On Friday, I visited SDSC and UCSD in San Diego presenting on recent work around remote memory access programming in a joint CS/SDSC seminar.

I believe the paradigm reaches way beyond MPI (indeed, it doesn’t include messages at all and thus the name MPI is somewhat misleading). In the talk titled “Remote Memory Access Programming: Faster Parallel Computing Without Messages”, I discuss performance issues when programming cache-coherent shared memory systems and RMA as a potential solution. Then I went into quite some detail on MPI-3 RMA as an example and our recently proposed extension “Notified Access”. The slides are here: http://htor.inf.ethz.ch/publications/index.php?pub=214

I really enjoyed giving the talk to the mixed SDSC and UCSD/CS audience. The talk was early morning 9am and the remaining day was filled with 1-1 meetings with CS faculty members in the Systems and HPC area and several researchers at SDSC. I had many interesting discussions and learned a lot. Very nice meeting overall. Thanks to Mike Norman, Scott Baden, and Laura Carrington for arranging the visit!

In fact, I didn’t do all the work for the talk alone — I had lots of help from others:

Last week, Roberto and I went to IPDPS where his paper was accepted. I was also invited to give a keynote at the HIPS/LSPP workhop as well as an invited talk at the PLC workshop.

Some impressions below:

We were staying in “real India” and had a nice and interesting 20 minute walk to the conference every morning.

This is why I am saying “real India” because the conference itself was not quite in India, well, physically yes but there were two fences of high fences and guards between it and outside India ;-).

Keynote at the HIPS/LSPP workshop on performance modeling. The slides are here: http://htor.inf.ethz.ch/publications/index.php?pub=212

Invited talk at the PLC workshop (on MODESTO, data-centric optimization of complex stencil codes). You can clearly see my standard pose :-). Slides are here: http://htor.inf.ethz.ch/publications/index.php?pub=213

The PLC audience, very well attended for a workshop.

The IPDPS plenary talk (we got a best paper award). http://htor.inf.ethz.ch/publications/index.php?pub=203

Actually, Roberto was supposed to give the talk but it would have been his first public talk. So he convinced me to do it but had to promise to give it back at ETH. I’m waiting Roberto :-)!!!

The audience (not visible well because nobody wanted to sit on the first rows, as usual 😉 ).