An overview of the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) will be given by program managers in the Department of Energy, highlighting how we got to this point in the program, results to date and future plans. Technical presentations on parts of the nuclear stockpile stewardship program will be presented by principal investigators from Sandia, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.
Computing systems have become central to medical care and research, and their success has created a demand for systems with ever increasing capabilities. Some applications are reaching computing power, bandwidth and storage requirements associated with supercomputers. The multimedia electronic patient record is such an application, especially at major medical centers where large scale image storage is becoming common. At the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, a supercomputer-like machine (MARS - Medical Archival System) is now used for this purpose. In addition, current high-end workstations based on the Alpha and other leading-edge microprocessors now have the compute power and memory bandwidth of supercomputers 10 years ago. Assuming this trend continues, we should ask what medical applications the supercomputer community should be developing today that may run on desktop machines in the next decade.
Programs such as Adventures in Supercomputing (AiS), the Alabama Supercomputing Program to Inspire computational Research in Education (ASPIRE), Earth Vision, the National Education Supercomputer Program (NESP), the PSC High School Initiative, SuperQuest and others have been offering in-depth training and experience with computational science tools and methods to teachers for a decade. This roundtable will offer a forum for those involved to discuss the successes and failures of these efforts and to communicate needs and goals for future programs.
Presentations will be provided by developers within the Federal Government (i.e., DoD, DoE, NOAA, NASA, NIH) on their experiences in developing scalable parallel application software to solve critical challenges in the areas of: computational fluid dynamics, computational structural mechanics, environmental quality modeling and computational electromagnetics. These talks will address the technical challenges of the efforts, the programming methods applied to solve them and the lessons learned in the research so far. After the initial stage-setting overview speakers, the presentations will be given by the working team leaders who are developing the codes.
Moderator: Peter R. Bridenbaugh, Alcoa
The effective use of knowledge lies at the heart of industrial leadership. This panel will discuss the role of high-performance computing in creating competitive advantage in the aerospace, automotive, materials and energy, and industries. They will also offer their view of the future for HPC and their requirements of the HPC community.
This session will include topics on:
Representatives of four sites, each running a different archiving solution, will form the panel. Each panel member will present information about their archive solution and usage statistics. They will discuss their perspective about the archive solution's features, faults, and future enhancements. Each panel member will provide their software and hardware solutions and costs for three proposed archive requirements (5 TB, 125 TB, and 1000 TB). A lengthy question and answer session will follow the discussions.
Petaflops computing has been explored through a series of federally sponsored community led forums. Although the feasibility and application of petaflops systems within the next twenty years are considered a distinct possibility, there are highly conflicting views concerning the means by which this is to be achieved. Such issues as architectural capabilities, system software user interface, exotic technologies, applications that will benefit, economic business model in support of industry, and research and development paths are all considered controversial. Also, diverse perspectives are sometimes in direct conflict. For example, one approach dictates the use of commercial off-the-shelf components as the only practical approach to funding the necessary hardware and software technology. Another approach considers alternative structures of processing logic and memory on a single chip for more efficient computing. A third approach proposes to exploit exotic technologies in hybrid organizations, including superconducting logic, optical communications and storage, and semiconductor memories. At the same time, it is quite possible that the first petaflops computer will be a special-purpose device good for only a single class of applications but available in just a few years. Other approaches have been considered as well.
The panel will present an array of such views and invite the audience to contribute their own ideas on possible paths to petaflops computing.
The Scalable I/O (SIO) Initiative intends to release for public review a draft parallel filesystem API suite no later than six weeks before this conference. The goal of this suite is to define a common set of powerful interfaces for application, compiler and toolkit programmers to use for high-performance I/O on a variety of parallel machine architectures. In this roundtable, the SIO Initiative would like to collect, interpret and discuss the community's responses to, and suggestions for, the proposed API suite. Broad-based comments are sought, but we will be especially interested in the programming experiences of I/O-intensive applications, out-of-core compilers/toolkits and parallel file system implementations. This draft will be available no later than October 1, 1996 at: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Web/Groups/PDL/SIO/SC96.html.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 has made major changes in the rules of engagement of the key stakeholders in the telecommunications field. Key FCC rulings on interconnection Rules and Universal Service are expected in August and November, respectively. (An Access Reform ruling is expected in January.) The panelists will be drawn from the local, long distance, cable, metropolitan, cellular, FCC and internet communities. A brief summary by each panelist of the key impacts already seen will lead to a lively debate.
