USF   FlashMob I—2004 Instant Supercomputer

The FlashMob I 
Scientific Conference

Introduction

The organizers of FlashMob I—2004 Instant Supercomputer event knew that it would work only if two conflicting social pressures could be harmonized and balanced:  we knew that we needed participation by many computer owners so committed to computing that they would have fast, memory-rich laptops; we also knew that they must put them in our trust once they were wired into the Mob clusters, leave them for six hours during benchmarking, and not worry.  They had to love computers, but also be willing to abandon them.  As entertainment and distraction, we offered guides to restaurants and shops in the area and we planned game exhibits and talks on campus.  In the end, there were eleven hour-long lectures offered by men and women who are computer experts, many world famous in the area of supercomputing.  All were infectious enthusiasts for computing and for the effort at instant supercomputing that we had planned.  
	Thus, without a strong intention, FlashMob hosted a scientific symposium on supercomputing, in two parallel tracks.  Every talk opened a window into the science and technology of supercomputers for lay members of the audience and shared the current state with practitioners.  Every talk set goals for computing for the next years and decades.  Every talk was a multimedia presentation, some with demos, animations, movies.  
	Next time, we’ll do it on purpose.

The FlashMob I Conference

Topics, Abstracts, Bios

11 AM    Harney 232  
	Basic Parallel Programming
Roland Krause, Weidlinger Associates Inc.
	In this presentation we will show the importance of simulations for challenging engineering applications. We will emphasize the necessity for parallel computations and introduce the basic concepts of parallel programs. We will discuss some of the problems and pitfalls that accompany the development of parallel programs and conclude with a brief example.
	Dr. Roland Krause is a Senior Research Engineer in the Applied Science Division of Weidlinger Associates Inc. in Los Altos, CA.  With a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering his main interest is the application of computational science to challenging engineering problems.

   Harney 127
	The Future of Supercomputing Using Ethernet
Ian Gray, Foundry Networks
	Ian Gray is an expert in high performance networking, network security, and wireless LAN technology.  He manages strategic alliances for Foundry Networks.  Ian has more than 12 years of experience in building and managing high-performance networks for organizations such as Lucasfilm.  Ian holds a degree from U. Windsor.

12 Noon    Harney 232
	10 Years of TOP500
Erich Strohmaier, NERSC 
	The TOP500 project for ranking of the fastest supercomputers was started in 1993 to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing. Twice a year, a list of the sites operating the 500 most powerful computer systems is assembled and released.  The best performance on the Linpack benchmark is used as performance measure for ranking the computer systems. The list contains a variety of information including the system specifications and its major application areas. This talk will present a brief analysis of the major developments in the HPC market place based on the TOP500 data. Information on all previous TOP500 lists is to be found at: http://www.top500.org/
	Erich Strohmaier is Computer Scientist in the Future Technologies Group of the Computational Research Division at LBNL. His current research focuses on performance characterization, evaluation and performance engineering for high-performance computing systems. He is, along with H. W. Meuer and Jack J. Dongarra founder of the TOP500 project.

1 PM   Harney 232
	The Amazing History of Supercomputing
Eugene Miya, NASA Ames and the Computer History Museum
	Supercomputer history is the proverbial elephant described by blind men.  This is a Saturday.  A straight supercomputer chronology would bore you.  Most people are not interested in detailed technical supercomputer development, but these machines influence life behind the scenes. History started with vacuum tubes and punched cards, but the listener needs some detail and background context, in particular.  Supercomputing history is about the limits of technology and science and small bands of people doing the seemingly impossible.  I doubt that a full, clear picture may ever be known.  My challenge is to wind between chronology and detail but also leave out boring stuff for lack of time.
	Eugene Miya maintains the bibliographic database of the world's unclassified literature on parallel computing.  Associate Editor for Publication and Software Reviews for Scientific Programming.  Moderator of the comp.parallel news group and generally credited with starting the concept of Frequently Asked Question lists (FAQs) on mailing lists and later news groups.  Holder of an Antarctic Service medal.   Did undergrad math and graduate work at UC Santa Barbara (ARPAnet host #3).  NASA Technical Liaison to the Computer History Museum and a designated West Coast representative to the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum.

  Harney 127
	Common-Off-The-Shelf Technologies in High Performance Computing
Mark Gantly, Hewlett-Packard
	Mark Gantly is an engineering manager in Hewlett Packard's High Performance Technical Computing Division. Based in Galway, Ireland, his current responsibility is for the development of a family of high performance fileservers. Previously he managed the development of the AlphaServer SC product, which is well represented on the higher reaches of Top500, including the no. 2 ranked Q machine at Los Alamos.  Mark holds degrees in engineering and mathematics from the University of Dublin, Trinity College.

2 PM   Harney 232
	Single System Image Supercomputers and the Development of Visualizations on Supercomputers at NASA
Bob Ciotti, NAS Engineering Branch, NASA Ames
	Running large systems with a single system image, or SSI, is important to obtaining the manageability, reliability, and low latency NASA researchers need to perform large scale modeling.   Scaling results will be presented for tightly coupled compute intensive problems. Stills and movies will demonstrate the enormous enhancements to scientific visualization based on supercomputers over the past decades.
	Bob Ciotti leads the Terascale Application Group in the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) division at NASA's Ames Research Center.

  Harney 127
	The Architecture, Programming and Applications of Clusters
Nan Boden, Myricom, Inc.
	Mass-produced computers offer remarkable performance for their cost, but performance that faces diminishing returns with cost.  Hence, people cluster these cost-effective computers to achieve higher performance than is available in a single workstation or server.  Clusters are also an excellent way to build systems that achieve high availability.  These benefits of clusters come at the price of needing to learn -- both at the algorithm and programming levels -- how to write correct and efficient concurrent, distributed-process programs.  Fortunately, the great majority of computations of practical interest can be formulated for concurrent execution, a subject that will be treated in this talk with examples.
	Nan Boden helped found Myricom in 1994, beginning her career at Myricom by writing the first Myrinet control program.  Dr. Boden has held a variety positions at Myricom, serving now as Executive Vice President. Prior to Myricom, she earned her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the California Institute of Technology, and a B.S. degree in Applied Mathematics from the University of Alabama (Tuscaloosa).

3 PM   Harney 232
	Building Big Data Servers for the Internet
Jim Gray, Microsoft Research
	We have evolved http://TerraService.Net over the last 7 years to serve a 1-meter resolution photo of the United States -- now it is getting 1-foot full-color images.  It has evolved to do reprojection and also to be a web service.   The talk will describe how TerraServer works and how we operate it.  More recently we have been working with the astronomy community to put all the world's astronomy data online in an integrated database. http://SkyServer.SDSS.org/ is the first installment on this, and it has evolved to http://SkyQuery.Net/.  The talk will describe that architecture as well and some of the research challenges we face going forward to build the world-wide telescope.
	Jim Gray is part of Microsoft's research group. His work focuses on databases and transaction processing. Jim is active in the research community, is an ACM, NAE, NAS, and AAAS Fellow, and received the ACM Turing Award for his work on transaction processing.  He edits of a series of books on data management, and has been active in building online databases like http://terraService.Net and http://skyserver.sdss.org.

  Harney 127
	Colossus—OK, maybe it was a computer, but a parallel, clustered supercomputer?
Benjamin Wells, USF
	Colossus, the first electronic digital computer, was built by Tommy Flowers at the GPO Research Station in Dollis Hill, London.  It was installed in Dec. 1943 at Bletchley Park, the famous WWII British code-cracking enclave.  Its purpose was to assist with the decryption of wireless traffic among German high-level commands encrypted using the Lorenz teletype cipher machine.  Called Colossus because of its size, it could be run by a single operator—and often was.  At least in that sense, it was also the world’s first personal computer.  Colossus introduced a lot of novel computing features.  We focus on two capabilities:  parallel computing and the recent discovery that the installed Colossi could have been clustered to run a universal Turing machine, making Colossus an early “supercomputer.”
	Benjamin Wells teaches both mathematics and computer science courses at the University of San Francisco, including freshman seminars that combine science and art.  He holds degrees from MIT and UC Berkeley and has studied in four countries.  The last student of noted logician Alfred Tarski, Wells works on the boundary of logic, algebra, and computing; he also contributes to computer graphics and visual communication.  He won a John Templeton Foundation science and religion course prize in 1998.

4 PM   Harney 232
	Archiving the Internet on a Petabyte Machine
Brewster Kahle, Internet Archive 
	Since the mid-1980s, Brewster has focused on developing transformational technologies for information discovery and digital libraries. In 1989 Brewster invented the Internet’s first publishing system, WAIS (Wide Area Information Server) system and in 1989, founded WAIS Inc., a pioneering electronic publishing company sold to America Online in 1995. In 1996, Brewster founded Internet Archive, the largest publicly accessible, privately funded digital archive in the world. He co-founded Alexa Internet in April 1996, sold to Amazon.com in 1999. Alexa's services are bundled into more than 80% of Web browsers.  Brewster earned a B.S. from MIT in 1982. As a student, he studied artificial intelligence with Marvin Minsky and Danny Hillis. In 1983, Brewster helped start Thinking Machines, a parallel supercomputer maker, serving there as lead engineer for six years. He is profiled in Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite (HardWired, 1996). He was selected as a member of the Upside 100 in 1997, Micro Times 100 in 1996 and 1997, and Computer Week 100 in 1995.

5 PM   Harney 232
	What Supercomputers Still Can't Do
Horst Simon, NERSC
	Supercomputing today is no longer based on custom-built expensive vector supercomputers, which were associated with the field more than a decade ago. Many of the high-end computers today are built from inexpensive commodity parts, using open-source software.  Consequently, the application of this high-end computing technology to floating-point intensive applications in science and engineering has become a dynamic and vibrant field.  Clusters are everywhere:  from university science and engineering departments, to commercial applications in banking, telecoms, biotech. But applications such fuzzy logic, neural nets, knowledge discovery, and cognitive computing, have not been a strong participant in this revolution of high end computing. With some notable exceptions such as Google’s search engine running on commodity clusters, parallel supercomputing and soft computing seem to be living in parallel universes.  This talk will survey the state of the field in supercomputing, analyze current developments based on data from the TOP500 list, and demonstrate with a few examples from NERSC’s user community, how powerful compute resources have transformed science.  Then I’ll offer an analysis, why these developments have had little impact on computational problems in cognitive computing. Based on this analysis, I’ll conclude with suggestions on how both fields and learn from each other in the future.
	Horst Simon has recently been named Associate Laboratory Director for Computing Sciences at Berkeley Lab. He continues his responsibilities as Division Director for both the National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Division and the Computational Research Division.  NERSC is DOE’s flagship supercomputing facility for unclassified research and is used by 2,276 users at 312 institutions.  Under Horst’s leadership, NERSC has aided discoveries in fields ranging from global climate modeling to astrophysics.  Horst is also the founding director of Berkeley Lab's Computational Research Division.  His own research interests include sparse matrix algorithms, algorithms for large-scale eigenvalue problems, and unstructured-domain decomposition algorithms for parallel processing.  His recursive spectral bisection algorithm is regarded as a breakthrough in parallel algorithms for unstructured computations.  His algorithm research efforts were honored with the 1988 Gordon Bell Prize for parallel processing research.  He is one of four editors of the twice-yearly TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful computing systems.  Horst holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from UC Berkeley and a Diplom in Mathematik from the TU Berlin, Germany.