We were very happy to again welcome Rich Brueckner of insideHPC at the Swiss hpc-ch booth at SC11 after his recent visit at ISC11. We had the discussion shortly before the end of the exhibit. This gave us the opportunity to relax a little bit after three very intensive exhibition days and to have a more philosophical approach to supercomputing and life in general.
We started by discussing the similarities between supercomputers (clusters) and his Java motorcycle he was exposing at his booth (yes, there are similarities). Rich told us about some highlights of the conference like the interactive Earth displayed at the NOAA booth. The discussion then continued to what makes HPC so interesting for us: Are these the latest GPU models or the applications of supercomputing to better understand the world?
Finally we closed the discussion looking at the HPC initiatives in Switzerland (CSCS has been the first center deploying a Cray XK6). Finally we said goodbye until March 2012 in Lugano at the HPC Advisory Workshop.
John Feo is the director of the Center for Adaptive Supercomputer Software (CASS) at the Pacific Northwest Laboratory. John and his team are using a Cray XMT 1 supercomputer since three years to study a large spectrum of applications like graphs algorithms, Dynamic network analysis (DNA), Emerging Subnetwork Patterns, bioinformatics, semantic search, and semantic database development.
The CASS group is also developing compilers and runtime systems to improve the compilation of code and is working on new programming models for highly multithreated machines like the XMT.
For John one important application of the Cray XMT will be in companies like Facebook, Google, or banks doing graphs algorithms, semantic search and knowledge discovery on huge data sets.
In this interview John explains the particularities of developing applications for this new kind of architectures and how his team is supporting users and scientists in porting their code.
Robert (Bob) Techentin is Principal Software Engineer in the Special Purpose Processor Development Group at Mayo Foundation (Rochester, Minnesota). Robert is one of the first users of the new Cray XMT supercomputer specially designed to analyze large amounts of data.
The Mayo Clinic is a large clinical practice for medicine and is specialized on medical research and medical education. The new Cray XMT is being used to tackle different kinds of biomedical and bioinformatic problems that have been very challenging using traditional computer architectures.
In one research project Bob is going to work with the electronic medical records on a million of patients with millions of events. The researchers assume that there are secrets buried in the information that is very challenging to extract using traditional data mining techniques. One example is the discovery that weight loss drug Fen-phen can lead to heart valve damage. The relationship has accidentally been discovered by a Mayo clinic data analyst. A supercomputer could have helped researcher find earlier such a relationship.
There are other interesting and very valuable insights in the medical data that can not be mined out using a traditional relational data base management system. The Cray XMT is very good at graph analytics and can be used to find patterns that are very difficult to discover otherwise. The algorithms and the necessary data structures are being developed together with Cray and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The first results of this common effort are expected in about one year from now.
At Mayo the Cray XMT is also being used to look at different ways to assemble the genomic sequences from the sequence data and to analyze the differences between individuals and the species references. Another possible application is free form text analysis. The clinic has a lot of free form text that is recorded as part of medical records that can be analyzed using the XMT to draw new conclusions.
CSCS is also deploying one of the first Cray XMT worldwide that is made available to research from different scientific fields.
Ulrich Schättler is working for Germany’s National Meteorological Service, the Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD). He started at DWD as software engineer. Years ago he has been asked to parallelize the weather forecast model on distributed memory computers. Since then he is getting involved in weather forecasting and operational forecasting. In his actual function he is responsible to produce day by day the weather forecasts and to give support to the users.
The model used by DWD is named COSMO and is the same being used in Switzerland and other countries in Europe and worldwide. COSMO has been developed in the late 90thies as a non hydrostatic regional model. COSMO is not only being used by weather services but also by the academia for research and to teach and train students . DWD and Ueli Schättler are also involved in the Swiss HP2C project aimed to port COSMO to next generation HPC platforms.
At this place we would also like to remember you about the Colloquium at MeteoSwiss on How much HPC does meteorology need? planned for tomorrow, Tuesday, November 29th.
At SC11 David Cremese (IBM Switzerland & Austria) visited the hpc-ch booth. As deep computing sales manager David is also responsible for the Swiss universities and research centers represented at the hpc-ch booth.
In the interview David tells us about his function at IBM and what makes Switzerland an interesting market for HPC. He also tells us about the research activities of IBM in Switzerland with the IBM Rüschlikon research lab. An example of research project is Aquasar together with ETH Zurich. David also tell us about his impressions of the SC11 conference.
For additional information you may visit the IBM Deep Computing pages or directly contact David per e-mail (dcr@ch.ibm.com).
