Independent High Performance Computing Seminar

HPC Is Changing


Independent High Performance Computing Seminar


Thursday, September 30th 2004


National Space Centre, Leicester, UK


HPC is at a major crossroads. Cluster capabilities are at unprecedented
levels and new technologies and applications have led to new challenges.
As the former mainstays of the Linux community have become increasingly
commercially focussed, it has become vital that academia, government and
industry are able to address their HPC strategy with access to the best
information.

	
We have organized a panel of industry experts from around the world and
will be inviting your feedback at an independent HPC seminar, aimed at
removing uncertainty, and involving and informing the UK HPC community.



    * 09:15 - Registration and refreshments
    * 10:00 - The future of free Linux
          o Redhat now offers exclusively commercial distributions, and
            other vendors are strongly focussed on revenue, so can there
            be a future for free Linux?
          o Will commercial application vendors support the free
            versions such as Fedora or Gentoo?
          o Could this spark a revival of commercial operating systems?
    * 11:30 - The future of 64 bit computing
          o First there was a choice of only Itanium, then came Opteron,
            and now Xeon 64 bit and PowerPC for Linux clusters - what is
            the future?
          o What advantages do 64-bit processors bring and what
            separates the offerings?
    * 14:00 - Controlling your cluster
          o Good management has been shown to radically improve the
            effectiveness of a cluster.
          o What options are available, what is best practice and where
            is it heading?
    * 15:30 - The future of high speed Interconnects
          o Infiniband is a new technology for high-performance
            interconnects which is aiming to be the standard.
          o What does this mean for other interconnects like Myrinet?
          o Will PCI express affect this with bandwidth in and out of
            servers to 10 Gb/sec?
    * 16:30 - Guest speaker from the Beagle Project.

Our keynote speaker from the ROCKS project will give a US perspective on
the future of open source. The panel of experts will demonstrate what
can be achieved with open-source and proprietary software for cluster
management.

Speakers from AMD, Intel and the PowerPC team will talk about the
relative advantages of each chipset regardless of which manufacturer you
chose.

Myricom and many other vendors will discuss openly the relative merits
of the technology and how to evaluate it. Applications do not always
scale uniformly and testing out a 32 node cluster does not mean the
solution will work well at 128 processors and beyond.

A number of applications vendors will discuss the platforms, operating
systems and networks they will support. With so much choice, not all
combinations can be supported - who will be the winners and how can you
ensure your application will run on your platform?

Please help support this event, in return we offer sustenance during the
day - and even a spot of lunch - and hopefully we'll end up with a
clearer idea of where the technology is going and where you want to take it.


For further information see http://www.streamline-computing.com/news_2.shtml