LBNL, 9:15–10 a.m. Wednesday, Nov. 19.
• “Save Energy Now in Computer Centers,” Masterworks presentation by Dale Sartor, Berkeley Lab Environmental Energy Technologies Division, 3:30–4:15 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 20.

Panels

• “Applications for Heterogeneous, Massively Parallel Systems: Can Developing Applications for Massively Parallel Systems with Heterogeneous Processors Be Made Easy(er)?” including David Patterson and John Shalf, 3:30–5 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 18.
• “Will Electric Utilities Give Away Supercomputers with the Purchase of a Power Contract?” including Bill Tschudi, 10:30 a.m.–noon, Wednesday, Nov. 19.
• “Exa and Yotta Scale Data: Are We Ready?” moderated by Bill Kramer, 10:30 a.m.–noon Friday, Nov. 21.

Research Poster

• “When Workflow Management Systems and Logging Systems Meet: Analyzing Large-Scale Execution Traces,” Dan Gunter et al., poster reception 5:15–7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 18.

 Birds-of-a-Feather Sessions (BoFs)

• “High Energy Performance for High Performance Computing,” led by Bill Tschudi, 12:15–1:15 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 18.
• “Network Measurement,” led by Jon Dugan, 12:15–1:15 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 18.
• “SP-XXL: Large IBM HPC Systems,” co-led by David Paul, 12:15–1:15 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 18.
•  “Tools for High Productivity Supercomputing,” co-led by David Skinner, 12:15–1:15 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 18. 
• “TOP500 Supercomputers,” led by Erich Strohmaier, 5:50–7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 18. 
• “The Challenges, Risks and Successes of Integrating Petascale Systems into Science Environments,” led by Bill Kramer, 12:15–1:15 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 20.