As computing moves into the PetaFlop era, and beyond to ExaFlop levels, issues of equipment cost, power consumption, reliability, programmability, etc., are becoming increasingly important. Over the past few years more and more systems are depending upon accelerator hardware technologies (AT). The Asian Technology Information Program (ATIP) plans to hold a workshop that will explore the ways Asian scientists are incorporating AT technologies into their research. Speakers will present on their level of success and the impediments they have encountered, etc. Their progress will be compared with that in the US, and ATIP will generate a short informative report summarizing the findings for distribution throughout the global HPC community. ATs can be very cost effective. The most popular ATs are based on technology used in the game community, and hence are familiar to younger researchers, and even to some students in high school. Therefore, they have the potential to help migrate high-performance computing broadly, into smaller research settings, including small universities and beyond. Absolute cost as well as cost performance is crucial in researchers decisions about the practical directions of their research. This is especially true in most parts of Asia, where essential hardware must be purchased from abroad (US), and Asians have been quick to consider ATs as a result. This workshop brings together top scientists and graduate students from both the US and Asia hoping that they will form connections that may lead to future research collaborations or cooperative commercialization efforts for practical HPC applications.
Note: No additional work was done on this project since the previous reporting period. Overall results of this project (achieved in the first year of the funding period) were as follows: On May 7 – 10, 2012, the Asian Technology Information Program (ATIP) and the A*STAR Computational Resource Centre (ACRC) held a workshop at the Biopolis Matrix in Singapore aimed at exploring the ways Asian scientists are incorporating accelerator hardware technologies (AT) into their research. Accelerators, such as GPGPU from NVidia, or MIC from Intel, are a new and exciting approach to the field of High-performance Computing (HPC). ATIP’s workshop contributed intellectually to the global field of HPC by improving the general understanding of less expensive and less energy intensive alternative approaches to practical-use HPC that are being widely considered in the Asian region, and by generating discussion among government agencies, HPC scientists, and vendors at an international level, which will stimulate new directions of research and practical use. The workshop was attended by a total of 115 scientists. The workshop was highly successful and ATIP received positive feedback from participants. In particular, participants were very enthusiastic about the combination of papers, presentations, posters, site visits, and vendor events that made this workshop a much more multidimensional event.
