After the stress of SC16 is finally over, let me summarize SPCL’s activities at the conference.
In a nutshell, we participated in two tutorials, two panels, the organization of the H2RC workshop, I gave three invited talks and my students and collaborators presented our four papers at the SC papers program. Not to mention the dozens of meetings :-). Some chronological impressions are below:
1) Tutorial “Insightful Automatic Performance Modeling” with A. Calotoiu, F. Wolf, M. Schulz
2) Panel at Sixth Workshop on Irregular Applications: Architectures and Algorithms (IA^3)
I was part of a panel discussion on irregular vs. regular structures for graph computations.
The opening
Discussions 🙂
Audience
3) Tutorial “Advanced MPI” with B. Gropp, R. Thakur, P. Balaji
I was co-presenting the long running successful tutorial on advanced MPI.
The section on collectives and topologies
4) Second International Workshop on Heterogeneous Computing with Reconfigurable Logic (H2RC) with Michaela Blott, Jason Bakos, Michael Lysaght
We organized the FPGA workshop for the second time, was a big success, people were standing in the back of the room. We even convinced database folks (here, my colleague Gustavo Alonso) to attend SC for the first time!
Gustavo’s opening
Full house
5) Invited talk at LLVM-HPC workshop organized by Hal Finkel
I gave a talk about Polly-ACC (Tobias Grosser’s work) at the workshop, quite interesting feedback!
Nice audience
Great feedback
6) Panel at LLVM-HPC workshop
Later, we had a nice panel about what to improve in LLVM to deal with new languages and/or accelerators.
7) SIGHPC annual member’s meeting
As elected member at large, I attended the annual members meeting at SC16.
8) Collaborator Jens Domke from Dresden presented our first paper “Scheduling-Aware Routing for Supercomputers“
Huge room, nicely filled.
9) Booth Talk at Tokio Institute of Technology booth
Was an interesting experience :-). First, you talk to two people, towards the end, there was a crowd. Even though most people missed the beginning, I got very nice questions.
10) Collaborator Bill Tang presented our paper “Extreme Scale Plasma Turbulence Simulations on Top Supercomputers Worldwide”
11) SPCL student Tobias Gysi presented our paper “dCUDA: Hardware Supported Overlap of Computation and Communication“
12) Collaborator Maxime Martinasso presents our paper “A PCIe Congestion-Aware Performance Model for Densely Populated Accelerator Servers”
But as usual, it’s always the informal, sometimes even secret, meetings that make out SC’s experience. The two SPCL students Greg and Tobias did a great job learning and representing SPCL while I was running around between meetings. I am so glad I didn’t have to present any papers this year (i.e., that I could rely on my collaborators and students 🙂 ). Yet, it’s a bit worrying that my level of business (measured by the number of parallel meetings and overbooked calendar slots) is getting worse each year. Oh well :-).
