In high competition, RCC is one of the chosen ones to present a paper next month in Dallas, Texas at SC18, the world’s largest and most prestigious supercomputing conference.
“It’s a big deal to get into SC,” said RCC Director Prof. David Abramson. “The technical program is very competitive, so to have our paper accepted is quite an achievement.”
RCC PhD student Mark Endrei will present the paper on high-performance computing energy efficiency modelling of parallel applications on Tuesday, 13 November. The paper’s other authors include Dr Jin Chao, Dr Minh Dinh and Prof. David Abramson of RCC, Heidi Poxon and Luiz DeRose of Cray Inc., and Bronis R. de Supinski of the US Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The Australian Research Council Linkage scheme and industry partner Cray have supported the project over the past three years.
Mr Endrei said he was excited, if a little nervous, at the prospect of presenting at an international conference, which is likely to attract more than 10,000 participants.
“It is an amazing opportunity to work with leading researchers here at RCC and internationally on the very active research area of supercomputer energy efficiency. While supercomputers are unmatched in their number crunching ability, their electricity costs can be millions of dollars a year. Our work aims to provide tools that help supercomputer end users decide on trade-off options between performance and energy efficiency,” said Mr Endrei.
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) organise the enormous conference, which touches on just about every aspect of high-performance computing, from applications to software and hardware.
This year, Prof. Abramson chaired SC18's Test of Time Awards (ToTA) committee and served on the cluster and clouds paper panel.
US-based scientists Mike Warren and John Salmon were named in July as SC18’s ToTA winners for their 1993-published paper, “A Parallel Hashed Oct-Tree N-Body Algorithm.”
For the last few years, UQ and RCC have sponsored a small group of Brisbane high school students to attend the conference. This year, four Year 10 Queensland Academy for Science, Mathematics and Technology (QASMT) students—two girls and two boys—will attend SC18 over the week of 11–16 November. (Read RCC’s story about these students.)
