The HPC Advisory Council and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre will host again the HPC Advisory Council Switzerland Conference 2012 in the
Lugano Convention Centre, Lugano, Switzerland, March 13-15, 2012
The conference will focus on High-Performance Computing education, training (including hands-on) and overview of new developments. The conference will include the following sections per day:
High Speed Networks
High Performance and Parallel I/O
Communication libraries: MPI, SHMEM, PGAS
GPU computing, CUDA, OpenCL
Big Data
Advanced topics / Technologies / development / the road to Exascale
It will bring together system managers, researchers, developers, computational scientists, students and industry affiliates for cross-training and to discuss recent HPC developments and future advancements.
Quantum computers, should they be realized one day, will inevitably make errors. Therefore, they need special error correcting mechanisms. The most important part of it, a so-called Toffoli gate, has now been realized by ETH scientists with superconducting circuits.
Photograph of the superconducting 3-qubit-processor mounted on and connected to a high frequency printed circuit board. (Image: Quantum Device Lab, ETH Zurich)
In a classical computer there happens one error in about ten quadrillion (1016) operations. The goal in quantum computing is to have less than one error in 10.000 (104) operations. Lars Steffen, PhD student in Wallraff´s group and co-author of the publication says that this is a reasonable goal, since errors in quantum computation can never be avoided. «If you want to do complicated quantum information processing, these errors need to be corrected», Andreas Wallraff said.
ETH-professor Andreas Wallraff and his team could now realize a Toffoli gate using a chip with superconducting circuits and could verify its functionality with the newest methods. The results of the study were now published in «Nature».
The Swiss German television SF DRS reported in the transmission Einstein about the research results of Prof. Lucio Mayer of the University of Zurich about the first realistic simulation of the birth of a galaxy similar to our Milky Way.
There are the last available days to submit papers for the ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers to be held in May 15th to 17th, 2012 in Cagliari, Italy (deadline for submission is January 9th, 2012).
The increasing complexity, performance, cost and energy efficiency needs of current and future applications require novel and innovative approaches for the design of computing systems. Boundaries between state of the art and revolutionary innovation constitute the computing frontiers that must be pushed forward to provide the support required for the advancement of science, engineering and information technology. The Computing Frontiers conference focuses on a wide spectrum of advanced technologies and radically new solutions relevant to the development of the whole spectrum of computer systems, from embedded to high-performance computing.
Authors are invited to submit full papers to the main conference and Ph.D. students are invited to submit an extended abstract for a special Ph.D. forum and poster session.
Papers are solicited in, but not limited to, the following areas:
Applications, programming and performance analysis of advanced architectures
Next-generation high performance computing and systems
Accelerators: many-core, GPU, custom, reconfigurable, embedded, and hybrid
Defect- and variability-tolerant designs, dependable computing
Power and energy efficiency: architectures, compilers and algorithms
Virtualization and virtual machines
Cloud-, internet-scale, service-oriented and smart infrastructure computing
Compilers and operating systems: adaptive, run-time, and auto-tuning
System management and security
Quantum and nano-scale computing
Impact of novel technology (e.g. NV memory, silicon photonics) on computing
Computational neuroscience, neuromorphic and biologically-inspired architectures
Computational aspects of intelligent systems and robotics
Reconfigurable, autonomic, organic, and self-organizing computation and systems
Interfaces and visualization for emerging applications and systems
Novel frontiers in computational science and scientific data repositories
Storing, managing, analyzing, and searching large data sets (” big data “)
In the last weeks the international press was reporting about the first results in the search for the Higg particle at CERN. The infrastructure behind the the LHC experiment in Geneva is impressing in all respects. A large number of technicians and researchers is working around the clock assuring that the infrastructure is working.
In fact the infrastructure is not located only in Geneva but is scattered all around the world. A very powerful grid of supercomputers allows to analyze the huge amount of data being produced.
CSCS is also contributing to the experiment by running a Tier-2 cluster used by Swiss particle physicists. Last October we have been invited by our physicists colleagues to visit where the data we are analyzing is coming from. We visited CERN and in particular the control room for the ATLAS experiment and the facility used to test the magnets used to accelerate the particles.
In addition we have also visited the CMS monitoring/shifters room, the LHC monitoring room, the (formerly) Heavy Ions initial accelerator that is now the first circular accelerator after the linear one in the beginning, and the beginning of everything, where the small bottle of hydrogen is.
CERN Accelerator Complex
Since this is Christmas time, we decided to put almost the full length of our visit at CERN. The movies are only recommended to people really liking physics and technology and that do not get bored too quickly…
In the movies you will have the chance to see what is happening behind the scenes at CERN:
The plenary room where all the important announcement are made
The “couloir des pas perdus”
The ATLAS building from outside
The ATLAS control room with scientists and technicians working in front of their control monitors
The CMS satellite control room
The data canter of CERN with thousands of servers
The first node of the modern WWW infrastructure used by Tim Berners Lee (a NeXT workstation with a small hand written label “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER DOWN!!”)
We would like Marc Goulette (ATLAS visit) and Szymon Gadomski (magnet testing facility visit) for their availability as all our colleagues at CHIPP supporting our work.
