AEROSPACE

Cray today announced that Cray President and CEO Peter J. Ungaro will be a keynote speaker at the 8th LCI International Conference on High-Performance Cluster Computing to be held May 14-17, 2007 in South Lake Tahoe, California. Ungaro's address, scheduled for May 17, will discuss the demands placed on Linux clusters when they are extended to supercomputing scale. A Linux cluster is a group of commodity (off-the-shelf) PCs that run the Linux operating system and are connected by a network to create a single parallel-processing system. Ungaro's keynote will examine how today's commodity technology trends are leading to an ever-increasing reliance on scalability for high-performance computing, and what the implications of those trends are for large-scale Linux clusters. There will be several other presentations by Cray experts at the conference. Luiz DeRose, director of programming environments, will speak on Cray's Cascade project devoted to developing a new generation of high-productivity computer systems capable of sustained performance in excess of one petaflop (a quadrillion floating-point operations per second). Cascade, a key element in Cray's Adaptive Supercomputing vision for heterogeneous computing, is sponsored in part by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under its High Productivity Computing Systems program. In addition, Michael Karo, principal engineer at Cray, will lead a technical discussion on Cray's Application Level Placement Scheduler (ALPS) and the challenges surrounding resource management for large scale systems. And Kevin Peterson, software technical project leader, will talk about a Cray initiative to develop a 'lightweight' or low-overhead Linux that combines the performance advantages of a specialized lightweight kernel with the familiarity and functionality of Linux. The LCI International Conference is a four-day event that attracts many of the world's top practitioners of cluster computing. It includes conferences, tutorials and a broad range of presentations and papers delivered by computer professionals in industry, academia and government. Events at the conference address the various ways that organizations are enhancing performance and scalability in clusters, and integrating scientific and engineering applications into cluster architectures. For more information about the conference, go to its Web site.