November 2011

Portrait of Children in a Sandbox.
Ted Jaslow, 1991.

By the time this issue hits the streets, we may have heard news on the rebid of the Blue Waters project. You may recall Blue Waters. It’s the program that caused a huge embarrassment for the NSF, NCSA and IBM, but is now being cleverly referred to by the spin doctors as a strategic business decision. Whatever happens with the ‘new’ Blue Waters program, the program as originally awarded ended in failure. So what’s different with the recently announced collaboration to build Titan? Do these organizations have what it takes to reach the finish line? We think this is important enough that we have used Titan as a central theme for this issue.
 

An Interview with Pete Ungaro, CEO of Cray

by Mike Bernhardt
The award of Titan to Cray is a milestone event for the HPC community. But for many of the hardware and software engineers at Cray, it’s just another day in the office. This is what Cray does. They build very large systems and they push the envelope. Next?
 

An Interview with Jack Wells, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

by Mike Bernhardt
The winner’s circle is nothing new to the folks at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They placed a big wager on Jaguar in the last race – and they won. Now, they are ready to make the next wager – and it’s a big one. They’re out of the gate – and everyone is watching Titan.
 

An Interview with The Portland Group’s Doug Miles

by Staff
As the systems get more complex, we all agree there will be an increasing need for enhanced compilers and development tools. At the core of this discussion, we always hear reference to the same company: The Portland Group.
 

An Interview With Steve Scott, CTO, Tesla Business Unit, NVIDIA

by Staff
"Oak Ridge’s decision to base Titan on Tesla GPUs underscores the growing belief that GPU-based heterogeneous computing is the best approach to reach exascale computing levels within the next decade."
 

AMD's Vlad Rozanovich

AMD is the king of leapfrog and a driving force in moving HPC forward. Now, their Interlagos processor has once again raised the bar and will be at the heart of the new Titan system being built by Cray. Titan is a major milestone win for AMD.

Community Feedback Section: The Exascale Report Asks.

by Staff
While the Blue Waters program is looking for new life with a rebid of the program, most voices throughout the community agree, Blue Waters as originally contracted failed to deliver.

The Exascale Report asked the following questions:

Q: How confident are you that Titan will succeed - and not go the way of Blue Waters?

Q: How will users cope - and how will we achieve any level of productivity - if systems get exponentially more complicated with thousands of processors and GPU accelerators?

Community Feedback Section: Questions for the next issue:

Send us your response to these questions for the next issue of The Exascale Report.

Join the Discussion

The Exascale Report encourages members of the HPC community to contribute articles dealing with key issues and technologies associated with the drive to develop exascale systems. Please submit a brief (150-250 word abstract) to idea@theexascalereport.com describing your proposed topic. We welcome original submissions from HPC practitioners. Articles will be peer reviewed.

Please note that success stories, white papers, press releases and other marketing communications collateral or public relations materials are not what we are looking for.