INDUSTRY

Silicon Graphics today announced that Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI's chief technology officer, asserts that existing high-performance computing architectures may be starting to limit the pace of science, research and development. In his opening keynote presentation at the 18th annual National High-Performance Computing and Communications Conference (HPCC) at the Hyatt Regency Newport Hotel, Newport, RI (March 30-April 1, 2004), Dr. Goh will discuss new concepts in computing architectures designed to offer the scientific and industrial community a way to accelerate innovation and discovery. This industry event will focus on supercomputing, homeland and cyber security, Internet security, grid computing, electronic banking, wireless computing, mass storage, and HPC applications. Dr. Goh will keynote this prestigious event for the second year in a row. His presentation, "Factors Influencing the Design of Next-Generation High End Computing and Visualization Architectures: facilitating scientific discovery to planned serendipity," will take place on Tuesday, March 30 at 9 a.m. "Dr. Goh is a noted industry visionary and the CTO of a company that has delivered a series of outstanding innovations to the high performance computing community," said Dr. John Miguel, HPCC program chair. "He brings extensive background and vast understanding of supercomputing technology and architectures, coupled with a compelling vision of the high performance computing industry's direction." "Today's methods of scientific and engineering investigation range from theoretical, experimental to computational science. In computational science, the classical approach has been modeling and simulation. The concern here is the growing gap between actual applications and peak compute performances," said Dr. Eng Lim Goh, senior vice president and CTO, SGI. "We believe one major solution to this growing performance gap is the new multi-paradigm computing architecture. It tightly integrates, what were previously, disparate computing architectures into a highly scalable single system and, thus, allows them to cooperate on the same data residing in scalable globally-addressable memory. Enabling scientists to focus on science, not computer science." "Additionally, with globally-addressable memory growing to Terascale sizes, a plethora of new, huge-memory applications that profoundly improve scientific and engineering productivity will come on line. From these, may emerge a new branch of computational science called data intensive methods. It includes the traditional method of query, to the more abstract methods of inference and even interactive data exploration. The availability of such a powerful range of interactive methods, for operation on Terascale data sets, all residing in monolithic globally-addressable memory, is a novel combination that will not only facilitate intended discoveries but may also give rise to a new complement which I will call 'planned serendipity'. The latter will be of growing significance in intelligence, science and engineering," said Dr. Goh. "And as the amount of data generated by faster and more productive systems grows, visualization will increasingly become an essential tool. The recent advances in display and related technologies, could pave the way for revolutionary new ways of visual, interactive and collaborative communications." The theme for this year's HPCC conference, "High-End Computing in the Wireless World: The Grid and Beyond," will highlight industry leaders from the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, DARPA, Los Alamos National Labs, Argonne National Labs, the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy and U.S. Army. Each year, the Council Conference Committee delivers an agenda full of prominent speakers who provide a wealth of information in a unique forum designed for exchanging information, discussing technical issues and transferring technology within the HPC community. Dr. Goh joined SGI 14 years ago and became chief technology officer in 2001. His tenure includes work in computer graphics algorithms and HPC architectures. A proponent of designing next-generation computer systems specifically for applications performance, Dr. Goh advocates computational density and a balanced multi-paradigm approach, across a globally-addressable memory, to architectural design that maps to the profile of customer applications. A Shell Cambridge University Scholar, he completed his Ph.D. research and dissertation on parallel architectures and computer graphics. He also holds a first-class honors degree in mechanical engineering from Birmingham University, U.K. The National High-Performance Computing and Communications Council holds an annual conference each spring. This is one of the few conferences that emphasize communication between manufacturers and users, as well as academics and the government agencies that establish policy and regulate the use of advanced technologies. More information can be found at http://www.hpcc-usa.org /.