GAMING

Those interested in the challenge of evaluating the performance and reliability of petascale computing systems and of developing application codes that scale effectively on these systems should plan to attend the SC06 Birds of a Feather Session “Evaluating Petascale Infrastructure Systems: Benchmarks, Models, and Applications.” The BoF will take place Wednesday, Nov. 15, from 5:30 – 7:30 p.m. at the Tampa Convention Center, room 17 (please confirm the room number with signs in the convention center). Sponsored by the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), the BoF will address a variety of topics, including: - scaling properties of benchmark suites - scalable machine models - application modeling to predict scaling for future machines - the challenge of preparing applications for petascale environments - the importance of all these issues to petascale acquisition decisions Representatives of large-system vendors, funding agencies, infrastructure operators, application development groups, and others with a stake in the successful design, operation and use of petascale systems are invited to attend. The BoF is related to the efforts of the National Science Foundation Cyberinfrastructure Evaluation Center, which is led by researchers at RENCI and SDSC. The Cyberinfrastructure Center uses a wide range of analysis tools to predict and evaluate the effectiveness of innovative and future systems in addressing scientific problems of interest to the NSF. The project seeks to advance the development of cyberinfrastructure by creating and validating performance models of strategic NSF computational science applications and by assessing the interdependence of alternative hardware, middleware and software implementations on application performance. The BoF session will be used to begin planning for a series of workshops on petascale performance and application scalability issues.