At the hpc-ch booth at SC11 you could have read on a signboard that CSCS is a proud member of the HPC Advisory Board. Brian Sparks, a representative of the of the HPC Advisory Board at SC11, visited us at the booth. We asked Brian to present the board and some of his activities.
Brian tells us that the HPC Advisory Board is an open community that was started in 2008. Now, just three years later there are 270 members worldwide, a variety of ISV, OEM, independent Hardware vendors, as well as all the different end users both in academia and in research. All members come together for a common goal: being able to take advantage of HPC technologies and make them very easy to use.
According to Brian, CSCS is an important partner for the HPC Advisory Board for a number of reasons. CSCS has been the first center of excellence outside the USA, followed by China. These centers are basically providing tools and outbound activities to be able to promote HPC to users of all kinds. In the last two years the HPC Advisory Board together with CSCS have organized together three days hands-on workshops in Lugano.
The third annual workshop will be organized again with CSCS and will take place on March 13-15, 2012 in Lugano. The same place has been already booked for the fourth workshop in 2013. This is a great workshop not only for people in Switzerland but also in the surrounding countries to get in and have nice three days of heavy information in terms of MPI, parallel programming languages, GPU, storage technology, network topologies, and some hand-on clustering. At the end there will also be a little competition and some great prizes.
Brian also recognizes the importance of hpc-ch as media partner for the HPC Advisory Council. hpc-ch covers not only the workshop in Lugano but also the workshop in the ISC time frame.
We look forward to meeting Brian and the HPC Advisory Board in March 2012 in Lugano.
SUNNYVALE, CA. and LUGANO, SWITZERLAND – Dec. 12, 2011 – The HPC Advisory Council, a leading organization for high-performance computing research, outreach and education, and CSCS, the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, will host the HPC Advisory Council Switzerland Conference 2012 in the Lugano Convention Centre, Lugano, Switzerland, from March 13-15, 2012. The conference will focus on High-Performance Computing (HPC) education, hands-on and classroom training and overviews of new important HPC developments and trends.
The conference will include comprehensive education for topics such as high-speed interconnects, high-performance and parallel I/O, communication libraries (such as MPI, SHMEM and PGAS), GPU and accelerations, Big Data, high-performance cloud computing, and will include advanced topics and development for upcoming HPC technologies. In addition, attendees will receive hands-on training for topics on clustering, network, troubleshooting, tuning, and optimizations.
“Continuing our successful international conference programs, the HPC Advisory Council Switzerland Conference is expected to uphold our tradition of providing rich educational content, taught from some of the industry´s most recognized luminaries and scientists, that will help HPC users optimize their HPC systems and experience,” said Gilad Shainer, chairman of the HPC Advisory Council. “We are pleased to collaborate again with the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre for this upcoming hands-on technical training and education conference, and will continue to assist and provide resources for industry and community organizations to better leverage HPC system capabilities and improve productivity and efficiency.”
“The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre is delighted to continue our collaboration with the HPC Advisory Council,” said Hussein Nasser El-Harake at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre who serves as the Director of the HPC Advisory Council Center of Excellence in Switzerland. “The council continues to be a cornerstone for HPC outreach and education and we are looking forward to providing attendees a very rich and engaging training program that enhances their usage of HPC technologies and platforms.”
Sponsorship opportunities are available today and provide exceptional “budget-conscious” awareness opportunities. Media sponsorship and coverage is being provided by HPC-CH, insideHPC and Scientific Computing World.
hpc-ch is looking for Swiss Teams to participate to ISC12 Student Cluster Competition
Are student at a Swiss university?
Have you strong interest in HPC / Supercomputing?
Do you want to represent Switzerland in an international competition?
Then send an e-mail to michele.delorenzi@cscs.ch so that we can get in contact with you! Registration is open to teams and single participants.
hpc-ch will take care to support you in preparing for the competition. So we will organize specific courses and help you finding sponsors for hardware and travel expenses.
Latest day for the registration is Friday October 28th. So hurry up!
Memberes of the hpc-ch community are invited to forward this message inside their university to reach the largest possible number of possible interested students.
Student Cluster Competition
ISC’12 will feature a new activity – the HPCAC-ISC Student Cluster Competition as an opportunity to showcase student expertise in a friendly yet spirited competition. The competition will feature small teams that compete to demonstrate the incredible capabilities of state-of- the-art high-performance cluster hardware and software.
In a real-time challenge, teams of six undergraduate and/or high school students will build a small cluster of their own design on the ISC exhibit floor and race to demonstrate the greatest performance across a series of benchmarks and applications. The students will have a unique opportunity to learn, experience and demonstrate how high-performance computing influence our world and day-to-day learning.
Held in collaboration of the HPC Advisory Council and ISC, the Student Cluster Competition is designed to introduce the next generation of students to the high performance computing world and community.
Competition Description
The Competition is an intense challenge, where the hard work and preparation of student teams will culminate on the exhibit floor in Hamburg, Germany during ISC12. Student teams will compete to:
Build and configure an HPC cluster
Run HPC benchmarks to achieve the best performance
Run a real-world workload consisting of four designated scientific applications to achieve the highest throughput of accurate runs
Convey to student cluster competition participants and judges their HPC knowledge through visualizations, interviews, and booth display, including a short outreach presentation to student participants
Points will be awarded for all three components. The team scoring the highest aggregate points across all three components will be the overall winner of the competition.
The HPC Advisory Council, a leading organization for high-performance computing research, outreach and education, announced that it will honor seven of its members including Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) for their contribution and support during the 2010-2011 time frame. Brian Sparks tell us more about the prize received by CSCS.
The HPC Advisory Council will hold the 2011 European Workshop on June 19th, 2011, in conjunction with the ISC´11 conference in Hamburg, Germany. The workshop will focus on HPC productivity, and advanced HPC topics and futures, and will bring together system managers, researchers, developers, computational scientists and industry affiliates to discuss recent developments and future advancements in High-Performance Computing.
