Researchers, programmers and educators from The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) traveled to SC’07 to discuss innovations in HPC design, implementation, and use, and illustrate how supercomputers are solving grand challenge problems and driving economic progress in the 21st century. This international conference on high performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis ran from Nov. 10-16, 2007 in Reno, Nevada.
TACC, a research unit of The University of Texas at Austin, is one of the leading advanced computing centers in the United States. TACC’s work enables researchers to conduct leading-edge simulations and analyses using comprehensive terascale resources. Throughout the conference, TACC hosted a demonstration booth (#387) and provided presentations showcasing the results from its innovative R&D activities including: performance optimization of linear algebra; computational fluid dynamics analyses of flexible off-shore structures; remote and collaborative visualization; MyCluster software for orchestrating grid jobs and workflows; and many more.
In addition to live demos and presentations, TACC staff led four “Birds of a Feather” (BoF) talks – open forums where attendees discussed topics of mutual interest:
Chaired by Rebeka Villarreal Martinez, this BoF allowed those interested in community outreach to share their experiences informing the public about the value of advanced computing technologies in society. Participants discussed projects to increase public awareness of, interest in, and understanding of advanced computing technologies, as well as methods for designing, deploying, and evaluating activities that engage broad and diverse communities.
TACC’s Brad Armosky discussed career development and training for high-performance computing systems, outlining pedagogies, curricula, training and education resources that are available or need to be developed to meet the needs of future computational scientists.
TACC’s new supercomputing marvel, Ranger, will have over 60,000 processing cores with 1/2 petaflop peak performance, 125 TB memory, and 1.7 PB disk and will become available to the community in January, 2008. Speakers from TACC and its partner institutions, Cornell University and Arizona State University, will present an overview of the Ranger system, and information on upcoming training opportunities and the TeraGrid allocation process.
Thank you for joining TACC at Booth #387, learning about novel technologies and supercomputing solutions being developed at TACC, and participating in thought-provoking dialogue about the future of high-performance computing.