HPC related seminars (Japan) in March

Unusual wet snow is falling silently outside. However, March is coming soon while no influenza pandemic came that our government strongly warned. It must be very good for medical researchers in infection diseases as well as for us. In addition, fortunately, there is not much notorious cedar pollen circulating in air until now.

Now I briefly list up HPC related seminars in Japan in March as far as I know.

- Pioneering Scientific Computation Forum 2009: “Computing in Molecular Science – Study Report and Introduction of New System”
Date/Time: 13:00-, March 8, 2009
Venue: Research Institute for Information technology, Kyushu University (Fukuoka)

Besides many academic speakers, “Docking Simulation with Molecular Design Software SYBYL” is presented by Dr. Jun Midorikawa, WorldFusion, Inc. that is a long life Japanese bio-venture company.

More details: http://www.cc.kyushu-u.ac.jp/scp/users/c_news/2008/158.html#1

- RIKEN HPC Symposium
Date/Time: 10:00-, March 12, 2009
Venue: Suzuki Umetaro Hall, Wako Institute, RIKEN (Saitama)

Theme is “The third Generation PC Clusters" this time.
More details: http://accc.riken.jp/HPC/Symposium/2008/index.html

RIKEN Benchmark Contest is continued and there are two benchmark problems announced, Poisson FDM-BMT, Poisson solver for incompressible fluid simulation, and ERI MO-BMT, two-electron integrals calculation in Hartree-Fock MO (Molecular Orbital) method.

More details: http://accc.riken.jp/HPC/Symposium/2008/bmt.html

- PC Cluster Workshop in Osaka
Date/Time: 10:00 - 17:45, March 13, 2009/02/27
Venue: Kansai System Laboratory, Fujitsu (Osaka)

PC Cluster Workshop in Osaka is organized by PC Cluster Consortium. There are many presentations, such as “introduction of SCore7", the latest release of high performance parallel programming environment.
More details: http://www.pccluster.org/event/workshop/pcc2009osaka/

PC Cluster Consortium promotes parallel programming contest on PC clusters, in cooperation with SACSIS 2009 (Symposium on Advanced Computing Systems and Infrastructures 2009) in May in Hiroshima.

More details: https://www2.cc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/procon/

- 2009 First Training Workshop for Parallelizing and Tuning of Codes
Date/Time:
(1) MPI Parallel Programming (9:30 - 17:30, March 26)
(2) Program Tuning (9:30 - 15:00, March 27)
(3) MPI Parallel Programming (9:30 - 17:30, April 2)
(4) Program Tuning (9:30 - 15:00, April 3)
Venue: Wako Institute, RIKEN (Saitama)

Combination of scalar code tuning and MPI parallelization is an excellent method in the training workshop. A lecturer, Yukiya Aoyama, Advanced Center for Computing and Communication, RIKEN has long experience – probably almost twenty years – in such workshops

More details: http://accc.riken.jp/HPC/training/2009-1.html


Just for the icing on the cake, I show a couple of overseas events.

- HPC User Forum -- 32nd HPC User Forum -- April 20 to 22, 2009 -- In Roanoke, VA
This user forum is operated by IDC.
More details: http://www.hpcuserforum.com

- ISC'09 -- Hamburg, Germany -- June 23-26
Online registration starts on March 2: Early birds get the savings. The registration for industry costs 900 EURO that is approximately 115 Kyen. Although Japanese yen becomes stronger to EURO than one year before, it is still expensive.

More details: http://www.supercomp.de/isc09/

CRA Praised U.S. Congress for Strong Investments in Science, Innovation

In U.S., the House Democratic leadership released an official stimulus summary on January 15 and it looks great for researchers including HPC. However, the numbers in the Senate version on January 26 were not as generous as the House numbers. It looked quite difficult to expect conclusion because some of the significant differences between the two versions -- including significant differences in how the science investments in the bill are handled according to the policy blog of Computing Research Association (CRA) that is an association of more than 200 North American academic departments of computer science, computer engineering, and related fields; laboratories and centers in industry, government, and academia engaging in basic computing research; and affiliated professional societies.

CRA policy blog on February 13 showed happy message “Computing Researchers Applaud Congress for Strong Investments in Science, Innovation” since Congress passed an economic stimulus package that included substantial investments in the nation's science and engineering enterprise. It took effect on February 17, just in around one month from release of the official stimulus summary by House.

In the meantime, Japanese government budget draft for FY2009 includes some of investments for Japanese strengthening of science and technology and the draft with related bills can probably pass the Lower House before March after a long struggle according to some newspaper. Hence I have to recall still unchanged difference in speed of policy decision making between U.S. and Japan while I like to share such good news in U.S.

Anyway, the conference agreement for the American Economic Recovery and Reinvestment Act includes investment more than $15 Billion in Scientific Research: $3 billion for the National Science Foundation, $1.6 billion for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, $400 million for the Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), $580 million for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and $8.5 billion for NIH!, etc. and many of HPC people in U.S. must be very happy.

This stimulus money will be invested besides the U.S. FY2009 budget for October 2008 to September 2009. Such huge and strong boost, maybe, will create very ambitious projects like mushrooms!?

The first European PetaFLOPS machine to Germany

The German research center, Forschungszentrum Juelich has selected IBM Blue Gene/P to develop the first supercomputer in Europe capable of one PetaFLOPS. IBM will partner with Juelich-based Gauss Centre for Supercomputing to install the new IBM Blue Gene/P System in the first half of this year.

This new Blue Gene System is the first to include new water cooling technology, created by IBM Research that uses room temperature water to cool the servers. This result is a 91 percent reduction in air conditioning units that would have been required to cool Forschungszentrum Juelich's data center with an air-cooled Blue Gene.
Inauguration and naming of the new systems will take place at an opening ceremony in mid 2009. Forschungszentrum Juelich has JUBL (Juelich Blue Gene/L) and then JUGEN (Juelich Blue Gene/P)、and now JU???? (Juelich Blue Gene/P Full System).

Key specifications of 1PetaFLOPS Blue Gene/P
Processors: 294,912 Processors
Type: PowerPC 450 core 850 MHz
Compute node: 4-way SMP processor
Memory: 144 Terabytes
Racks: 72
Network Latency: 160 Nanoseconds
Network Bandwidth: 5.1 Gigabytes
Energy consumption: 2200 Kilowatts

In addition, Forschungszentrum Juelich will install 100TFLOPS HPC-FF (for Fusion) cluster system for the fusion scientists´ simulation programs of ITER experimental fusion reactor. It will consist of 1,080 computing nodes each equipped with two Nehalem EP Quad Core processors from Intel. The grand total of 8,640 processors will have a clock rate of 2.93 GHz each, they will be able to access about 24 terabytes of total main memory and will be water-cooled. French supercomputer manufacturer Bull will integrate the system and InfiniBand ConnectX QDR from the Israeli company Mellanox will be used as the network.
ITER will go into operation in 2018 and will be the first fusion reactor to generate at least 500 megawatts of excess power. ITER will be constructed in Cadarache, in the south of France, by a consortium consisting of the European Union, Japan, the USA, China, Russia, India and South Korea.


Germany (or EU) looks running one or two year behind US but steadily in supercomputer performance. Their government is much more positive in HPC investment than several years ago. In Japan, the fastest system is a T2K in University of Tokyo (140TFLOPS) and I can not see any delivery plan for more than 200TFLOPS system this year. Hence we may have to look at back of German supercomputers for a while (probably until end of FY 2011, delivery of 10PetaFLOPS Japanese Next Generation Supercomputer.)