On August 3 and 4, 2016, we had our third SC17 planning meeting in the SC17 conference city, Denver, Colorado. In Germany, we would call this August meeting “mountain party” (“Bergfest”) , as we reached now the halftime in our three year quest to organize the SC17 conference, and after 18 months of steep, hard, up-hill work to reach the summit, the second half of the trip should be easier and down-hill. Of course, the future will show whether it is really down-hill 😉 It is also the last (face-to-face) planning meeting this year before the SC16 conference in Salt Lake City in November, however the organizing committee will continue to meet in monthly tele-conferences.

 

The "Blue Bear" mascot infront of the Colorado Convention Center, Denver -- Picture by Bernd Mohr

The “Blue Bear” mascot of the Colorado Convention Center, Denver — Picture by Bernd Mohr

Meeting attendance was again higher than past meetings: 31 attendees compared to 22 and 12, so beyond the top-level Executive Committee much more of the next level Committee Chairs (mainly from Infrastructure and Local Arrangements) and of our contractors (like Exhibition Management, Meeting Management, or Web Design) attended.

Like in the last meeting we mainly discussed the progress the teams accomplished the past three months and the next steps ahead of us. Most of the work done at this point is actually working on contracts: After we had finalized in 2015 all the contracts with hotels for our attendees and exhibitors for the conference in November 2017 (almost two dozen of them!), in 2016 the work concentrates on the contracts with hotels for the five planning meetings in 2017 (January, March, June, August, and October), the SCinet meeting also in October, the January meeting (“turnover”)  in 2018, the final Convention Center contract, and, last-but-not-least, renewals or even competitive bids for our contractors. Luckily we get a lot of support here from professionals working for ACM and IEEE, the SC conference sponsors! The second focus point is the communication team, which has to get our first version of the SC17 website live and public by November 17, the Thursday of this year’s conference. The same day, a short (2 minutes) SC17 preview video will be shown for the first time. The production of this video is especially exciting as we hired a producer which won already 9(!) Emmy awards, so you see how serious we take this task 😉

After the meeting, a smaller group of us used the opportunity being in our conference city touring more possible locations for our two big evening events: the Sunday Exhibitor and Thursday Tech Program Networking Events. The locations must be able to host a couple of thousand attendees and you can imagine that even in a big city like Denver, there are not too many of those. In addition, they should be close to the Convention Center and conference hotels, and finally, they must be available for us on the two very specific dates (because these are already set). I can report that we found fabulous locations for both events, but of course I cannot tell you yet, as it would ruin the surprise (and, of course, we have not finalized the contracts(!) with them yet 🙂

New Denver A line train connection Denver airport to Downtown -- Picture by Bernd Mohr

New Denver A line train connection Denver airport to Downtown — Picture by Bernd Mohr

Arriving in Denver Union Station! -- Picture Bernd Mohr

Arriving in Denver Union Station! — Picture Bernd Mohr

This visit allowed me also to test the new Denver tram line which connects Denver airport to downtown Union station. Worked like a charm! A one-way trip is US$ 9 and there is a train every 15 minutes. The ride takes about 40 minutes. The best part is that this makes the trip to the airport much more reliable, because before that it depended very much on the traffic in and around Denver.

On June 9, 2016, we had our second SC17 planning meeting in Snowbird, Utah. It is actually a ski winter resort which means you can rent it for meetings in summer for quite some low rate 😉 Why Snowbird? Well, the meeting is traditionally in the city of the conference the year before which is Salt Lake City this year (2016). However, due to some other event in the city during the week, all hotels were completely booked, so the meeting was relocated to Snowbird nearby. It is a very nice place but being located at 2468 meters above sea level, you had to drink a lot of water all day in order not to get elevation sick 😉

20160611_084231This second meeting was a little bit larger than the first (22 attendees compared to 12), so beyond my Executive Committee some other Committee Chairs (like the Space Chair and our new Inclusivity Chair) as well as some of our contractors (like Exhibition Management, Meeting Management, or Web Design) attended.

In the meeting we mainly discussed the progress the teams accomplished the past three months and the next steps ahead of us. The communication team reported on the conference tagline and the logo they created; however you have to wait until SC16 in November to see them when our first version of the SC17 website goes live and public. The finance team has created a first budget for the conference and we now have to wait for approval of the budget by the governance bodies of the societies behind SC, ACM and IEEE.

20160611_124443After the meeting, I used an afternoon to visit the Bonneville Salt Flat, about two hours west of Salt Lake City. It is the largest of many salt flats located west of the Great Salt Lake and is known for land speed records at the “Bonneville Speedway”.

On March 28 to 30, 2016, we had our first SC17 Planning meeting in Denver, Colorado. This is just a small, first meeting of the Executive Committee, i.e., the Chairs for Technical Program, Communication, Exhibits, Local Arrangements, SCinet, Students@SC, Communications, and Finance, the Deputy Chair, the Vice Chair, the Executive Director, a representative of ACM, and me.

Near fullscale model of StarWars X-Wing Fighter at the "Wings over the Rockies Air & Space" Museum -- Picture by Bernd Mohr

Near fullscale model of StarWars X-Wing Fighter at the “Wings over the Rockies Air & Space” Museum — Picture by Bernd Mohr

On the first day, we visited various locations in Denver suitable for events with 2000 and more people. During the SC conference, there are typically two associated networking events: one for the exhibitors on the Sunday before the conference with 1500 to 1800 people, and one for the technical program attendees on Thursday with up to 2500 attendees. As one can easily imagine, organizing these large events is not a simple task and you have to start early finding the right locations and work with the local staff, to make it work.

The rest of the meeting we discussed the status of the work in each area. The main task for each executive chair in the next months is to recruit her/his subcommittee. With all subcommittees and reviewers for the technical program in place, the overall committee will be over 500 people by the end of the year. Another topic was the organization of the rest of the planning meetings; another 3 in 2016 (June, August, and November) and 5 more in 2017 (January, March, June, August, and October) before SC17 in November 2017.

The meeting went very well, and after the meeting I am now even more confident that I picked the right people for my Executive Committee.

What do you do if you have two meetings to attend in the U.S. within two weeks (one in Salt Lake City, the other in Denver) with just a weekend in between and flying separately to the two meetings across the Atlantic is about four times more expensive than a single trip combining both? You spent a nice extended weekend driving through the Rocky Mountains!

However, someone should have told me in advance that March is the month with the most snow in Colorado 😉

Rest area on Interstate Highway 70 in the Rocky Mountains -- Picture by Bernd Mohr

Rest area on Interstate Highway 70 in the Rocky Mountains — Picture by Bernd Mohr

Visiting the Dinosaur Quarry at the Dinosaur National Monument near Vernal, Utah. The bones from over 500 dinosaurs have been found there. -- Picture by Bernd Mohr

Visiting the Dinosaur Quarry at the Dinosaur National Monument near Vernal, Utah. The bones from over 500 dinosaurs have been found there. — Picture by Bernd Mohr

Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park near Montrose, Colorado. -- Picture by Bernd Mohr

Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park near Montrose, Colorado. — Picture by Bernd Mohr

Grand Sanddunes National Park near Alamosa, Colorado. -- Picture by Bernd Mohr

Grand Sanddunes National Park near Alamosa, Colorado. — Picture by Bernd Mohr

Highway 285 in Central Colorado. -- Picture by Bernd Mohr

Highway 285 in Central Colorado. — Picture by Bernd Mohr

Being SC17 General Chair also means that I am SC16 Deputy Chair “shadowing” the SC16 General Chair John West which means that I watch and learn from him at all meetings and at the conference in 2016, so I am well prepared for the conference organization work “my” year.

Snow blizzard in Salt Lake City -- Picture by Bernd Mohr

Snow blizzard in Salt Lake City — Picture by Bernd Mohr

The SC16 Organization Committee met in Salt Lake City, where the SC conference will be this year, for a first planning meeting on March 22nd and 23rd. The first morning, a tour of the Salt Palace Convention Center (SPCC) was on our schedule.  Just in time, when we wanted to start walking to the Convention Center , it started snowing heavily 😉  Luckily, I was prepared and I had packed some warm clothing.

Salt Lake City Convention Center, ready for ComicCon -- Picture by Bernd Mohr

Salt Palace Convention Center, ready for ComicCon — Picture by Bernd Mohr

When we arrived at the Convention Center we saw that preparations were in full swing to get ready for Comic Con Salt Lake which was scheduled to open just a few days later.

SPCC main ballroom -- Picture by Bernd Mohr

SPCC main ballroom — Picture by Bernd Mohr

 

When we toured the Convention Center, we could also watch the preparations in the main ball room which seats up to 4900 people. We will use it for the keynote and invited talks at SC16.

 

There is not much to report from the actual meeting: the progress in the different areas of the conference (technical program, finance, infrastructure, local arrangements, communications, student@SC, SCinet, and exhibition) is discussed. About 60 people, almost all volunteers from all other the world, typically attend such a meeting.

Me presenting at the Multicore@Siemens 2016 conference -- Picture by Siemens

Me presenting at the Multicore@Siemens 2016 conference — Picture by Siemens

Yesterday, I gave an invited talk at the Multicore@Siemens 2016 conference in Nürnberg about the performance analysis of parallel applications. While in our high-performance computing center at JSC, we have to deal with large-scale scientific applications running on our world-class very scalable HPC systems like JURECA or JUQUEEN, software developers in general deal with much smaller systems.

Multicore@Siemens 2016 conference — Picture by Bernd Mohr

However, everyone has to deal with parallel (multicore) systems now: smartphones, tablets, or laptops nowadays typically have two or four compute cores and a graphics accelerator and the same is true for embedded computers in consumer devices like washing machines or process automation control systems. Multicore computers are everywhere and so every software developer has to learn and understand parallel programming in these days and quickly finds out: (a) it is complicated to get right and (b) it is even more complicated to make it efficient, that means that the software really makes use of all the computer power available by all the cores on the chip.

If you are interested in the topic, here are the slides. I gave a very similar talk at the Multicore Day 2016 organized by SICS in Stockholm, Sweden and they even videotaped it.

In my talk, I presented some of the results of the RAPID ((Runtime Analysis of Parallel applications for Industrial software Development) project, which is a collaboration between the Corporate Technology Multicore Expert Center of Siemens AG and Jülich Supercomputing Centre.

RAPID (Runtime Analysis of Parallel applications for Industrial software Development) project Logo

RAPID (Runtime Analysis of Parallel applications for Industrial software Development) project logo

The goal of this project was to adapt the measurement and analysis tools Score-P and Scalasca, which we develop at Jülich in my team for many years now, to the needs of industrial applications. As industrial applications are parallelized differently than scientific application codes, it meant that we had to integrate support for threading models like POSIX threads, Windows threads, Qt threads, and ACE threads into Score-P. In addition, support for leveraging task parallelism using MTAPI, the Multicore Association Tasking API,  was also developed. Besides supporting new programming paradigms, additional work had to be done with regards to portability. Although Score-P is already quite portable as it is running on all relevant supercomputer architectures, systems like Windows and operating systems for embedded systems had not been targeted so far, but are of course very important in an industrial context. On the analysis side, new methods targeting thread-based communication patterns, e.g., a lock contention analysis, were implemented in Scalasca. Meanwhile, our software was successfully used in the work of the Multicore Expert Center to understand and optimize important Siemens industry codes.

My new coffee mug from the Siemens Multicore Expert Center -- Picture By Bernd Mohr

My new coffee mug from the Siemens Multicore Expert Center — Picture By Bernd Mohr

At the end of my talk, they gave me a Siemens Multicore Expert Center coffee mug — not sure whether they read my blog article about my coffee mug collection, but anyhow, the mug will get a prominent spot in my bookshelf 😉

Travel for my job often means visiting colleagues all over the world at their high-performance computing centers. As they are hosting some of the most powerful, and therefore very expensive, computers in the world, it is clear that this requires a little bit more than a large enough room in the basement of your university or research center institute. For one thing, they require quite some power: a typical top25 HPC system installation with the actual computer, the high-speed network, enough storage and cooling needs anything between 5 and 25 MW.

In this first part of a new mini-series (“HPC Centres Around the World”), I would like to show you the most beautiful HPC machine room of the world at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC).

Mare Nostrum Supercomputer at BSC -- picture by BSC (2003)

Mare Nostrum Supercomputer at BSC — picture by BSC (2003)

As you can see, it is actually inside a church, a de-secularized church to be precise 😉  The stories (at least how I remember it) is that in 2003, IBM wanted to demonstrate that it is possible to build a world-class HPC system out if industry-standard compute blades. A partner, the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) at Barcelona, was quickly found. UPC would get a special deal, however, there was the requirement that the system would be up and running in a year. The problem then was to find a building suitable to be able to host a supercomputer, as constructing a new one would have taken too long. The University had a church building on campus which at that time was used for chorus singing. This is actually the reason why the roof of the church inside is covered with a red carpet — it was installed to improve the acoustics for singing. In order to avoid having to cool the whole building a steel / glass frame was constructed inside the church housing the computer. During a sight-seeing tour, visitors are taken to the gallery in the backside of the church, with nice movie theater like seating, with a great view down to the computer. The tour guide can actually walk on top of the glass cage and this way can easily show and explain the different parts of the computer.

If you are interested in more pictures just search for “marenostrum” and “bsc” at Google Images. And, if you visit Barcelona in the future — a good idea anyhow — make sure to reserve some time for the “Temple of HPC Technology” as I call it 😉

BSC machine room from the outside -- Picture by Bernd Mohr

BSC machine room from the outside — Picture by Bernd Mohr

Hilton Head island beach - Picture by Bernd Mohr

Hiking the Hilton Head island beach in a meeting break – Picture by Bernd Mohr

After the conference (see past blog entry) is before the conference! So the SC committee met last week in the picturesque Hilton Head island in South Carolina. This is the so-called “Turnover” meeting: the outgoing SC committee (SC15 this time) meets with the now-in-charge committee for this year’s conference (SC16) to exchange ideas and experiences, discuss issues and problems and suggestions how to fix them for the next conference. This is one instrument SC uses to ensure quality and continuity over the years although the organizing committee changes from year to year. The other is the SC Steering committee which also meets in the same place for two additional days to discuss strategy and policies.

These face-to-face planning meetings are important for the success of the conference as SC is mainly organized by a large group of volunteers with the help of a few contractors. The typical committee size is around 500 people. Of course, only the committee and subcommittee chairs come to these meetings but this still can be easily 60 to 80 people. (And in case you were wondering about it: yes, the home organizations of the people are paying for the travel and hotel!) Besides exchanging experiences, face-to-face meetings also ensure that the different subcommittees (e.g. technical program, exhibition, infrastructure, finance, or local arrangements) get to know each other better and learn more about the work of the other subcommittees.

The Turnover meeting is traditionally in a “warmer” location (as it is always mid to end of January), and while it was warmer than many places people came from (e.g. in Jülich it was snowing ;-)) it was not as warm as expected: the temperature was more in the single-digit degrees Celsius and with the cold wind it was feeling more like freezing. At least we were not hit by “Snowzilla”, the blizzard which went over the Northeast of the US at the end of the week. A few committee members actually got stuck in Hilton Head Island for a few extra days as there home airport was closed a few days.

This is the second part of my “Things you never wanted to learn about SC, but I tell you anyhow!” (TynwtlaSC,bItya!)  posts 😉

My SC drinking mug, glasses, and bottles collection -- Picture by Bernd Mohr

My SC drinking mug, glasses, and bottles collection — Picture by Bernd Mohr

If you go to the same conference every year for a long time you collect some nice experiences and memories, but also you collect quite some souvenirs (ask my wife about it!). My typical souvenir is some conference logo wear like a t-shirt, polo shirt or sweater. If you have met me at work, you know that I wear them every day! Unfortunately, I collected so much SC pieces of clothing over the years that it will be quite some effort to get them out of my closets and arrange them all nicely on the floor, so I can take a picture of it. But if I ever get around to find the time for it, you will see it first here on this blog, I promise!

So, to get started, I took a picture of the various mugs, glasses, and bottles I collected at SC (see above). As you can see, SC makes quite some effort to have a large collection of shapes, volumes, and colors available over the years.

My mug and classes collection -- Picture by Bernd Mohr

My mug and glasses collection — Picture by Bernd Mohr

The SC glasses are actual just a small part of my collection of drinking classes from my business trips from all over the world. If you visit me in my office, I am happy to show them to you in detail. And if someone ever wonders what gift she or he wants to give to me when you are visiting Jülich, now you know … wink! wink!

Update Jan 29: Found some more glasses at home (see below) 😉

My SC drink glass collection - Picture by Bernd Mohr

My SC drink glass collection – Picture by Bernd Mohr

Me introducing the SC15 invited plenary speakers -- Photo by SC15

Me introducing the SC15 invited plenary speakers — Photo by SC15

Wow! What a conference! SC15, the 27th international conference of high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis, from November 15 to 20, 2016 in Austin, Texas, again broke all records and with 12, 862 registered attendees from 65 countries is now officially the largest SC conference ever. There were 4830 people attending the technical program. It featured 78 technical paper presentations, 15 invited speakers, 41 tutorials, 42 workshops, 123 posters, 75 BoFs, and 12 panels. In parallel to the technical program, the attached exhibit hall featured 343 exhibitors from industry, academia and research organizations from around the world in approx. 137,000 net square feet of exhibit space, again the largest of all SC conferences. It certainly sets a high bar for me looking forward to 2017!

SC15 Technical Program Networking Event in Austin Football Stadium - Photo by Bernd Mohr

SC15 Technical Program Networking Event in Austin Football Stadium – Photo by Bernd Mohr

So where do have the customary technical program social event during the conference when you have over 4000 people coming? Answer: at the University of Texas at Austin football stadium! The food court was easily able to handle this crowd. 😉

Also, as a leading high-tech IT conference, attendees expect the latest and best networking support. So, during the conference, Austin also became the hub for the world’s fastest conference computer network – SCinet – which made 1.63 TeraBits of bandwidth available to exhibitors and attendees.  The network featured 89 miles of fiber deployed throughout the convention center and was constructed and maintained by 130 volunteers from 15 countries using US$22 million in loaned equipment. 337 wireless access points provided excellent service to about 6000 concurrent wireless clients roaming the Austin convention center during the conference.

But after the conference is before the conference! Let’s get SC16 organized in Salt Lake City!