Connecting the Global Supercomputing Community in Hamburg, Germany 

ISC’12 will continue its long tradition of engaging the international community in high-performance computing, networking and storage. This year’s event will place a special emphasis on networking – the organizers will bring together the global HPC community to facilitate information exchange, discussions, and new collaborations for research related to innovating high performance applications and advancing scientific discovery. It will also promote strategic business partnerships with around 160 leading exhibitors of supercomputing, software, storage, networking and infrastructure technologies.

This year ISC will also feature Europe’s very first Student Cluster Challenge Competition which will bring five teams from Germany, the US and China to compete in real time to build a cluster of their own.  A number of satellite events will also be hosted by our partners and exhibitors during the conference. Some events may require advance registration.

Educational Tutorials and HPC in Asia Workshop on Sunday, June 17

The conference will kick-off on Sunday, June 17, with two full-day and eight half-day Tutorials. Four of the eight half-day tutorials will be held in the afternoon. What makes these tutorials exceptionally interesting is that they are offered by  speakers with hands-on experience in HPC, and the topics themselves allow attendees to focus on diverse areas of interest, e.g., architectures, algorithm and analysis, large scale simulations, storage and data as well as developing areas like Exascale, Clouds and Big data. All tutorials will be held in parallel sessions and the registration fee allows participants to visit all the sessions.

Asia’s position in the top 5 supercomputers remains unchanged since last summer, with the continent supplying four of the five fastest HPC installations worldwide. Continuing the purpose of sharing information on HPC activities in Asian countries with European and U.S. researchers and vendors, ISC has organized its second HPC in Asia Workshop and invited the leaders of the most well-known HPC centers in China, Japan, India, Korea, Taiwan and Singapore to share the status of HPC activities in their countries. Japanese and Chinese experts will also be sharing application results of the K-Computer and Tianhe-1A.  To provide a higher stage to stimulate young researchers to collaborate within and outside Asia, the workshop has incorporated a poster session into this year’s program. Chosen posters will be displayed during the workshop and in the ISC’12 exhibition hall.      

ISC’12 Conference Highlights, June 18 – 21

One of the main focus points will be HPC programming tools and application performance measurements – seen from different directions and tackled in various conference sessions and panels.

The session Application Performance –Lessons Learnt from Petascale Computation will address the interaction of application performance and hardware design of modern multi-/many core based supercomputers. A thorough analysis of the issues involved in modern designs will guide the discussion of the requirements on application development for Exascale machines. And to round off this topic, ISC has organized a panel, moderated by Jack Dongarra, with worldwide renowned software experts to discuss Programming Models in the Years to Come, where the newest developments for programming tools intended for solving large scale simulation problems for upcoming HPC systems will be highlighted.

Once again HPC applications will play a dominant role at the conference. Here’s a few of our picks:

• The in-depth session Life Sciences will provide a forum for discussions of latest research in developing high-performance computing solutions to problems arising from Neural Networks and Molecular Dynamics Simulations.
• The session Computational Chemistry will focus on chemistry applications that are running on moderate many-core architectures up to ‘Ab Initio Simulations’ on really very large HPC systems, i.e. the Blue Gene platforms.
• The session Novel HPC Simulations in Research and Industry will present various applications from Cosmology, Aircraft Design and Material Science. Since decades all three fields were and are under the major drivers for advances in HPC.
• Since the advent of the first “supercomputers”, the simulation of atmosphere and oceans has played a mutually beneficial role in the development of more powerful computing capabilities. The session Climate Research will concentrate on climate modeling and coupled models for atmosphere/ocean simulations.
• The session Energy and HPC concentrates on new Supercomputer applications in the energy sector. There will be presentations about Biomass-Simulations, Greener Coal Utilization and Renewable Energy Simulations.

Other Interesting Conference Topics

The new goal, reaching the Exaflops mark in 2019 will be heavily discussed by globally acknowledged experts during the session Exascale Computing: Where we are? The Exascale Chat is another highlight, with moderator Horst Simon inviting SC experts to share their point of view in a casual chat on Exascale Computing.

In the coming years the HPC-centers will be strongly affected by the energy requirements of HPC systems. The session “Energy Efficient HPC Centers-At what Cost?” is dedicated to this issue.

The session “New Petascale Systems in the World & Their Applications has the focus to illustrate the newest and most interesting HPC projects from various regions worldwide to a broader audience in a comprehensible manner.

The session Cloud Computing & HPC Requirements focuses on the growing importance of HPC-Clouds in science and industry. Some examples from Amazon and the Magellan Project will share deep insights gained in this field.

The co-founder and chief scientist of Convey Computer, Steve Wallach and Peter Ungaro, the President and CEO of Cray will present their take on Big Data in the ‘Supercomputer Architectures for Data Intensive Computing’ session. And not to forget, the session ‘Big Data Analysis for Extreme Scale Research’ will reveal the impact HPC architectures have on the analysis of large dataset, for example, the datasets stemming from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Here are some other things that attendees should look out for:

• Session about Young & Bright HPC Researchers
• Hot Seat Sessions: One of ISC's Clinchers reloaded in a new and even more attractive style
• Publication of the 39th TOP500 list
• Think Tank on TOP500 – 20 Years Later
• Analyst Crossfire continues with sharp, hard-hitting questions from Addison Snell
• Four compelling Keynote Presentations:
• Keynotes at ISC’12 - At ISC’12, four outstanding Keynote talks await you:

Monday Keynote Talk
Guus Dekkers, CIO of EADS and Airbus
HPC as Enabler for the Virtualization of Aircraft Development

Tuesday Keynote Talk
Dr. Byungse So, Senior Vice President, Head of Memory Product Planning & Application Engineering Team, Samsung
Advanced Memory Technology – #1 Factor for Energy Efficient HPC

Wednesday Keynote Talk
Prof. Dr. Thomas Sterling, Professor of Informatics & Computing, Indiana University
HPC Achievement & Impact 2012

Thursday Keynote Talk
Prof. Dr. Arndt Bode, Director, Leibniz Rechenzentrum & Technische Universität München
Extreme Energy Efficiency with SuperMUC

The new interactive ISC agenda planner will help participants to easily browse through the conference sessions.

The ISC’12 Exhibition, June 18 – 20

This year’s Exhibition will be the largest ever with 160 exhibitors, comprising the world’s leading HPC industry and research organizations. There is no better way to compare efficiency and cost-effectiveness between services and solutions than speaking directly with the vendors and service providers.

Early Registration Deadline Fast Approaching!

On May 15, the early registration for ISC’12 will close, ending the opportunity to save up to 25 percent off the conference and exhibition fees. Attendees can tailor their registration, using the flexible pricing system that allows registration for the entire program, or just a selection of days. Daily catering and the welcome party are included in the registration fees.

Stay informed – be there at ISC’12 from June 17 to 21 in Hamburg. For further information, visit: www.isc12.org