NCSA NEWS

Smarr to Keynote Mannheim Supercomputer Conference

Larry Smarr, director of the National Computational Science Alliance and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will present the keynote address at Supercomputer '98, an annual high-performance computing conference held in Mannheim, Germany.

The conference, scheduled for June 18-20, brings together experts in the field of high-performance computing to discuss the latest trends and developments in the field and see examples of commercial and research uses of supercomputers. A highlight of the conference is the presentation of the Top 500 Supercomputer list, a worldwide list of the sites that have the 500 most powerful computing systems. The list, which will be presented for the 11th straight year at the conference, helps provide a basis for statistics on high-performance computing.

Smarr's June 18 keynote is titled "Supercomputers: Directions in Technology, Architecture and Applications". By using the results of the Top 500 over the last five years, Smarr will trace the complete transformation of the supercomputer industry. In 1993, none of the Top 500 was made by a broadly based market-driven company, while today more than three quarters of the Top 500 are made by SGI, IBM, HP, or Sun. Similarly, vector architectures have been replaced in market share by microprocessor based SMPs. The industry is now seeing a strong move to replace many MPP and SMPs by the new architecture of Distributed Shared Memory (DSM), such as the SGI Origin or HP SPP series. A key trend is the move toward clusters of DSMs instead of monolithic MPPs. The next major change will be the emergence of the Intel Merced processor, which should become dominant shortly after 2000. A major battle will shape up between UNIX and Microsoft's NT operating systems, particularly at the lower end of the Top 500. Finally, with each new architecture comes a new set of applications that can now be attacked. Smarr will discuss how DSM will enable dynamic load balancing needed to support the multi-scale problems that teraflop machines will enable the high-performance computing community to tackle.

Smarr's paper on the topic will be available on the Supercomputer '98 Website after the conference. For more information on Supercomputer '98, see http://parallel.rz.uni-mannheim.de/sc/sc.html. For information on the Top 500 Supercomputer list, see http://www.top500.org/.

 

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