ENGINEERING

By Tim Little, Editor and CEO / HECMS -- The 7th Annual Linux Cluster Institute conference, held in Norman, OK at the University of Oklahoma, kicked-off with Dr. Jack Dongarra providing some very interesting insight as seen in Top 500 Supercomputer list. Along with Dr. Dongarra, Dr. Stephen Wheat from Intel and HPC Program Manager George Jones from Dell rounded out the first day of conference proceedings. Dr. Dongarra and his team have tracked the Top 500 list for over 10 years. Systems that were found on the top of this list when it first started were actually slower than the laptop computer today. Will there be a Teraflop laptop in your future? Well, if we continue to remain on the same performance curve as we have seen for the past 10 years, then yes it is feasible. Dr. Dongarra did not want to carry the battery though… Peta flop computing system are now being forecasted by a number of vendors whether they are the winner’s of the DARPA HPCS project or not. Dr. Dongarra listed 12 that he knew about. Dell is planning to have no less than five (1) Petaflop computer systems installed in leading educational institutions by 2009. Per Mr. Jones, Dell understands the need to develop and make accessible the most powerful systems to the world’s educational institutions. It will be out of these educational institutions that rapid development and improvements will be made to make use of these extremely powerful systems. Mr. Jones is looking at a number of partnering institutions to help this project along. Installation of a Petaflop system has gone well beyond the traditional issue - Do we have the funding. Funding in today’s day and age is less of an issue than in the past. The most important people in Petaflop computing aspirations are the organization’s Facilities Management. Mr. Jones is quick to point out Power and Cooling are playing an ever more important aspect to installation and locating existing institutions that can handle such requirements. While we do not have an exact number of what power a Petaflop system might take, mention of owning your own Nuclear Power Plant or at least contacting them does come up. Dr. Wheat shared Intel’s roadmap for future chips. While Intel in the past focused on the desktop / laptop issues, Dr. Wheat has for sometime and continues to further Intel interest in high-end computing. Along with sharing Intel’s chip roadmap, Dr. Wheat works closely with many institutions and organizations in determining the right actions and development paths required to sustain Intel as the leading supplier of CPUs for high-end computing. Dr. Wheat’s presentation highlighted, how Intel has found a path in which they can decrease the CPU’s demand for watts and increase the CPU’s efficiency in switching speed. While one might think these are diametrically opposing they are, however the advent of peak clock speed and strongly suggested multi-core architectures has demanded a change in basic thinking. While over clocking one CPU can increase performance the additional heat generation is detrimental. Intel has proven that it is better to have a multi-core approach in which per say under clocking two cores closely doubles performance while using little more power than over clocking a single core CPU. Attendees at this year’s LCI conference are extremely impressed with the line up and content of the keynote speakers and track presentations. With over 100 attendees full of energy, sharing their particular area of expertise, The Linux Cluster Institute conference is advancing the development and productivity of Linux based clusters. Petaflop Linux Cluster based computing is coming. In the next months, more and more news will be released discussing this topic as the DARPA HPCS finalist(s) are named. Please mark May 2007 on your calendar as the next LCI conference will be held in Tahoe, CA, when Petaflop computing will be 52 weeks closer….