RCC Director Prof. David Abramson gave two keynote speeches in Taiwan in September and attended special workshops in China with the teams that built the world’s top two fastest supercomputers.
Prof. Abramson attended the IEEE Cluster 2016 conference in Taipei, Taiwan, where he gave two keynote addresses: one entitled “Caches All the Way Down: Infrastructure for Data Science”, the other entitled “It’s not my Fault: Finding Errors in Parallel Programs.”
“These keynotes gave me a chance to talk about the infrastructure we have built in RCC for supporting data-intensive science, in particular, high performance computer FlashLite and data storage fabric MeDiCI,” said Prof. Abramson. “These platforms attracted a lot of interest amongst the delegates. I also spoke about our debugging research, which was recently selected as a finalist in the R&D100 Awards in the U.S. [a story about which was featured in last month’s RCC News].”
IEEE Cluster 2016 drew speakers from all around the world, and a vibrant set of papers, keynotes and panels was available.
Other keynote addresses included Torsten Hoefler from ETH Zürich, Switzerland, on "Theory and Practice in HPC: Modelling, Programming, and Networking”, and Michela Taufer from the University of Delaware on "Who is afraid of I/O? Exploring I/O Challenges and Opportunities at the Exascale”. “We were privileged to have Michela present the same material in her recent RCC seminar,” said Prof. Abramson. (View the video of Dr Taufer’s RCC seminar.)
Following the conference, a number of speakers, including Prof. Abramson, were invited to special workshops in China by the teams that built the Sunway TaihuLight and the Tianhe-2 machines, which currently occupy the top two positions on the prestigious Top500 list, which ranks the world’s fastest supercomputers.
Prof. Abramson visited the supercomputers at their locations in Wuxi (TaihuLight) and Guangzhou (Tianhe-2) in China. At workshops in both provinces, Prof. Abramson presented RCC’s debugging work.
