ICPP 2009 in Vienna

I presented our initial work on Offloading Collective Operations, which is the definition of an Assembly language for group operations (GOAL), at ICPP’09 in Vienna. I was rather disappointed by this year’s ICPP. We had some problems with the program selection already before the conference (I’ll happily tell you details on request) and the final program was not great. Some talks were very entertaining though. I really enjoyed the P2S2 workshop, especially Pete Beckman’s keynote. Other highlights (in my opinion) include:

  • Mondrian’s “A resource optimized remote-memory-access architecture for low-latency communication” (I need to talk to those guys (I did ;))
  • Argonne’s “Improving Resource Availability By Relaxing Network Allocation Constraints on the Blue Gene/P” (I need to read the paper because I missed the talk due to chaotic re-scheduling, but Narayan’s 5-minute elevator pitch summary seemed very interesting)
  • Prof. Resch’s keynote on “Simulation Performance through Parallelism -Challenges and Options” (he even mentioned the German Pirate party which I really enjoyed!)
  • Brice work with Argonne on “Cache-Efficient, Intranode Large-Message MPI Communication with MPICH2-Nemesis”
  • Argonne’s “End-to-End Study of Parallel Volume Rendering on the IBM Blue Gene/P” (yes, another excellent Argonne talk right before my presentation :))

Here are some nice pictures:
vienna1
My talk at the last day was a real success (very well attended, even though it was the last talk in the conference)! It’s good to have friends (and a good talk from Argonne right before mine :-)). Btw. two of the three talks in the (only) “Information Retrieval” session were completely misplaced and had nothing to do with it, weird …

vienna2
My co-author, friendly driver, and camera-man and me in front of the parliament.