HPC Garage

Georgia Tech has been named an NVIDIA CUDA Center of Excellence, to be led by Prof. Jeffrey Vetter, an Oak Ridge National Laboratory computer scientist with a joint appointment in our very own School of Computational Science and Engineering. Congratulations to Jeff and Georgia Tech!

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/nvidia-names-georgia-institute-of-technology-a-cuda-center-of-excellence-2010-08-23?reflink=MW_news_stmp 

  Just returned from the DOE-sponsored CScADS Workshop on Libraries and Autotuning for Petascale Applications, held this year in the lovely Snowbird, Utah. The agenda featured exciting developments in domain-specific optimization, software engineering, compilers, languages, and mechanized derivation techniques. Click here for the full agenda and slides.

More blurbs! This one by realworldtech.com appears in a summary of HotPar'10:

http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT072610001641&p=6

Update: HPCwire mention:

http://www.hpcwire.com/blogs/Postcards-From-the-Edge-of-Parallel-Computing-99592644.html

We have two papers that will appear at this year's ACM/IEEE International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, a.k.a., "Supercomputing" or "SC", to be held in New Orleans in November, including one by Aparna and another that is a Gordon Bell Prize Finalist!

Jee and Rich just returned from the Sixth International Workshop on Parallel Matrix Algorithms and Applications (PMAA 2010), which the University of Basel in Switzerland hosted this year. There were many interesting talks, including a keynote by colleague and collaborator, George Biros, sessions on GPUs and autotuning in matrix computations, as well as Jee's reprise of his PPoPP 2010 talk on sparse matrix-vector multiply on GPUs.

The University of Basel campus abuts the Rhine river. Rich wonders how students and faculty there still manage to get so much great work done.

Rich just got back from the USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Parallelism (HotPar), where he presented the lab's meta-analysis of the potential and limitations of GPU systems. Slides for the talk should soon appear on the HotPar'10 page if they are not there already.

The workshop itself was great fun! In particular, it had a uniquely lively atmosphere, with highly interactive talk sessions, a prominent and high-quality poster session, great lunch discussions, all at an amazing price! (To reduce cost, we stayed and "workshopped" on Berkeley's Clark Kerr facilities. Lodging + all meals + registration was only about $600 or so. Amazing!)

As an added bonus, Rich accidentally missed his flight back to ATL and so took a minute to drop by the original Hewlett-Packard Garage, depicted above. It's a great reminder of the kind of impact the HPC Garage hopes to have some day.