CLOUD

PITTSBURGH, PA -- A workshop to examine the issues and challenges involved in scaling application codes to run on machines comprised of thousands of processors will be held May 20 and 21 at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. Called "Scaling to New Heights," the workshop is sponsored by the three lead centers in the NSF Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and by the U.S. Department of Energy laboratories under the leadership of the Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Workshop planners are seeking papers that will shed light on scaling issues from tool developers, computational scientists, application scientists, and any others who have insights into effective scaling techniques. Papers are due March 15 and should be between 10 and 30 pages. Accepted papers will become the topics for 30-minute talks presented by one of the authors. Papers can be submitted via email to begandy@psc.edu or online via the workshop website www.psc.edu/scaling_workshop/workshop.html. Major funding agencies and corporations are making huge investments in distributed-memory architectures that have the potential of solving previously unsolvable critical scientific and engineering problems. Furthermore, new and alternative architectures are emerging such as "processor-in-memory" and "embedded computing" architectures, which could result in machines with 10,000 to 100,000 processors. In order to use these new computers to their fullest potential, many questions must be asked and answered. These include: What are the characteristics of applications that scale well? What kind of resources will emerging applications need? What are indicators of bad scaling? and, What tools exist to achieve better scaling? The workshop will address these and other issues through six invited and eight contributed talks, concluding with a panel discussion. Confirmed speakers so far are Jim Demmel, professor of mathematics and computer science at UC Berkeley; Manish Gupta, senior manager, emerging system software and part of the IBM Blue Gene Project; L. Kale, associate professor of computer science at thee University of Illinois; William Shelton, group leader of the computational condensed matter physics group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Paul Woodward, professor of astronomy and director of the laboratory for computational science and engineering at the University of Minnesota. Registration information is now available on the website. Because attendance will be limited to 100 participants, those interested in attending are urged to register as soon as possible. A $50 registration fee will cover all meals.