Session Chair: Mario Barbacci
Carnegie Mellon University
President, IEEE Computer Society
10:00
Sid Fernbach Award Winner Presentation
Established in 1992, the Sid Fernbach Award honors Sidney Fernbach, one of the pioneers in the development and application of high performance computers for the solution of large computational problems, given for Ňan outstanding contribution in the application of high performance computers using innovative approaches."
The 1996 winner of the Sid Fernbach Award is Dr. Gary A. Glatzmaier, a distinguished physicist in Geophysical Fluid Mechanics at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Dr. Glatzmaier is being recognized for using innovative computational numerical methods to perform the first realistic computer simulation of the Earth's geodynamo and its resultant time-dependent magnetic field.
10:40
Gordon Bell Award Finalists Presentations
The Gordon Bell Award was established to reward practical use of parallel processors by giving a monetary prize for the best performance improvement in an application. The prize is often given to winners in several categories relating to hardware and software advancement. Following are the three finalist teams competing for this year's Gordon Bell Prize.
Simulation Of The Three-Dimensional Cascade Flow With Numerical Wind Tunnel (Nwt)
Takashi Nakamura, Toshiyuki Iwamiya, Masahiro Yoshida, Yuichi Matsuo, and Masahiro Fukada, National Aerospace Laboratory
The NWT was reinforced to get 280 GFLOPS of theoretical peak performance with the addition of 26 PEs to the original 140 PEs. On a CFD simulation of a jet engine compressor, we attained active performance speed of 111 GFLOPS using 160 PEs.
N-Body Simulation Of Galaxy Formation On The Grape-4
Special Purpose Computer
Toshiyuki Fukushige and Junichiro Makino, University of Tokyo
We report on recent N-body simulations of galaxy formation performed on the GRAPE-4 (GRAvity PipE 4) system, a special-purpose computer for astrophysical N-body simulations. We review the astrophysical motivation, the algorithm, the actual performance and the price per performance. The performance obtained is 332 Gflops averaged over 185 hours for a simulation of a galaxy formation with 786,400 particles. The price performance obtained is 4,600 dollars per Gflops. The configuration used for the simulation consists of 1,269 pipeline processors and has a peak speed of 663 Gflops.
Electronic Structure Of Materials Using Self-Interaction Corrected Density Functional Theory
Adolfy Hoisie, Cornell Theory Center; Stefan Goedecker and Jurg Hutter, Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research
We have developed a highly efficient electronic structure code for parallel computers using message passing. The algorithm takes advantage of the natural parallelism in quantum chemistry problems to obtain very high performance even on a large number of processors. Most of the terms which scale cubically with respect to the number of atoms have been eliminated, allowing the treatment of very large systems. It uses one of the most precise versions of Density Functional Theory, namely Self-Interaction Corrected Density Functional Theory. On a 6-processor Silicon Grahics Symmetric Multiprocessor based on the MIPS R8000 microprocessor, we obtain a performance of 6.3 Gflops per million dollars.
Session Chair: Bill Buzbee
National Center For Atmospheric Research
1:30
Awards Session
The winners of the Best Student Paper, Sid Fernbach Award, Gordon Bell Award and the High Performance Computing Challenge will be presented in this session.
(Following the presentation of awards will be a plenary talk by Erich Bloch. See below.)
The Best Student Paper is determined by a panel of program committee members who read and attend the presentations of each of the nominated papers. The students, paper titles, and sessions of this year's nominees follow.
Anath Grama
Parallel Hierarchical Solvers and Preconditioners for Boundary Elements Methods (see Algorithms II Session, Wednesday, 3:30 p.m.)
Anna M. del Corral
Reaching the Peak Throughput in Complex Memory Systems of Multivector Processors (see Networking & Architecture Session, Wednesday, 10:00 a.m.)
Subodh Kumar
Scalable Algorithms For Interactive Visualization of Curved Surfaces (see Visualization & Education Session, Tuesday,
1:30 p.m.)
Constantinos Evangelinos Communication Patterns and Models in Prism: A Spectral Element-Fourier Parallel Navier-Stokes Solver (see Performance II Session, Wednesday, 10:00 a.m)
Induprakas Kodukula
Transformations for Imperfectly Nested Loops(see Compiler Analysis Session, Tuesday, 1:30 p.m)
Lei Wang
Performance Evaluation of Code Generation Algorithms for High Performance Fortran (see Performance I Session, Tuesday, 10:30 a.m.)
Ying Chen
Performance Modeling for the Panda Array I/O Library (see Data Mining & Modeling Session, Thursday, 10:00 a.m.).
Obviously, the answer to the question is that supercomputers were both change agents and now are the victim of changing technologies. This observation is valid for different points of time.
The discussion will trace the history of supercomputing and its effect on science, engineering, defense and other social areas. It will also elaborate on the reasons for the pre-eminence of the U.S. in this field and the effect of supercomputers on the computer sector. For a long time, supercomputers were the originator of technology that trickled down to other branches of computers and data processors. Today, the inverse is true. What is in store for this field and what need the government and the private sector do to provide important and continuous progress in this area will conclude the remarks.