Computer Science Department

Computer Science Department

Disruptive Technologies for High Performance Computing
R. Phillip Bording
Husky Energy Chair in Oil and Gas Research
Memorial University of Newfoundland
Monday, October 8, 3 PM, McGlothlin-Street 020

The micro-processor has been the mainstay of parallel computing technology for the last decade. The vector machine architecture has acquired almost all of the characteristics of the parallel cluster. Notably, the use of large scale queues for execution of memory instructions in vector machines is very similar to that of the many queues in the micro-processor parallel cluster. The inclusion of realistic physics in many of the game playing software programs has brought a large number of 32 bit floating point units into the hardware graphical programming unit. These GPU's now have significantly more computational power than the PC. However, the programming model is much more difficult than our traditional functional or procedural languages. The IBM/SONY/Toshiba cell processor was designed for gaming machines with 8 novel synergistic processing units. Here, the performance promise is again large, 100x over the PC, and the programming model very similar to that of the attached array processor for the mini-computer. Other hardware for high performance computing include the 100,000 processor IBM Blue Gene machine family which support the popular MPI programming paradigm, and the very specific hardware engines purpose built with field programmable gate arrays. All of the above hardware/software solutions are disruptive technologies as they promise substantial performance increases with the application of heroic programming efforts. This I define to be the bleeding edge of high performance computing.