HPC ASIA & APAN 2009 in Taiwan Last Week

Last week, HPC ASIA & APAN 2009 was held on March 2 – 5 in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Its presentation materials and proceedings are ready for download in advanced program.

It is the 10th HPC Asia event hosted by National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) in Taiwan. The seventh HPC Asia 2004 was held in Japan, followed by HPC Asia 2005 in China and HPC Asia 2007 in Korea

Taiwan government is positive in HPC, and researches from Taiwan also look very smart and active, such as Hsu-san, father of Deep Blue project, or Chiu-san who is developing Blue Gene, I think.

The first day of HPC ASIA & APAN 2009 is dedicated to tutorials and three remaining days are dedicated to keynotes, presentations and workshops.

AIST, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Keio University, Kyushu University, ISIT and RIKEN from Japan appear in the proceedings in HPC.

There are several keynote and invited speakers, such as well-known Jack Dongarra, and William Kramer, Deputy Director of Blue Waters project (recently moved from General Manager, NERSC), Zhiwei Xu in ICT developing Dawning 5000, #1 of TOP500 in Asia at present, and then Mark Seager in LLNL leading 20 PFLOPS Sequoia procurement.

There looks nothing new for their presentation materials. What I find is that Rob Pennington (he visited Tokyo last fall) and Edward Seidel left Blue Waters project and William Kramer and William Gropp joined.


This is just an aside relative to HPC in Asia/Middle East. TOP500 Asia is announced. It targets Asia and the Middle East and assembles and maintains a list of the 500 most powerful computer systems in this region. The list is being compiled twice a year during GITEX exhibition in Riyadh and Dubai. There’s also a variety of TOP500.