Speaker/Affiliatio

n: Mateo Valero/Technical University of Catalonia

Date/Time: Monda

y February 11 2008 3:30 p.m.

Location: ACES 2.302

Host:

Yale Patt

Talk Title: Supercomputing for the Future Supercomputing
from the Past

Talk Abstract:
Supercomputers which were a long t

ime ago built on technology developed
from scratch are nowadays built f

rom commodity components. On one side
this means that designers of such
systems have to closely monitor the
evolution of mass market developmen

ts. On the other side supercomputing
becomes a driving boost for techno

logy and systems for the future providing
requirements for the performa

nce and design. As fundamental limits in the
single processor per chip

in terms of performance/power ratio are already on
the table multicore
chips and massive parallelism have become the trend to
achieve the requ

ired performance levels. A hierarchical structure both in
hardware and

software is the unavoidable approach build future
supercomputing system

s. The talk will first address how these systems have
been built in the

past and how we envisage their design in the near future.

The gap be

tween peak and real performance for current systems will become
worst if
designers don''t adopt a vertical approach from processor to node and

system design (including interconnect) parallel programming models dynami

c
resource management to improve load balancing tools for performanceanalysis prediction and optimization and new numerical methods algorit