pioneering and promoting parallel computing research and education

alternate text

Parallel@Illinois at SC09

Parallel@Illinois represents activities and resources that have been pioneering and promoting parallelism for over four decades. Current efforts include the Blue Waters petascale supercomputer, a global Cloud Computing Testbed, a CUDA Center of Excellence, a Center for Extreme Scale Computation, the Joint Laboratory for Petascale Computing, an OpenSPARC Center of Excellence, and the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center.

Exhibition Booths — Nov. 16-19

Contact Information

Questions about Parallel@Illinois at SC09 may be directed to Cheri Helregel, 217-714-7200. Questions about NCSA-related activities may be directed to Trish Barker, 217-390-3593.

William Gropp, SC09 Technical Chair

Illinois Professor of Computer Science William Gropp, has a long history of involvement with the Supercomputing conference series — dating back to Albuquerque in 1991 — and is delighted to be serving as the 2009 Technical Program Chair. Gropp talks about what attendees and exhibitors can expect from this year's program in an online interview. At Illinois, Gropp's research interests focus on efficiently and correctly expressing parallel programs — one of the biggest challenges in parallel computing for scientific computing. Gropp is one of the co-developers of PETSc and also serves as co-PI of the Blue Waters project and Deputy Director of Research for IACAT at Illinois.

Technical Program

Sunday, November 15

Tutorial S01: Application Supercomputing and the Many-Core Paradigm Shift
8:30AM - 5:00PM | Room TBD
William Gropp is among the presenters of this tutorial that provides an overview of supercomputing application development with an emphasis on the many-core paradigm shift and programming languages.

Tutorial S04: High Performance Computing with CUDA
8:30AM - 5:00PM | Room TBD
John E. Stone, Associate Director of the NVIDIA CUDA Center of Excellence at Illinois, particiaptes in this tutorial where engineers will partner with academic and industrial researchers to present CUDA and discuss its advanced use for science and engineering domains. The morning session will introduce CUDA programming, motivate its use with many brief examples from different HPC domains, and discuss tools and programming environments. The afternoon will discuss advanced issues such as optimization and sophisticated algorithms/data structures, closing with real-world case studies from domain scientists using CUDA for computational biophysics, fluid dynamics, seismic imaging, and theoretical physics.

Workshop: Third International Workshop on High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing Technology and Applications (HPRCTA'09)
9:00AM - 5:30PM | Room A108
HPRCTA'09 brings together domain scientists and technology developers from industry and academia to present and discuss new research on the use of field-programmable gate array technologies for high-performance reconfigurable computing. The workshop is co-organized by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the George Washington University, and OpenFPGA.

Monday, November 16

Tutorial M02: Advanced MPI
8:30AM - 5:00PM | Room TBD
William Gropp presents at this tutorial that plans to cover several advanced features of MPI that can help users program such machines and architectures effectively. Topics to be covered include parallel I/O, multithreaded communication, one-sided communication, dynamic processes, and fault tolerance. In all cases, we will introduce concepts by using code examples based on scenarios found in real applications and present performance results on the latest machines.

Tutorial M03: Developing Scientific Applications using Eclipse and the Parallel Tools Platform
8:30AM - 5:00PM | Room TBD
The Eclipse Parallel Tools Platform (PTP) is an open-source Eclipse Foundation project for parallel scientific application development. The application development workbench for the Blue Waters petascale system is based on Eclipse and PTP. Jeff Overbey (Dept. of CS) and Jay Alameda (NCSA) are among the presenters in this tutorial that aims to provide a complete introduction, with hands-on exercises, to using the Eclipse PTP workbench for developing parallel scientific applications.

Tutorial M05: Productive Performance Engineering of Petascale Applications with POINT and VI-HPS
8:30AM - 5:00PM | Room TBD
NCSA's Rick Kufrin is among the presenters for this tutorial, which presents state-of-the-art performance tools for leading-edge HPC systems, focusing on how the tools are used for performance engineering of petascale scientific applications. Four parallel performance evaluation toolsets from the POINT (Performance Productivity through Open Integrated Tools) and VI-HPS (Virtual Institute - High Productivity Supercomputing) projects are discussed-PerfSuite, TAU, Scalasca, and Vampir.

Tuesday, November 17

BoF: Breaking the Barriers to Parallelization at Mach Speed
12:15PM - 1:15PM | Room D139-140
With the proliferation of multicore processors and commodity clusters EVERYONE should be writing parallelized applications by now, shouldn't they? Outside of the HPC community there is a growing awareness that in the future all programs will need to be designed and developed to exploit parallelism. So why is there any hesitance? What are the barriers? UPCRC Illinois Co-Director, Marc Snir, has been invited to join this panel that seeks to explore the diverse reasons behind decisions to not parallelize. Participants will share their successful methods for reaching outside the HPC community to bring parallelization to a broader audience.

Poster Session: Performance Comparison of Intrepid, Ranger and Jaguar using Scientific Applications
5:15PM - 7:00PM | Oregon Ballroom Lobby
Presented by the Parallel Programming Lab which is directed by Laxmikant V. Kale, Illinois Professor of Computer Science. Their paper presented a performance comparison of three of the fastest machines in the world: IBM's Blue Gene/P installation at ANL (Intrepid), the SUN-Infiniband cluster at TACC (Ranger) and Cray's XT4 installation at ORNL (Jaguar). Comparisons were based on three applications selected by NSF for the Track 1 proposal to benchmark the Blue Waters system: NAMD, MILC and a turbulence code, DNS. They present a comprehensive overview of the architectural details of each of these machines and compare across them. They hope insights from this work will be useful to application developers who port and tune applications on these and future machines to obtain maximum performance.

Wednesday, November 18

BoF: Early Access to the Blue Waters Sustained Petascale System
12:15PM - 1:15PM | Room A103-104
NCSA's Bob Fiedler and Bob Wilhelmson will describe the Blue Waters petascale computing system and the PRAC program, which is the pathway to obtain an allocation on Blue Waters. They will discuss support available to PRAC winners in preparing their applications for Blue Waters, including training and access to application performance simulators and early hardware. They also provide tips on writing a winning proposal.

Doctoral Research Showcase: Scalable Automatic Topology Aware Mapping for Large Supercomputers
3:30PM - 3:45PM | Room PB252
Parallel Programming Lab's Abhinav Bhatele showcases his dissertation that demonstrates the effect of network contention on message latencies and proposes and evaluates techniques to minimize communication traffic and hence, bandwidth congestion on the network.

Paper Session: Towards a Framework for Abstracting Accelerators in Parallel Applications: Experience with Cell Supercomputers - FINALIST for Best Student Paper!
4:00PM - 4:30PM | Room PB256
While accelerators have become more prevalent in recent years, they are still considered hard to program. In this session on GPU Applications, David Kunzman and Laxmikant V. Kale (Parallel Programming Lab) extend a framework for parallel programming so that programmers can easily take advantage of the Cell processor's Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs) as seamlessly as possible. Congratulations to David for being selected a finalist for Best Student Paper!

Masterworks Session: Fighting Swine Flu through Computational Medicines by Klaus Schulten
4:15PM - 5:00PM | Room PB253-254
The swine flu virus, spreading more and more rapidly, threatens to also become resistant against present forms of treatment. In this lecture, Klaus Schulten illustrates how a look through the "computational microscope" (CM) contributes to shaping a pharmacological strategy against a drug resistant swine flu. The CM is based on simulation software running efficiently on many thousands of processors, analyzes terabytes of data made available through GPU acceleration, and is adopted in the form of robust software by thousands of biomedical researchers worldwide. Klaus Schulten is an Illinois Professor of Physics and is a full-time faculty member in the Beckman Institute for Advance Science and Technology where he directs the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group.

BoF: Can OpenCL Save HPC?
5:30PM - 7:00PM | Room E145-146
John E. Stone contributes to this session that discusses OpenCL — a framework expressely designed to help computational scientists write portable, sustainable code. Stone will cover the use of OpenCL for molecular dynamics and molecular visualization & analysis.

Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation Informational Session
5:30PM - 7:00PM | Room B119
The Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation will host an information session at SC09. The event will explain the consortium and how to collaborate with members on a wide range of projects. It will also include an overview of the Blue Waters sustained-petascale supercomputer that will come online at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications in 2011. Everyone is welcome. More information on the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation is available at: www.greatlakesconsortium.org.

Friday, November 20

Panel Session: The Road to Exascale: Hardware and Software Challenges
10:30AM - 12:30PM | Room PB251
Marc Snir joines this panel that will review hardware and software advances needed for exascale computing and will attempt to lay out research, development and engineering roadmaps to successfully overcome the obstacles in our path and create the needed advances. Snir currently serves as co-principal investigator of the Blue Waters project, co-leads the Joint Laboratory for Petascale Computing, and is co-director of UPCRC Illinois.

Check back frequently for updated info about Illinois activities at SC09 in Portland, Oregon - November 14 through 22, 2009.