Society of HPC Professionals News and Announcements

Announcing 2012 Board of Directors Officers

Society of HPC Professionals — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 18:01:53 GMT

Announcing the officers for 2012:

President -- Earl Dodd

Vice President -- Susan Baldwin

Secretary -- Steve Hebert

Treasurer -- Scott Denham

We would also like to announce the addition of Geraint Morgan. Welcome Geraint!

You can read more information about each of these members on the Board of Directors page.

Newsletter Now Available!

Society of HPC Professionals — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 15:41:18 GMT

The first issue of our newsletter is now available! We will be writing a bi-monthly newsletter for 2012 and hope to include articles of relevance to you, the HPC users. If you have suggestions for the newsletter or would be interested in creating an article for submission, please contact our editor, Bill Menger at bmenger@hpcsociety.org. We hope you enjoy it.

Issue 01 Number 01 - March 2012

Officer Elections Underway

William Menger — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 15:09:37 GMT

The board has nominated a slate of officers for 2012 and is currently collecting online ballots from our membership. If you would like to participate in the election, you can join online.

Slate of nominees:

President -- Earl Dodd

Vice President -- Susan Baldwin

Secretary -- Steve Hebert

Treasurer -- Scott Denham

Addison Snell, CEO, Intersect360 will present "Technology Trends in HPC" in the Plenary Session at the SHPCP Fall Technology Meeting

Society of HPC Professionals — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 20:49:11 GMT

Addison Snell, CEO, Intersect360 Research

Presentation Title:
Technology Trends in HPC

Addison Snell will present his views on the important technology trends affecting the HPC market today and over the next three to five years. Specific technologies will include GPU accelerators, parallel file systems, and cloud computing, along with choices in interconnects, microprocessors, and operating systems. In his talk, Mr. Snell will draw upon several recent, broad-based studies of users in the HPC industry, including a new, groundbreaking study on HPC adoption drivers and barriers at the low end.

Intersect360 Research is a market advisory and consulting practice focused on the high performance computing industry. The user-driven research methodology of Intersect360 Research is inclusive of application workflows both within and beyond science and engineering and tracks the complete technology spectrum within HPC. Intersect360 Research maintains an exclusive content and research partnership with Tabor Communications, publishers of HPCwire and HPC in the Cloud, and Mr. Snell is co-host of the weekly HPCwire Soundbite podcast.

Ms. Susan Baldwin, Executive Director of Compute/Calcul Canada will deliver the Keynote Address at the SHPCP Fall Technology Meeting

Society of HPC Professionals — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 20:43:46 GMT

Ms. Susan Baldwin, Executive Director of Compute/Calcul Canada will deliver the Keynote Address at the SHPCP Fall Technology Meeting

Bio:

Susan Baldwin is Compute/Calcul Canada’s first Executive Director, responsible for leading the creation of a powerful national HPC platform for research. She works in collaboration with the university-based HPC consortia to provide for overall architecture and planning, software integration, operations and management and coordination of user support for the national HPC platform. She is responsible for developing and executing the strategic plan for HPC in Canada and securing the necessary funding. Compute Canada is also supporting the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) in the G-8 Exascale Project. In a recent consultation by the Government of Canada on a Digital Economy Strategy, the submission prepared by Ms. Baldwin won the most votes for the best idea.

Prior to taking the Executive Director position, she was the Chief Administrative Officer with CANARIE Inc., involved in the strategic planning and implementation for both advanced broadband networks and advanced applications and was responsible for the management of all funding programs.

For two decades prior to joining CANARIE, Ms. Baldwin held a variety of senior executive positions with various departments within the Government of Canada, including Executive Director, Broadcasting at the CRTC; Director General, Broadcasting Policy at the Department of Canadian Heritage; Director General, New Media with Industry Canada and Director, Research and Technology Policy with the Department of Communications. As Director General, New Media, she was instrumental in proposing and establishing the Information Highway Advisory Council and headed the Executive Secretariat. As a skilled negotiator, she was part of Canadian delegations to numerous international negotiations including the information highway and GATS (General Agreement on trade in services).

Ms. Baldwin holds an Honours BA from York University and a Masters degree from the University of Toronto.

Earl Dodd, Executive Director, Rocky Mountain Supercomputing Centers, Inc. will present "High Performance Computing for Mortals" in the Plenary Session at the SHPCP Fall Technology

Society of HPC Professionals — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 16:00:14 GMT

Earl Dodd, Executive Director, Rocky Mountain Supercomputing Centers, Inc.

Presentation Title

High Performance Computing for Mortals: There are Drivers & there are Passengers

Presentation Abstract

As we were entertained at this year’s ISC “HPC: Future Technology Building Blocks” session, new approaches will not emerge from evolutionary changes in processor speed and scale from today’s petascale and future exascale systems. These ultrascale systems will require fundamental breakthroughs in hardware technology, programming models, algorithms and software at the system and application levels. And therein lies the issue: What does the vast majority of the world do with our “hand-me-down” terascale cyberinfrastructures? Earl Dodd will address leading-edge, best practices for terascale computing for what the Council on Competitiveness calls the “Missing Middle.” An overview of HPC access via cloud computing models, benchmarking, tools, techniques and skills development will be presentedundefinedgrounding us to what is possible today and helping us mere mortals take benefit of the HPC ecosystem.

HPC gets its own society - E&P Magazine

Society of HPC Professionals — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 21:26:51 GMT

www.EPmag.com February 2010 | E&P | 19

HPC gets its own society:

A user group is being formed to acknowledge the huge impact highperformance

computing is having on the oil and gas industry.

By RHONDA DUEY, Senior Editor

Science and technology experts have always needed a place and time to meet and share their ideas. That need has not changed. But the science and technology have.

As trade organizations like the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG) increasingly showcased high-performance computing (HPC) during their annual conventions, it became apparent to a few folks that the needs of the HPC community within the oil and gas industry were not being adequately met. So recently six organizers got together to discuss the concept of creating a user group for this underserved population.

Ebb Pye, now secretary-treasurer of this budding organization, said that several attempts had been made previously to gauge the interest in such a group. In each case attendance far outweighed expectations. However, often the workshops covered such a broad range of topics that many of the specialists were disappointed with the outcome.

“We’re trying to find those people, find out how many there are, and then have special interest groups (SIGs) for them,” Pye said.

So recently the founders met to form the group, called the Society of HPC Professionals. In addition to Pye, current officers include Bill Menger as president, Nicolas McClean as vice-president, and Gary Crouse as executive director. Scott Morton and Herb Riley serve as board members. Crouse has agreed to fulfill his role gratis for the first year.

Working from the ground up

The group is starting small, soliciting opinions on its Web site (www.hpcsociety.org) and planning an initial users meeting to be held in late April. But its ambitions are large.

So far early activities include:

Establishing an organization that will focus on the interests of the HPC user;
Developing a Web page to provide society plans and meeting activities;
Recruiting companies to be founders and sponsors of the society;
Establishing a strong membership program;
Identifying strong areas of interest;
Conducting HPC workshops in conjunction with major industry conferences;
Arranging and coordinating

HPC workshops/seminars at

major universities;

Conducting SIGs to present/discuss topics of special interest; and
Conducting round table discussion meetings to provide direction for the society.

Pye added that he hopes the group will eventually expand beyond the Houston area and even beyond the boundaries of E&P.

Early participation has been good. Many major universities have expressed an interest in being involved, and already two companies have committed to sponsor the April meeting. “We think getting early sponsor money isn’t going to be that difficult, although when we start talking about long-term larger funding, it might get difficult,” Pye said. “But I think we’ll have plenty of vendors and operating companies that want to sponsor this.”

Included in the list of potential sponsors is a pool of new entrants to the oil and gas industry such as Data Direct Networks, which focuses on data storage, and Q Associates, which makes a product that reduces vibration in the racks where the storage devices are housed.

“These are little companies that you just don’t hear much about, but they play some pretty significant roles in the industry,” he said.

The main input for the future of the society, however, will come from the members, and Pye said the April meeting will have five presenters who will discuss how they want to be a part of the group and then open up a discussion about its future. Pye said a similar session on 3-D interpretation at a recent SEG meeting had hit-or-miss participation until the end, when the organizers scheduled a panel discussion where they asked the audience what they thought of the session and what they’d like to hear more about.

“The room filled up,” he said. “I thought we were dead in the water, but the closer it got to that last session, the more people flowed in.” He hopes to do a similar session on HPC at this year’s annual meeting.

Overall, interest in the group seems to be strong, and funding may indeed prove to be the sticking point. Several international organizations have asked the group to do a workshop outside the US. “I don’t know whether we’ll have the funding to do that early on; we’ll have to wait and see how successful we are raising funds in the near term,” he said. “It may take a couple of years to get the momentum that we need to raise the funding to a level where we can support international meetings.”

A new trade organization?

Pye hopes that eventually the society will be a “mini-SEG,” with different levels of sponsorship, paid membership, a board of directors, paid staff, etc. As a non-profit 501(c).6 corporation, the group can also do its own publications.

But there are no plans to compete with SEG or any of the other societies. In fact, the Society of HPC Professionals would prefer to be a partner with existing organizations. Right now the burning question being posed to potential members is, “What do you want?” Pye hopes to reach not only the operations people, those who offer ways to lower cooling and power costs, but also the people who generate and build the algorithms that drive software improvements, and the end-users in the operating companies.

“There are maybe 20 different areas that these guys work in,” he said. “So not only is it a reduced area of interest, but within that reduced area of interest it’s even more specific. We’re trying to find out how to get to those people and make sure they’re getting what they want out of this society.”

The round tables will be another source of information, he added. The format here will be to bring three or four presenters together and have a question-and-answer session from the audience following the presentations.

“It’s always amazed me the information that will come out of something like that,” he said. “You would think it would be confidential information within a corporation. But people will say, ‘This is a problem in our organization. How do you handle it?”

For now Pye and the other organizers are dipping into their own financial reserves to pay for things like legal fees and promotional materials. He expects that to change. But he doesn’t regret the time he’s put into the program.

“This is something I enjoy doing,” he said. “It keeps me in the industry, and it keeps me talking to people that I like to talk to.

“I can see the benefits of it. When 200 people come out of a room and they’re happy with the presentations, that’s pretty rewarding to me. As soon as the society is up and running and someone else wants to take my place on the board, I’ll probably retire. Again.”

WesternGeco and Unique Digital have offered places to meet!

Society of HPC Professionals — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 21:12:29 GMT

WesternGeco and Unique Digital have offered places to meet!

WesternGeco and Unique Digital have graciously agreed to provide their meeting facilities to host our SHPCP meetings. These facilities provide the ideal meeting environment for our spring and fall general meetings as well as our board of directors, committee, special interest groups and round table discussion meetings.

We are sincerely grateful for the strong support these two organizations have provided in establishing the society as a viable organization as well as their assistance to further the development of the society. These meeting facilities will provide an excellent platform for the society to bring the HPC community together to share technology and maintain a dialog with all interested participants.

Society of HPC Professionals announces first general meeting - insideHPC

Society of HPC Professionals — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 21:43:14 GMT

The meeting will be held April 28, 2010 at the WesternGeco meeting facilities in Houston, Texas (USA). Read more of the insideHPC article...

Inaugural sponsorship meeting

Society of HPC Professionals — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 22:35:36 GMT

Our first sponsorship meeting was held in Houston, TX