The HPC experts met in Chemnitz already for the fifth time in order to
inform themselves on the latest developments in the world of
supercomputing and exchange experience gained in practice. This year,
the participants were looking forward to a series of interesting
presentations with regard to current issues from the fields of science,
research and industry.
AMD, a global manufacturer of processors, presented the CPU technologies
of the future, taking as an example a number of newly developed
platforms, and compared the performance of the current Opteron 6100
processors with that of the next Opteron 6200 generation. Panasas
explained its latest developments in connection with the PAS12 Storage
System as well as the PanFS File System, taking as an example a number
of joint projects with MEGWARE.
A series of special lectures dealt with fascinating insights into
practical work. The participants were particularly enthusiastic about a
report on the High-Performance Computing Centre in Jülich. Dr. Norbert
Attig reported on scientific applications performed with Europe’s first
petaflop supercomputer, JUGENE, and with the cluster computer JUROPA.
Professor Herbert Störi, Project Manager of the Vienna Scientific
Cluster, explained the development of supercomputing at the Vienna-based
universities, taking as an example the systems VSC-1 and VSC-2. He
showed the increase in performance which becomes possible in the wake of
technical developments in a very short period of time. MEGWARE
presented a convincing and fascinating paper on its own developments in
High Performance Computing. This time, the focus was on the innovative
direct hot water cooling system ColdCon® which has already been
implemented successfully at the Leibniz Computing Centre in Garching.
Up to the end of the meeting, the conference participants, sponsors and
MEGWARE collaborators exchanged a wide range of experience and discussed
the new challenges ahead. Once again, it became clear that parallel
computing occupies an important place in Germany’s industry, research
and teaching.