SC14 blog – Day three, George Beckett

HPC Matters

The theme of this year’s Supercomputing conference is ‘HPC Matters’ and, in keeping with this, the drive of the program has been to emphasise how supercomputing enables scientists to tackle problems that would otherwise be impossible, in fields as diverse as particle physics, manufacturing, and health care — in line with the aims of the current iVEC Petascale Pioneers’ Program. I was fortunate enough to have an appointment-free day, which meant I could immerse myself in the technical program.

During the morning, I attended a session on petascale bioinformatics, which felt particularly pertinent given iVEC’s recent, hugely popular symposium on bioinformatics. The session was very inspiring, showcasing the significant work that has been done to migrate some of the key elements of genomics workflow — such as gene assembly and gene-sequence alignment — to large, parallel systems. The first talk looked at a new tool called Meraculous, which optimises de novo gene assembly. Early results have demonstrated fantastic scalability and speedup, turning a 140-hour wheat genome assembly process into a 15-minute one, by properly exploiting a supercomputer of the scale of Magnus. This was followed by a talk on sequence alignment, which explored how algorithmic advances were delivering a step-change over traditional MPI-BLAST workflows in terms of database size and alignment accuracy, thanks to a tool called Orion, which is expected to be released to the community in the coming months.

At lunchtime, I stopped by at the exhibition hall to check on the iVEC Student Cluster Competition team. All was looking good and, with just a few hours to go, the team had completed the majority of the tasks they had been set. It was good to see everyone in good spirits, in spite of the near-two days of non-stop work to tune their hardware to run the challenging simulations set by the judges. I also stopped by the Australian HPC booth to listen to the now famous “Tim Tam” talks, today from VLSCI and Swinburne University.

This afternoon, I participated in the HPC Connections (HPCC) workshop, in which I had been invited to talk about the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre and our role in the SKA telescope. The HPCC workshop, which focuses mainly on HPC developments in Asia, attracted a large and interactive audience of 60 or so delegates, who were treated to a program that included multi-Petaflop programming on the Tianhe-2 system (the Chinese National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) system that currently holds the number one position on the Top 500), work at Argonne National Laboratories to create next-generation batteries for electric cars and, of course, a reprise of the Pawsey project and SKA pre-construction. It was good to meet some of iVEC’s colleagues from the HPC in Asia consortium and to build on our links with those supercomputing centres that are among our nearest neighbours.

I’m sad to say that tomorrow is the last day of SC’14 — for me, at least. However, as my flight is in the evening, I’ll get to partake of the full program, plus will be involved in an SKA industry-engagement workshop at which we will provide an update on telescope pre-construction activities plus progress prospects to engage in technology prototyping.