Super Computing 2016

--D. Thiebaut (talk) 10:39, 14 November 2016 (EST)

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I attended SuperComputer 2016 (SC16) conference in Salt Lake City, UT, in Nov. 2016. The conference deals with all issues relating to supercomputing, high performance computing (HPC), and any domain where massive orders or computation are required.

I attended a 1-day tutorial on parallel processing as a way of reviewing the material I will teach in my parallel and distributed processing class CSC352 in the spring of 2017. The tutorial was presented by Quentin F. Stout and Christiane Jablonowski of U. Michigan. The tutorial was a good way of getting back in the material. I was happy to see that my current syllabus is quite up to speed with what is important to the field, and I just need to revise it by adding a new section on GPUs and accelerators. GPUs will likely become one of the biggest players in parallel computing in the next few years from their use in machine learning and deep learning in particular, and running neural network operations. NVidia seems to be the company at the head of the game, with Intel's Xeon Phi a competitor in HPC and machine learning.

The conference also an afternoon session relating to eduction of HPC in undergraduate/graduate schools, and I was on the review committee for this session (Monday 11/14/16).