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| News |
| Fall Creek Falls Conference |
| Meetings Speed HPC Community Toward Petascale Systems |
| More than 120 leading experts from academia, industry, and government convened at the 2007 Fall Creek Falls Conference in Nashville, TN to explore the challenges of designing and running models and simulations on high-end computing systems performing at the level of petaflops, or a quadrillion floating point operations per second. The conference, held September 24-26, brought together users of high-performance computing facilities for open scientific research, software developers, and hardware vendors to discuss how to extract the most science from high-end facilities provided by the DOE Office of Science, the largest source of funds for basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. |
| "The conference aims to engage the computational science community broadly," says Computer Science and Mathematics Division Director Dr. Jeff Nichols of ORNL. Participants, including representatives from the NSF, NASA, and DOE's national laboratories, engaged in meaningful dialogue with vendors—including Cray, IBM, SGI, Sun Microsystems, and Data Direct Networks—and academic participants from coast to coast, including graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and researchers from North Carolina State University to the University of California–Davis. |
| The event included individual presentations, panel discussions, and posters organized around themes including climate change, energy, and hardware and software, including scientific visualization tools. |
| In the session on climate change Dr. David Erickson (ORNL) provided an overview of modeling Earth systems and Dr. Auroop Ganguly (ORNL) spoke of modeling climate extremes. Dr. Lawrence Buja of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, an NSF center, spoke about new directions and requirements for climate modeling following the findings of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This has particular national and global relevance because of the Panel's conclusion that the 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit of planetary warming observed during the 20th century has a more than 90% chance of being the result of human activities. The authors predict large-scale changes in food and water availability, dramatic changes in ecosystems, increased flooding, and extreme weather. |
| In a session led by ORNL's Dr. Gil Weigand, seven speakers explored the challenges of modeling and simulation of advanced energy. Key challenges presented by next-generation hardware systems were discussed in two sessions. Topics included scaling beyond commodity, storage-intensive supercomputing, performance monitoring, developing petascale applications, and much more. A final session tackled challenges in visualization and data analytics. |
| Dr. Nichols stated that petascale systems will be deployed by mid-2009. "The key to scientific applications running efficiently on great big systems is balance," says Dr. Nichols. A petascale system may contain 100,000 compute cores, just as 100,000 laptops would. How much data can a system that size store? How fast is it to retrieve those data from primary or secondary storage, such as disks, or tertiary storage, such as tapes? How much memory and bandwidth are needed to run a simulation? |
| The Fall Creek Falls Conference sought to support well-balanced systems designed for research by bringing together the software developers who write the codes with the computational scientists who run the codes to explore complex scenarios. The computational scientists then work with the researchers studying grand scientific challenges, and those researchers in turn communicate with the vendors who need to understand the researchers' requirements in order to build systems that meet them. |
| This conference series has been conducted since 2004. "These ongoing conferences—dialogues with the community—are important to achieving more scientific output than we normally would if we were locked into commodity design," Dr. Nichols said, citing a research computer that runs on PlayStation 3TM chips. Though science is often fun, it's not often child's play. "It's all about how to make better scientific compute engines." |
