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NOTE!

This year, due to exceptional circumstances related to pandemic of coronavirus
and special protection measures, the conference will be conducted as a virtual
event. The participants will be able to follow the full program of the
conference remotely from any place worldwide with internet access.
The registration fee has been very drastically reduced to allow the widest
participation.

...will explore visionary trends and innovations in high performance computing
and computational science


JULY 11-15, DIGITAL

Call for papers


TESTIMONIALS

"Now that SCFE21 is over, I want to thank the conference organizers for a
perfect conference, with many great talks about different HPC Initiatives, HPC
architectures and components, including Claud, Edge, AI, and Quantum Computing,
amazing and novel HPC applications, and outstanding speakers. And last but not
least a perfectly smooth organization with an excellent digital conference
platform."

Wolfgang Gentzsch President The UberCloud

"During these pandemic times, it is a challenge to organize virtual conferences
and invite participants across the globe. To that end, SCFE21 did a fantastic
job with all the organization!! The conference covered a broad range of topics
including HPC, Quantum, AI/DL/ML and interdisciplinary science! I thank SCFE21
for inviting me to give a talk at their conference and it was fun to present on
the best practices of software development!!"

Sunita Chandrasekaran Lecturer, Department of Computer & Information Sciences
University of Delaware

"Supercomputing Frontiers Europe 2021 was a well organised conference providing
an excellent balance of high performance computing “trade-craft” talks and
interesting scientific talks. The talks were all informative and I learnt
something from each one of them. Some topic areas were new for me and challenged
my thinking – which is exactly the purpose of this Conference I believe. Many of
the speakers were very engaging and have prompted me to continue to learn about
the topics after the conference. This is the essence of attending a conference –
virtual or otherwise!"

Clement Lau Senior Consultant, Founder XLink Media

"The conference was exceptionally organised, covering diverse, current and
relevant topics in relation to cutting edge data and compute intensive theory,
technologies, ecosystems and applications. The conference was attended by a
globally diverse audience and provided invaluable networking opportunities to
foster collaborations. It provided industry engagement, panel discussions and
hands-on training workshops"

Tshiamo Motshegwa Lecturer, Department of Computer Science University of
Botswana

"SFE21 was an excellent conference covering a broad range of topics including
HPC initiatives, Cloud, Edge, AI and Quantum Computing. Bringing the
international community together during the pandemic and creating a good
experience using a virtual platform is hard and the organizing team did a
fantastic job to this end. I am glad I had the opportunity to attend this
conference and enjoyed giving a talk on how to get insight into HPC code
behavior. Thank you SFE21 team!"

Fouzhan Hosseini Performance Optimisation and Productivity Manager NAG

"Now that SCFE21 is over, I want to thank the conference organizers for a
perfect conference, with many great talks about different HPC Initiatives, HPC
architectures and components, including Claud, Edge, AI, and Quantum Computing,
amazing and novel HPC applications, and outstanding speakers. And last but not
least a perfectly smooth organization with an excellent digital conference
platform."

Wolfgang Gentzsch President The UberCloud

"During these pandemic times, it is a challenge to organize virtual conferences
and invite participants across the globe. To that end, SCFE21 did a fantastic
job with all the organization!! The conference covered a broad range of topics
including HPC, Quantum, AI/DL/ML and interdisciplinary science! I thank SCFE21
for inviting me to give a talk at their conference and it was fun to present on
the best practices of software development!!"

Sunita Chandrasekaran Lecturer, Department of Computer & Information Sciences
University of Delaware

"Supercomputing Frontiers Europe 2021 was a well organised conference providing
an excellent balance of high performance computing “trade-craft” talks and
interesting scientific talks. The talks were all informative and I learnt
something from each one of them. Some topic areas were new for me and challenged
my thinking – which is exactly the purpose of this Conference I believe. Many of
the speakers were very engaging and have prompted me to continue to learn about
the topics after the conference. This is the essence of attending a conference –
virtual or otherwise!"

Clement Lau Senior Consultant, Founder XLink Media

"The conference was exceptionally organised, covering diverse, current and
relevant topics in relation to cutting edge data and compute intensive theory,
technologies, ecosystems and applications. The conference was attended by a
globally diverse audience and provided invaluable networking opportunities to
foster collaborations. It provided industry engagement, panel discussions and
hands-on training workshops"

Tshiamo Motshegwa Lecturer, Department of Computer Science University of
Botswana

"SFE21 was an excellent conference covering a broad range of topics including
HPC initiatives, Cloud, Edge, AI and Quantum Computing. Bringing the
international community together during the pandemic and creating a good
experience using a virtual platform is hard and the organizing team did a
fantastic job to this end. I am glad I had the opportunity to attend this
conference and enjoyed giving a talk on how to get insight into HPC code
behavior. Thank you SFE21 team!"

Fouzhan Hosseini Performance Optimisation and Productivity Manager NAG

"Now that SCFE21 is over, I want to thank the conference organizers for a
perfect conference, with many great talks about different HPC Initiatives, HPC
architectures and components, including Claud, Edge, AI, and Quantum Computing,
amazing and novel HPC applications, and outstanding speakers. And last but not
least a perfectly smooth organization with an excellent digital conference
platform."

Wolfgang Gentzsch President The UberCloud

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CHECK OUT NEXT VIRTUAL SEMINAR - JAN 20TH

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See more recordings here

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View recording x


MAREK MICHALEWICZ

Director, Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling
(ICM), University of Warsaw, Chairman of the Organising and Scientific Committee

TITLE: CLOSING WORDS

Dr. Marek Michalewicz is a scientist, entrepreneur and inventor. In 2018 he
became the Director of Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and
Computational Modelling (ICM), University of Warsaw. In 1987–2000 he worked in
research institutions in the USA and Australia, where he dealt with the use of
supercomputers in scientific research. From 2009 to 2016, he was the managing
director of A * STAR Computational Resource Center (A * CRC) – the largest
scientific supercomputing center in Singapore. He was one of the people
responsible for planning and creation of Singapore’s National Supercomputing
Center (NSCC). In 2014, Dr. Michalewicz initiated the InfiniCortex project – a
global computer network with a capacity of 100 Gb/s – and InfiniBand – a
transport technology enabling the creation of one concurrent supercomputer
located on four continents. Since 2015, Dr. Michalewicz has been organizing
“Supercomputing Frontiers” conference, firstly in Singapore and in 2018 first
European edition was held in Warsaw in March. He was also the founder of the
startup Quantum Precision Instruments – one of the first companies in the world
specializing in nanoscale products. From October 2016, Dr. Michalewicz was the
deputy director of the ICM UW.

View recording x


MAREK MICHALEWICZ

Director, Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling
(ICM), University of Warsaw, Chairman of the Organising and Scientific Committee

TITLE: OPENING REMARKS

Dr. Marek Michalewicz is a scientist, entrepreneur and inventor. In 2018 he
became the Director of Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and
Computational Modelling (ICM), University of Warsaw. In 1987–2000 he worked in
research institutions in the USA and Australia, where he dealt with the use of
supercomputers in scientific research. From 2009 to 2016, he was the managing
director of A * STAR Computational Resource Center (A * CRC) – the largest
scientific supercomputing center in Singapore. He was one of the people
responsible for planning and creation of Singapore’s National Supercomputing
Center (NSCC). In 2014, Dr. Michalewicz initiated the InfiniCortex project – a
global computer network with a capacity of 100 Gb/s – and InfiniBand – a
transport technology enabling the creation of one concurrent supercomputer
located on four continents. Since 2015, Dr. Michalewicz has been organizing
“Supercomputing Frontiers” conference, firstly in Singapore and in 2018 first
European edition was held in Warsaw in March. He was also the founder of the
startup Quantum Precision Instruments – one of the first companies in the world
specializing in nanoscale products. From October 2016, Dr. Michalewicz was the
deputy director of the ICM UW.

View recording x


MACIEJ BRZEŹNIAK

Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center

TITLE: NATIONAL DATA STORAGE

ABSTRACT: THE AIM OF THE PROJECT IS TO DELIVER A PRODUCTION-LEVEL INFRASTRUCTURE
FOR DATA STORAGE, ACCESS AND PROTECTION SERVICES AS WELL AS TO INTEGRATE
SOLUTIONS FOR EFFICIENT ANALYSIS AND PROCESSING FOR LARGE AND COMPLEX DATA SETS
BASED ON DISTRIBUTED ECOSYSTEM OF HPC, BIGDATA AND AI PLATFORMS, SUPPORING THE
APPROACH OF PROVIDING EUROPEAN OPEN SCIENCE CLOUD AT NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL
LEVELS.

 

View recording x


KEN O’BRIEN

Senior Research Scientist at Xilinx

TITLE: INNOVATIVE COMPUTING-ARCHITECTURES WITH FPGAS

ABSTRACT: A SPECTRUM OF INNOVATIVE HARDWARE ARCHITECTURES ARE EMERGING TO TACKLE
MODERN COMPUTE AND MEMORY INTENSIVE WORKLOADS. SPECIALIZED HARDWARE
ARCHITECTURES ARE CRITICAL TO PERFORMANCE SCALING IN KEY DOMAINS SUCH AS HPC AND
ML. IN THIS TALK, WE WILL EXPLORE FPGA SPECIFIC HARDWARE INNOVATIONS SUCH AS
SPATIAL PROCESSING AND CUSTOM ARITHMETIC, AND USING A NETWORK INTRUSION
DETECTION EXAMPLE WE WILL DEMONSTRATE THE BENEFITS OF THESE SOLUTIONS.

Ken O’Brien is a senior research scientist at Xilinx research labs. He graduated
in 2019 from University College Dublin, Ireland, with a PhD in computer science
focused on energy efficient high performance heterogeneous computing. In the
past he has worked in the areas of reduced precision machine learning,
bioinformatics, and performance modelling on reconfigurable platforms. He is
currently researching heterogeneous distributed computing solutions for
reconfigurable platforms.

View recording x


GAURAV KAUL

Senior Solutions Architect – AI & HPC at Hewlett Packard Enterprise

TITLE: MEMORY AND INTERCONNECT INTERPLAY IN SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE

ABSTRACT: TECHNOLOGY CHANGES IN KEY BUILDING BLOCKS OF SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE ARE
HAPPENING WHICH IMPACT SYSTEM DESIGN AT LARGE SCALE SPECIFICALLY IN AI/ML
ACCELERATION AND EXASCALE COMPUTING. IN THIS ARTICLE, WE COVER HOW THESE CHANGES
ARE IN RESPONSE TO EXISTING SCALING CHALLENGES AND HOW IT WILL IMPACT COMPUTER
ARCHITECTURE IN THE NEXT 3-5 YEARS. WE WILL ALSO LOOK AT SOME NOVEL HARDWARE
ARCHITECTURES WHICH HAVE BEEN RECENTLY LAUNCHED AND HOW THESE ARE RESPONSE TO
THE TRENDS WE DISCUSS. IN ORDER TO SCALE COMPUTATION FOR AI/ML ACCELERATION,
FOLLOWING BUILDING BLOCKS CAN BE USED BY ARCHITECTS COMPUTE – CHIPLET : TENSOR
CORES, SYSTOLIC ARRAYS, FULL PROCESSING ELEMENTS (A LA PONTE VECHHIO) MEMORY –
HBM, EDRAM, LPDDR, SMART MEMORY CPU-ACCELERATOR-MEMORY INTERCONNECT – NVLINK,
CXL, CAPI NODE INTERCONNECT – INFINIBAND, SMARTNIC HOW THESE BUILDING BLOCKS ARE
COMBINED IS A FUNCTION OF PERFORMANCE, SCALE AND COST WHICH ARCHITECTS WANT TO
OPTIMIZE. THE PURPOSE OF THIS DOCUMENT IS TO BUILD A SYSTEM MODEL WHICH CAN
FACTOR IN THESE BUILDING BLOCKS TO COME UP WITH DESIGN SPACE EXPLORATION OF HOW
THESE ELEMENTS ARE COMBINED IN CURRENT ARCHITECTURES AND HOW THEY MAY EVOLVE AS
THESE BUILDING BLOCKS EVOLVE FURTHER LOOK AT MEMORY DATAFLOW AND ORCHESTRATION
ACROSS THE CHIPS FROM CORE, MEMORY ELEMENTS (HBM, GDDR, LPDDR, DRAM…), NETWORK
AND ACROSS SYSTEMS POSSIBLE TRADEOFFS ACROSS THESE SYSTEM PARAMETERS HYPERSCALE
VS HPC/EXASCALE DEPLOYMENTS WHITE_CHECK_MARK

An experienced IT professional with extensive knowledge in Cloud Computing
platforms and Intelligent Edge Services, particularly in zero-downtime, scalable
microservices architectures. He has been specifically focused on HPC and AI
platforms designed to support both Cloud-native and non-Cloud-native
applications running on on-premise infrastructure, Cloud-based Private, Public
and Hybrid environments, or at the Edge, which has enabled him to manage,
develop and build successful Software-defined Enterprise Systems integration and
Service operations. Gaurav obtained his MSc in Computer Science (High
Performance Computing) at the University of Manchester. He is has also published
technical papers on HPC and AI in industry sessions and forums. Gaurav is based
out of London, UK.

View recording x


VALENTIN PLUGARU

Chief Technical Officer, LuxProvide High Performance Computing Center

TITLE: MELUXINA – A NEW GENERATION SUPERCOMPUTER

ABSTRACT: LUXPROVIDE IS HOME TO THE MELUXINA SUPERCOMPUTER, BUILT AS ONE OF THE
NEW GENERATION EUROPEAN SUPERCOMPUTERS AND PART OF THE EUROHPC NETWORK. MELUXINA
IS DESIGNED AS A MODULAR SYSTEM TO OFFER WORLD-CLASS HPC, HPDA AND AI SERVICES
FOR A WIDE VARIETY OF WORKLOADS AND APPLICATION DOMAINS. THIS TALK WILL FOCUS ON
MELUXINA’S ARCHITECTURE AND TECHNOLOGIES, SOFTWARE ECOSYSTEM AND PLATFORM
SERVICES, AS WELL AS LOOK INTO FUTURE USE CASES THAT WILL TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE
SYSTEM’S CAPABILITIES.

With over a decade of passion and experience in all things HPC, Valentin Plugaru
has worked as part of national and European HPC initiatives, helping shape the
roadmap for the European HPC ecosystem and creating Luxembourg’s first national
HPC center and supercomputing platform. Today he is sharing his time between
boosting LuxProvide’s HPC, Data and AI capabilities, growing highly expert
groups, and supporting the development of competencies networks, in particular
through the EuroCC/National Competence Centers and CASTIEL projects.

View recording x


TOMASZ WAZNY AND RAFAL TYMKOW

Huawei

TITLE: THE BIGGEST HPC IMPLEMENTATION ON THE CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE, PCSS
BUSINESS CASE

ABSTRACT: PRACELAB PROJECT IS A PROJECT IMPLEMENTED IN POLAND, OFFERING ADVANCED
COMPUTING AND DATA STORAGE SERVICES, SUPPORTING THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY IN THE
COUNTRY AND EUROPE, AS WELL AS INDUSTRIAL RESEARCH IN THE ECONOMY. THE MOST
MODERN AND LARGEST COMPUTING INFRASTRUCTURE WITH THE HIGHEST STANDARD OF
RELIABILITY.

THE MAIN GOAL OF THE PROJECT IS TO INCREASE THE COMPETITIVENESS OF THE
SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY AND THE ECONOMY, WITH PARTICULAR EMPHASIS ON SMES, ON
INTERNATIONAL MARKETS. THANKS TO THE IMPLEMENTATION OF DEVELOPMENT WORKS, IT IS
PLANNED TO IMPROVE THE POSITION OF THE POLISH ICT SECTOR BY SUPPORTING AND
STRENGTHENING THE DEVELOPMENT OF INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS.

THE DIRECT OBJECTIVE OF THE PROJECT IS TO BUILD A WIDELY AVAILABLE HPC (HIGH
PERFORMANCE COMPUTING) COMPUTING INFRASTRUCTURE CONSISTING OF HIGH-PERFORMANCE
COMPUTING SERVERS, SPECIALIZED PROCESSING UNITS AND FLEXIBLE DATA MANAGEMENT
SYSTEMS, AND TO PROVIDE SCIENTIFIC UNITS AND ENTERPRISES BASED ON THIS
INFRASTRUCTURE WITH SERVICES FOR RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT AND ACTIVITIES
COMMERCIAL.

THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE PROJECT IS PLANNED FOR 2019-2023 AND INCLUDES THE
CONSTRUCTION OF SPECIALIZED LABORATORIES THAT GUARANTEE THE HIGHEST QUALITY OF
SERVICES.

THE PROJECT PARTNERS ARE: INSTITUTE OF BIOORGANIC CHEMISTRY OF THE POLISH
ACADEMY OF SCIENCES – POZNAN SUPERCOMPUTING AND NETWORKING CENTER, ACADEMIC
COMPUTER CENTER CYFRONET AGH, BIALYSTOK TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY, CZESTOCHOWA
UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, GDANSK UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY CI TASK, TECHNICAL
UNIVERSITY OF LODZ, KIELCE UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, WROCLAW UNIVERSITY OF
TECHNOLOGY – WROCLAW NETWORK AND SUPERCOMPUTING CENTER

Tomasz Wazny is Huawei’s Account Manager, in charge of key customers from
banking and public sectors. With the IT industry for 10 years. Enthusiast of
supercomputers, Artificial Intelligence, Robotic Process Automation and
cybersecurity.



Rafal Tymkow is Head of public sector in EBG Huawei Poland. He is directly
responsible about PCSS project. With the IT industry for 20 years. HPC expert
and passionate.



Video not available x


AKSHARA JAYANAND KAGINALKAR

Senior Director at Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), India

TITLE: CONNECTING THE DOTS: URBAN ENVIRONMENT MODELS, HPC-CLOUD, CLIMATE
RESILIENT INDIAN SMART CITIES

ABSTRACT: GLOBALLY, RAPID URBANISATION IS CONTRIBUTING TO THE ECONOMIC GROWTH.
THIS IS LEADING TO MAJORITY OF THE POPULATION TO BE URBAN DWELLERS. THIS GROWTH
HAS COST IN TERMS OF ENVIRONMENTAL VULNERABILITY AND CASCADING HEALTH AND
ECONOMY IMPACTS. SCIENCE DRIVEN URBAN RESILIENCE IS CRUCIAL FOR IMPROVING
QUALITY OF LIFE AND TO MITIGATE CLIMATE CHANGE EFFECTS. TO THAT END, IT IS
IMPERATIVE TO UNDERSTAND, SIMULATE AND DISSEMINATE URBAN SCALE IMPACT FORECASTS
FOR EXTREME EVENTS, ROUTINE CITY OPERATIONS AND PLANNING DECISIONS. THERE IS AN
URGENT NEED FOR INTEGRATED MODELING BASED CITY SERVICES TO ADDRESS ENVIRONMENTAL
ISSUES SUCH AS EXTREME POLLUTION, HEAVY RAINFALL, FLOODING, HEAT WAVES AND THEIR
CASCADING IMPACTS. THE NEIGHBOURHOOD SCALE SIMULATIONS ARE COMPUTE AND RESOURCE
INTENSIVE DUE TO COMPLEX PARAMETRIZATION, LARGE SCALE DATA ASSIMILATION, AND
MULTI-MODEL ENSEMBLE EXECUTIONS.

ADDRESSING THESE NEEDS, THE TALK HIGHLIGHTS THE URBAN SCALE CROSS-SECTOR
MODELING WITH WEATHER, AIR QUALITY, AND HYDROLOGY MODELS AND HPC-CLOUD
CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT UNDERWAY FOR INDIAN SMART CITIES. THE URBAN
ENVIRONMENT SCIENCE TO SOCIETY (UES2S) SYSTEM, UNDER THE AEGIS OF ‘NATIONAL
SUPERCOMPUTING MISSION’ PROGRAM WILL BE PRESENTED.

Akshara Kaginalkar is a Senior Director with Centre for Development of Advanced
Computing (C-DAC), India. She works in HPC applications in weather, climate and
environment. She has executed number of projects translating science and
computational modeling using supercomputers to the end-user services in sectors
such as, agriculture, air quality, defence, energy, and disaster management.

View recording x


WARSAW TEAM
PATRYCJA KRZYNA, MAREK MASIAK, MAREK SKIBA

University of Warsaw, University College London

TITLE: WARSAW TEAM: STUDENT PARTICIPATION IN HPC COMPETITIONS AMIDST A GLOBAL
PANDEMIC

ABSTRACT: WARSAW TEAM IS A STUDENT CLUSTER COMPETITION TEAM, ASSEMBLED FROM
STUDENTS STUDYING AT AN UNDERGRADUATE LEVEL. THE TEAM OPERATES WITH THE SUPPORT
AND SUPERVISION OF THE INTERDISCIPLINARY CENTRE FOR MATHEMATICAL AND
COMPUTATIONAL MODELLING UW. THE MAIN OBJECTIVE OF THE TEAM IS TO QUALIFY FOR AND
TAKE PART IN THE FINALS OF THE THREE MOST SIGNIFICANT STUDENT CLUSTER
COMPETITIONS. THE COMPETITIONS ARE THE STUDENT CLUSTER COMPETITION (SCC) DURING
THE SC CONFERENCE IN THE USA, THE SCC DURING THE ISC CONFERENCE IN GERMANY, AND
THE ASIA SUPERCOMPUTER CHALLENGE IN CHINA. NORMALLY, THE COMPETITIONS DEMAND,
APART FROM COMPETITION TASKS, BUILDING A CLUSTER ON-SITE, STAYING VIGILANT FOR
POSSIBLE POWER OUTAGES, AND MAKING SURE THAT THE POWER USAGE DOESN’T EXCEED A
PREDEFINED THRESHOLD. DUE TO THE ONGOING PANDEMIC, THE COMPETITIONS HAD TO
TRANSITION INTO ONLINE HACKATHONS. MOUNTING NODES INTO THE RACK CABINET HAVE
BEEN REPLACED WITH CHOOSING THE RIGHT AWS OR AZURE CLUSTER INSTANCE. DESPITE THE
NEW CHALLENGES, THE WARSAW TEAM MANAGED TO TAKE PART IN ISC20, SC20 AND ASC20-21
REMOTELY. THE TEAM HAS EMBRACED THE SITUATION. THE REMOTE WORKING CONDITIONS
MEANT THAT MEMBERS COULD HAVE BEEN ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD AND STILL PARTICIPATE
IN PREPARING FOR THE COMPETITIONS.

Patrycja Krzyna, University of Warsaw Marek Skiba, University of Warsaw Marek
Masiak, University College London

The Warsaw Team is a student cluster competition team, which was first assembled
in 2016 on the initiative of the acting director of the ICM UW. Since that time,
the team has been acquiring professional knowledge in the HPC field. Five years
have passed since the team was created, which means that some team members who
graduated had to be substituted by first- and second-year students. The younger
members are very well-prepared, having gained experience by participating in the
student cluster competitions at SC19 and SC20 and academic research in HPC. The
graduate veterans of the SCCs are guiding and teaching more recent members about
what they have learned in their time as a part of the Warsaw Team. This
combination of hard-earned experience and eagerness to learn is our formula for
success.

The team gathers students from the University of Warsaw, University of Oxford
and University College London. All team members are registered at college level
programs related to computer science and physics.

View recording x


PHUTI NGOEPE

Professor at University of Limpopo

TITLE: SIMULATED SYNTHESIS, CHARACTERISATION AND PERFORMANCE OF NANOSTRUCTURED
METAL OXIDE ELECTRODES FOR ENERGY STORAGE

ABSTRACT: LITHIUM ION BATTERIES ARE INCREASINGLY BEING USED IN IN ELECTRONIC
CONSUMER DEVICES, ELECTRIC VEHICLES AND FOR ENERGY STORAGE IN RENEWABLES.
SIMULATED AMORPHISATION RECRYSTALLIZATION METHOD, WHICH IS BASED ON MOLECULAR
DYNAMICS, IS USED IN CONJUNCTION WITH CLASSICAL FORCEFIELDS, TO ILLUSTRATE
SIMULATED SYNTHESIS AND CHARACTERISATION OF DIFFERENT NANO-ARCHITECTURES, I.E.
NANO- SPHERES, SHEETS, RODS, POROUS AND BULK OF BINARY METAL OXIDES SUCH AS MNO2
AND TIO2. [1] FURTHERMORE, THE NANO-ARCHITECTURES ARE LITHIATED, TO IMITATE
CHARGING AND DISCHARGING, AND THEIR STRUCTURAL ASPECTS AND PERFORMANCE ARE
CHARACTERIZED BY SIMULATED X-RAY DIFFRACTION PATTERNS. IN PARTICULAR, THE
RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MECHANICAL PROPERTIES, MICROSTRUCTURAL FEATURES AND
ELECTROCHEMICAL ACTIVITY IN NANOPOROUS AND BULK STRUCTURES IS HIGHLIGHTED [2].
SUCH CONNECTION IS EXTENDED TO WHY THE TERNARY NANO LI2MNO3, AN END MEMBER OF
HIGH VOLTAGE COMPOSITE CATHODES, IS ELECTROCHEMICALLY ACTIVE WHILST ITS BULK
FORM IS INACTIVE. LASTLY, NANO-ARCHITECTURES, ASSOCIATED WITH THE LI-MN-O
TERNARY WERE SYNTHESISED FROM AMORPHOUS SPINEL NANOSPHERE. THE RESULTING
CRYSTALLISED NANO-ARCHITECTURES ARE CHARACTERISED AND THE PRESENCE OF A
COMPOSITE CONSISTING OF THE LAYERED LI2MNO3 AND SPINEL LIMN2O4 TOGETHER WITH A
VARIETY OF DEFECTS, INCLUDING GRAIN BOUNDARIES AND ION VACANCIES ARE OBSERVED,
FROM XRDS AND MICROSTRUCTURAL FEATURES [3]]. THIS IS A STEP TOWARDS ADDRESSING
THE CHALLENGE OF VOLTAGE FADE IN THE COMPOSITE LAYERED SPINEL CATHODES, WHICH
HAVE HIGH CAPACITY AND ENERGY DENSITY. PRELIMINARY WORK BEYOND LI-ION BATTERIES,
ESPECIALLY THE ROLE OF CATALYTIC METAL OXIDES IN METAL-AIR BATTERIES WILL BE
DISCUSSED [4].

REFERENCES:
[1] M.G. MATSHABA, D.C. SAYLE, T.X.T. SAYLE AND P.E. NGOEPE, J. PHYS, CHEM. C
2016, 120, 14001-14008.
[2] T.X.T. SAYLE, F. CADDEO, N.O. MONAMA, K.M. KGATWANE, P.E. NGOEPE AND D.C.
SAYLE, NANOSCALE 2014, 7, 1167-1180.
[3] R.S. LEDWABA, D.C. SAYLE AND P.E. NGOEPE, ACS APPL. ENERGY MATER 2020, 3,
1429-1428.
[4] K.P. MAENETJA AND P.E NGOEPE, J. ELECTROCHEM SOC., ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION.

Professor Phuti E Ngoepe is a Professor in Physics, holds the South African
Research Chair in Computational Modelling of Materials at the University of
Limpopo, South Africa. He has previously served as Dean of the Faculty of
Science and Acting Deputy Vice Chancellor at the University. He is a Founder
Member of the Academy of Science of South Africa and was a CSIR Fellow. He is a
recipient of several honours including the Order of Mapungubwe (Silver), awarded
by the President of South Africa for excellent contributions to science. He has
published widely on computational modelling on energy storage, mineral
processing and alloy development and has given several invited lectures at local
and international conferences and summer schools where he organized some;
including chairing them and serves on some of their advisory committees. He has
successfully supervised over 80 MSc and PhD students to completion. Lastly he
has served on several Boards mainly of Science Councils and participated in many
science strategy committees and including reviews of government institutions.

View recording x


ATTILA CANGI

Center for Advanced Systems Understanding (CASUS)

TITLE: DATA-DRIVEN SURROGATE MODELING OF MATTER UNDER EXTREME CONDITIONS

ABSTRACT: THE SUCCESSFUL DIAGNOSTICS OF PHENOMENA IN MATTER UNDER EXTREME
CONDITIONS RELIES ON A STRONG INTERPLAY BETWEEN EXPERIMENT AND SIMULATION.
UNDERSTANDING THESE PHENOMENA IS KEY TO ADVANCING OUR FUNDAMENTAL KNOWLEDGE OF
ASTROPHYSICAL OBJECTS AND HAS THE POTENTIAL TO UNLOCK FUTURE ENERGY TECHNOLOGIES
THAT HAVE GREAT SOCIETAL IMPACT. A GREAT CHALLENGE FOR AN ACCURATE NUMERICAL
MODELING IS THE PERSISTENCE OF ELECTRON CORRELATION AND HAS HITHERTO IMPEDED OUR
ABILITY TO MODEL THESE PHENOMENA ACROSS MULTIPLE LENGTH AND TIME SCALES AT
SUFFICIENT ACCURACY. IN THIS TALK, I WILL SUMMARIZE OUR RECENT EFFORTS ON
DEVISING A DATA-DRIVEN WORKFLOW TO TACKLE THIS CHALLENGE. BASED ON
FIRST-PRINCIPLES DATA WE GENERATE MACHINE-LEARNING SURROGATE MODELS THAT REPLACE
TRADITIONAL ELECTRONIC-STRUCTURE ALGORITHMS. OUR SURROGATES BOTH PREDICT THE
ELECTRONIC STRUCTURE AND YIELD THERMO-MAGNETO-ELASTIC MATERIALS PROPERTIES OF
MATTER UNDER EXTREME CONDITIONS HIGHLY EFFICIENTLY WHILE MAINTAINING THEIR
ACCURACY. THIS OPENS UP THE PATH TOWARDS MULTISCALE MATERIALS MODELING FOR
MATTER UNDER AMBIENT AND EXTREME CONDITIONS AT A COMPUTATIONAL SCALE AND COST
THAT IS UNATTAINABLE WITH CURRENT ALGORITHMS.

Attila Cangi is a theoretical and computational physicist interested in various
aspects of quantum many-body theory, quantum dynamics, materials science, and
machine learning for the modeling of phenomena in matter induced by extreme
electromagnetic fields, temperatures, and pressures. He is currently the acting
research team leader of the research area “Matter under Extreme Conditions” at
the Center for Advanced Systems Understanding (CASUS), Helmholtz-Zentrum
Dresden-Rossendorf, Germany. He began his academic career with a Ph.D. in
Chemistry from the University of California, Irvine in 2011. From 2011 to 2017
he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure
Physics, Halle, Germany. Until 2020 he was a staff member at the Center for
Computing Research, Sandia National Laboratories, USA where he developed
modeling frameworks for matter under extreme conditions.

Video not available x


DAUDI JJINGO

Programme Director/PI for the Ugandan NIH H3Africa bioinformatics training
programme (BRECA)

TITLE: A REVIEW OF COMPUTATIONAL DATA SCIENCE APPLICATIONS IN UGANDA

ABSTRACT: IN LOW RESOURCED ENVIRONMENTS LIKE UGANDA, HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING
AND COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCE COME TO LIFE THROUGH LOCALLY RELEVANT APPLICATIONS.
SEVERAL SUCH APPLICATIONS ARE NOT HEAVY ON COMPUTATIONAL THEORY, BUT ARE LOCALLY
RELEVANT AND IMPACTFUL. IN THIS TALK, I WILL PROVIDE AN OVERVIEW OF EXEMPLIFIED
LOCAL PROBLEMS TO WHICH HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING AND COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCE ARE
BEING BROUGHT TO BEAR IN UGANDA. THESE WILL RANGE FROM THE BIOMEDICAL AND PUBLIC
HEALTH TO THE AGRICULTURAL DOMAINS. THE TALK WILL THEN CONSIDER SOME OF THE
EFFORTS BEING TAKE TO BUILD SUITABLE HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING ENVIRONMENTS AND
THE ATTENDANT CHALLENGES.

Dr. Daudi Jjingo is a Principle Investigator of the NIH/Fogarty Bioinformatics
training grant in Uganda and Co-Principal Investigator of the Ugandan H3BioNet
node. He serves as the Director of the African Center of Excellence (ACE) in
bioinformatics and data intensive sciences, whose mandate involves providing
cutting-edge computational platforms for biomedical research. Dr. Jjingo is a
Senior Scientist and Lecturer at Makerere University in the College of
Computing, where he is also a senior member of the Artificial Intelligence
laboratory (AI-lab). He earned his PhD in Bioinformatics as a Fulbright Scholar
at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta USA, preceded by an MSc in
Bioinformatics from the University of Leeds, UK and a BSc in Biochemistry from
Makerere University, Uganda. His research interests broadly lie in the
application of computational tools and methods on biomedical and public health
problems.

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THOMAS BLUM

Pre-Sales Systems Engineer DDN® Storage

TITLE: TAKING A CLOSER LOOK AT AI I/O

ABSTRACT: WITH LATEST APPLICATIONS USING AI AND ML ALGORITHMS THERE IS A NEED TO
OPTIMIZE THE DATA PATHS TO PROVIDE THE BEST POSSIBLE PERFORMANCE FOR THE LARGE
DATA SETS THAT’S BEING USED. IF DATA CAN’T BE PROVIDED IN TIME FOR PROCESSING
EXPENSIVE COMPUTE RESOURCES WILL RUN UNDERUTILIZED AND CAN NOT SUSTAIN THEIR
FULL CAPACITY AND EXPENSIVE RESOURCES WOULD BE WASTED. WITHIN THIS PRESENTATION
WE ANALYZE THE IO PATTERNS AND SHOW OPTIMIZATION STRATEGIES AND TECHNOLOGIES TO
IMPROVE THE IO EFFICIENCY FOR AI/ML.

Thomas is an IT engineer with over 15 years of experience in High Performance
Computing and storage systems. Since his thesis in computer science on
distributed and parallel filesystems, he specially focused on parallel
filesystems and storage technologies for HPC, designed solutions for academic
and industry and was involved into several Top500 projects throughout Europe. In
2017 he joined DDN and architects storage solutions for academic and industrial
HPC, media, life sciences and other data intense applications.



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SANTOSH ANSUMALI

Associate Professor, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research

TITLE: TOWARDS CFD AT EXA-SCALE

ABSTRACT: COMPUTATIONAL FLUID DYNAMICS IN THE PETASCALE ERA IS LARGE MEMORY
BOUND AND MEMORY BANDWIDTH AND DATA STRUCTURE OPTIMIZATION PLAYS IMPORTANT ROLE
IN CODE PERFORMANCE. THIS TREND IS EXPECTED TO WORSEN WITH EXA-SCALE ERA. THIS
TALK WILL SURVEY THESE TRENDS, DISCUSS PROGRESS AT OUR END, AND OFFER SOME
SUGGESTIONS FOR EMERGING HARDWARE.

Prof. Santosh Ansumali an Associate Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for
Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR). He is also the founding CTO of Sankhya
Sutra Labs Pvt Ltd, Bangalore (https://www.sankhyasutralabs.com). His research
interests are mesoscale methods for Computational Fluid Dynamics, High
Performance Computing and Computational Kinetic Theory. His works primarily
focuses on developing algorithms and physical models which are fundamentally
suited for high performance computing. Before joining JNCASR, he was an
Assistant Professor at School of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, NTU
Singapore. Prof. Ansumali received his PhD from Institute of Energy Technology,
ETH Zurich in 2005. His complete list of publications is available on Google
Scholar

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EDWARD HSU

Chief Product Officer at Rescale

TITLE: HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING BUILT FOR CLOUD USING AN INTELLIGENT CONTROL
PLANE APPROACH

ABSTRACT: APPLYING THE CLOUD ARCHITECTURE AND OPERATING MODEL TO HIGH
PERFORMANCE COMPUTING MEANS IT’S FINALLY POSSIBLE TO START FROM THE WORKFLOW AND
THE WORKLOAD TO OPTIMIZE THE INFRASTRUCTURE USED, AND NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.
CLOUD COMPUTING MEANS NEAR UNLIMITED SCALE, UNPRECEDENTED VARIETY OF ACCESSIBLE
ARCHITECTURES, AND PERSISTENT CONNECTIVITY TO A BROAD RANGE OF PLATFORM
SERVICES.

THE ONLY WAY ORGANIZATIONS CAN SUCCESSFULLY NAVIGATE ALL THE POSSIBILITIES TO
FIND THE BEST APPROACH PER WORKLOAD IS THROUGH AUTOMATION.  WE WILL DISCUSS HOW
A CONTROL-PLANE BASED APPROACH TO CLOUD HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING CAN HELP
DELIVER THE OPTIMAL SOFTWARE, SPECIALIZED ARCHITECTURE, AND OTHER RELEVANT
SERVICES, SO THAT RESEARCHERS AND ENGINEERS CAN FOCUS ON DISCOVERING
BREAKTHROUGHS.

THIS CONTROL PLANE AUTOMATES ~700 OF THE MOST POPULAR COMMERCIAL AND OPEN SOURCE
SIMULATION AND MACHINE LEARNING SOFTWARE, ON SPECIALIZED ARCHITECTURES FROM ALL
MAJOR CLOUD PROVIDERS, INCLUDING AWS, GCP, AZURE, AND ORACLE CLOUD
INFRASTRUCTURE.  CONTROL PLANE INTELLIGENCE ON PERFORMANCE ENABLES AUTOMATION TO
IDENTIFY THE OPTIMAL CLOUD HARDWARE ARCHITECTURE BY WORKLOAD, FROM MACHINE
LEARNING, TO FLUID DYNAMICS, OR FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS.  BY COMBINING GLOBAL
REGIONAL PRICING INFORMATION, REGIONAL CAPACITY/MATURITY, AND WORKLOAD-SPECIFIC
PERFORMANCE INTELLIGENCE, WE CAN HELP RESEARCHERS OR IT LEADERS OPTIMIZE FOR
TIME-TO-SOLVE, LOWEST COST OR A BALANCE IN BETWEEN.



Edward Hsu is Chief Product Officer at Rescale, which delivers an intelligent
computing platform to help organizations move towards Digital R&D operations. 
Previously, Edward led product and marketing at D2IQ which pioneered production
container infrastructure operations with technologies like Docker, Apache Mesos,
and later Kubernetes as it became mainstream.

At VMware, Edward worked as the Sr. Director of Product Marketing, where he was
responsible for pricing and packaging for the majority of VMware products by
sales. Edward led the first launch of groundbreaking products including storage
virtualization (VSA), private cloud software (vCloud Suite), and hyperconverged
integrated systems (Cloud Foundation).

At McKinsey, Edward sourced and oversaw engagements with Fortune 500 companies,
to help senior executives dramatically improve the performance of technology and
service organizations. Edward led engineering at Oracle where he delivered
Oracle’s first browser & workflow-based CRM products and invented patented
software technologies. Edward has Masters and Bachelors degrees in Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, and an MBA from NYU Stern School of
Business.

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MIGUEL TEROL PALENCIA

HPC Solutions Architect Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group

TITLE: LENOVO SCALABLE ARCHITECTURES FOR GENOMICS ANALYTICS

ABSTRACT: THE PAIN POINT OF RESEARCHERS AT GETTING INSIGHTS FROM GENOME
SEQUENCING IS THE BOTTLENECK THAT OCCURS IN THE GENOMICS ANALYTICS STEP TO GET
GENOME VARIANTS. USUALLY, WITH A STANDARD SOLUTION, THIS TAKES UP TO 150 HOURS
TO GET A WHOLE GENOME SEQUENCE (WGS) ANALYZED. THIS MAY CAUSE, E.G., DELAYS IN
THE DEVELOPMENT OF A CERTAIN DRUG FOR A SPECIFIC DISEASE, OR A VACCINE AGAINST A
NEW VIRUS.

LENOVO HAS DEVELOPED GOAST (GENOME OPTIMIZATION AND SCALABILITY TOOL), AN
OPTIMIZED HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE PLATFORM THAT DRAMATICALLY REDUCES THE TIME TO
RESULTS OF GENOMICS ANALYTICS UP TO 19 MINUTES, ACCELERATING THE PRODUCTIVITY OF
BIOINFORMATICIANS, WITH A GENERAL PURPOSE ARCHITECTURE THAT ALLOWS SAVINGS IN
THE ACQUISITION AND REUSABILITY FOR OTHER LIFE SCIENCES WORKLOADS.

MIGUEL TEROL WILL BE EXPLAINING THE MAIN FEATURES OF THIS SOLUTION.

Miguel Terol is a professional with more than 20 years of experience in
different areas of the IT industry, in companies like Siemens, Silicon Graphics,
IBM and Lenovo, spending the last 14 years focused in HPC. Miguel holds a BSc.
Degree in Mathematics.

He works as HPC&AI architect for the EMEA organization at Lenovo Infrastructure
Solutions Group. Besides the design of HPC&AI hardware architectures, he works
in the design of solutions targeting specific workloads in Life Sciences and
some other segments.



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TARA MADHYASTHA

Principal Research Scientist at RONIN and affiliate faculty in the Department of
Psychology at the University of Washington

TITLE: RONIN: SECURE SELF-SERVICE HIGH PERFORMANCE RESEARCH COMPUTING IN THE
CLOUD

ABSTRACT: IN MANY AREAS OF COMPUTATIONAL RESEARCH, THE PACE OF INNOVATION
CREATES PRESSURE TO STORE, PROCESS AND ANALYZE EVER-LARGER DATA SETS USING EVER
MORE COMPUTATIONALLY DEMANDING METHODS. TO MEET THESE CHALLENGES, RESEARCHERS
CAN BENEFIT FROM THE FLEXIBILITY OF CLOUD COMPUTING TO CREATE THEIR OWN HIGH
PERFORMANCE COMPUTING CLUSTERS OR TO USE SPECIALIZED HARDWARE (GPUS, FPGAS,
MEMORY-OPTIMIZED MACHINES) FOR THEIR WORKLOADS.

RONIN IS A USER-FRIENDLY WEB APPLICATION THAT PROVIDES RESEARCHERS WITH EASY
SELF-SERVICE CONTROL TO CREATE HIGH THROUGHPUT, TIGHTLY COUPLED, AND ACCELERATED
COMPUTING CLUSTERS IN THE CLOUD IN MINUTES. THIS ENABLES RESEARCHERS WITH
TIME-SENSITIVE WORKLOADS TO AVOID QUEUES AND PROVIDES EXTRA HPC CAPACITY FOR
SMALLER JOBS OR THOSE WITH UNIQUE COMPUTATIONAL DEMANDS. FOR EXAMPLE, THE
ABILITY TO CREATE AUTO-SCALING CLUSTERS THAT ARE BASED ON MULTIPLES OF HIGHLY
AVAILABLE SMALL INSTANCE TYPES IS A COST-EFFECTIVE APPROACH TO RUNNING
UNOPTIMIZED RESEARCH CODES OR SCRIPTS. BUDGET MONITORING AND RESOURCE SCHEDULING
IN RONIN ENABLE RESEARCHERS TO EASILY TRACK AND CONTROL COSTS OF THEIR CLOUD
RESOURCES. INCLUDED HPC PACKAGE MANAGERS SUCH AS SPACK CAN BE USED TO FACILITATE
SOFTWARE INSTALLATION AND OPTIMIZED INSTALLATIONS OF POPULAR SCIENTIFIC
APPLICATIONS CAN EASILY BE PACKAGED FOR FUTURE USE OR SHARED WITH OTHERS. THIS
FEATURE ENABLES REPRODUCIBILITY AT SCALE. ABSTRACTIONS TO MANAGE OBJECT-BASED
STORAGE FACILITATE SIMPLE DATA ACCESS CONTROL AND COLLABORATION WHILE OTHER
FEATURES SUCH AS REMOTE DESKTOPS ASSIST WITH DATA VISUALISATION AND ANALYSIS.
FINALLY, THE RONIN ARCHITECTURE SUPPORTS SECURE AND COMPLIANT RESEARCH
ENVIRONMENTS (SUCH AS TRUSTED RESEARCH ENVIRONMENTS AND HIPAA COMPLIANT
WORKLOADS) WITH HPC CAPABILITIES THAT ARE AS EASY FOR RESEARCHERS TO USE AS
ON-PREMISE SYSTEMS.

THIS TALK WILL INTRODUCE RONIN AND DESCRIBE HOW IT IS CURRENTLY BEING USED BY
RESEARCH GROUPS TO PROVIDE SELF-SERVICE RESEARCH COMPUTING ON THE CLOUD.

Dr. Tara Madhyastha is a Principal Research Scientist at RONIN and affiliate
faculty in the Department of Psychology at the University of Washington. Trained
in high performance computing, she is an interdisciplinary scientist. Prior to
coming to RONIN she led HPC research strategy at Amazon Web Services (AWS). In
her earlier academic career she worked in neuroimaging, developing new methods
to study changes to cognitive networks that occur with aging and
neurodegenerative disease. She is the author of over 100 peer-reviewed
publications in the fields of computer science, educational technology,
psychology and neuroscience. Tara did her PhD in high performance computing at
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has held faculty positions at
the University of California and the University of Washington, Seattle. She has
received numerous innovation awards in these positions and at AWS, and
extramural funding from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of
Health, and Department Of Education.

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ADDISON SNELL

CEO of InterSect360 Research

TITLE: ROUND TABLE PANNEL ON INDUSTRY TRENDS FOR HPC AND AI

ABSTRACT: THE ROUNDTABLE PANEL IS AN OPEN DISCUSSION ON INDUSTRY TRENDS FOR HPC
AND AI AND BEYOND. ADDISON WILL BE JOINED BY IRENE QUALTERS (LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL
LABORATORY), ANDERS DAM JENSEN (EUROPEAN HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING JOINT
UNDERTAKING) AND TSHIAMO MOTSHEGWA (UNIVERSITY OF BOTSWANA) TO SHARE THEIR
THOUGHT ON TOPICS BASED ON THEIR PREVIOUS TALKS AND INTERSECT360 RESEARCH.

Addison Snell is a veteran of the High Performance Computing industry and the
co-founder and CEO of Intersect360 Research, now in its 15th year delivering
forecasts and insights for high-performance markets. Addison is a competent
bridge player, an excellent Scrabble player, and a puzzle and game enthusiast,
particularly word puzzles. His life “bucket list” dream is to compose a
crossword published in the New York Times.

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PINAKI CHAUDHURI

Professor at The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, India

TITLE: STUDYING AMORPHOUS MATERIALS VIA LARGE-SCALE COMPUTING

ABSTRACT: AMORPHOUS MATERIALS, IN THE FORM OF GLASSES, GELS, EMULSIONS, FOAMS,
GRANULAR MATERIALS, ARE UBIQUITOUS IN OUR DAILY LIVES AND NATURAL PHENOMENA.
UNDERSTANDING THE PROPERTIES OF THESE MATERIALS FROM A MICROSCOPIC PERSPECTIVE
HAS BEEN A CHALLENGING EXERCISE, BOTH FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF FUNDAMENTAL
SCIENCES AS WELL AS FOR DESIGN OF MATERIALS. NUMERICAL TECHNIQUES HAVE PROVEN TO
BE VERY VALUABLE, IN THAT CONTEXT, IN PROVIDING INSIGHTS INTO DIVERSE PROCESSES
AT PLAY. IN THIS TALK, I WILL DISCUSS, USING SOME EXAMPLES, HOW LARGE-SCALE
COMPUTING HAS BECOME RELEVANT FOR INVESTIGATING PHENOMENA AT DIFFERENT
LENGTH-SCALES, TO PROVIDE MULTI-SCALE DESCRIPTIONS.

Pinaki obtained his PhD from the Physics department of Indian Institute of
Science, Bangalore, India, followed by postdoctoral tenures at the universities
of Montpellier, Lyon and Duesseldorf. Since 2014, he has been at the Theoretical
Physics group at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, India.
Pinaki’s research is primarily focused on using computational tools to study
soft matter, specifically amorphous materials of diverse kinds.

View recording x


TOMI ILIJAS

Arctur’s CEO

TITLE: FF4EUROHPC: ENABLING SMES TO BENEFIT FROM HPC – OPEN CALL 2

ABSTRACT: SMES ARE THE BACKBONE OF THE EUROPEAN ECONOMY THAT DRIVE INNOVATION
THUS THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION IS ENCOURAGING SMES TO ADOPT NOVEL TECHNOLOGIES.
STILL, MANY COMPANIES ARE NOT AWARE OF THE POTENTIALS THAT HPC BRINGS TO THE
BUSINESS.

IN THIS PRESENTATION, THE FF4EUROHPC PROJECT, A SUCCESSOR OF THE FORTISSIMO AND
FORTISSIMO2 PROJECTS, AND OPEN CALL 2 WILL BE PRESENTED IN DETAIL. THE KEY
CONCEPT BEHIND FF4EUROHPC IS TO DEMONSTRATE TO EUROPEAN SMES WAYS TO OPTIMIZE
THEIR PERFORMANCE WITH THE USE OF ADVANCED HPC SERVICES (E.G., MODELLING &
SIMULATION, DATA ANALYTICS, MACHINE-LEARNING AND AI, AND POSSIBLY COMBINATIONS
THEREOF) AND THEREBY TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THESE INNOVATIVE ICT SOLUTIONS FOR
BUSINESS BENEFIT. NAMELY, OPEN CALLS CAN LOWER THE BARRIERS FOR THE
PARTICIPATING SMES TO COMMENCE HPC-RELATED INNOVATION IN THEIR EXISTING OR NEWLY
IDENTIFIED MARKETS, HELP SMES TO DEVELOP UNIQUE PRODUCTS AND INNOVATIVE BUSINESS
OPPORTUNITIES. TWO OPEN CALLS WILL BE ORGANISED BY THE PROJECT, WITH THE AIM TO
CREATE TWO TRANCHES OF APPLICATION EXPERIMENTS WITHIN DIVERSE INDUSTRY SECTORS.
ADDITIONALLY, HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE PREVIOUS FORTISSIMO SUCCESS STORIES WILL BE
PRESENTED TO INSPIRE THE COMMUNITY.

Tomi Ilijaš is founder and CEO of Arctur and he holds a MSc degree from
Ljubljana University, Faculty of Electrical Engineering. Mr. Ilijaš is an
entrepreneur focusing on Hi-Tech innovation, who has shared his knowledge and
experience to many start-ups and spin-offs in the region. He participated in
several EU funded R&D projects, inventing new business models in HPCaaS and
successfully breaking the barriers in bringing HPC to manufacturing SMEs. He is
also a member of EUROHPC Research & Innovation Advisory Group (RIAG) and member
of PRACE Industrial Advisory Committee.

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KARL PODESTA

EMEA HPC Technical Specialist @ Microsoft

TITLE: SUPERCOMPUTING ON AZURE POWERED BY AMD EPYC

ABSTRACT: FROM OPTIMISING VEHICLE SAFETY, TO SIMULATIONS IN AUTONOMOUS DRIVING,
TO ANALYSING RISK IN GLOBAL FINANCIAL MARKETS, TO LIFE SCIENCE RESEARCHERS
INVESTIGATING NEW THERAPIES, TO UNDERSTANDING MORE ABOUT OUR GLOBAL CLIMATE.
THESE ARE REAL SCENARIOS WHERE SUPERCOMPUTING ON THE PUBLIC CLOUD (MICROSOFT
AZURE) IS CURRENTLY MAKING A DIFFERENCE IN OUR WORLD. PUBLIC CLOUD HAS A HUGE
ROLE TO PLAY IN PROVIDING LARGE SCALE COMPUTE & SIMULATION RESOURCES (AND HPC,
AKA “SUPERCOMPUTING”) TO EVERYONE. POWERED BY AMD EPYC PROCESSORS, AZURE HPC HAS
PRODUCED WORLD CLASS AND “WORLD FIRST” HPC APPLICATION BENCHMARKS AT SCALE,
PROVING REAL SUPERCOMPUTING SCALE AND PERFORMANCE. IN THIS PRESENTATION WE WILL
GIVE A SHORT OVERVIEW OF THE TOPIC – COVERING THE “WHY, WHAT, WHO, WHERE, AND
HOW” OF DOING SUPERCOMPUTING IN THE PUBLIC CLOUD WITH MICROSOFT AZURE AND AMD
EPYC – ALSO LEAVING YOU WITH INSIGHT, PROOF POINTS, AND NEXT STEPS FOR HOW YOU
COULD GET STARTED WITH YOUR OWN PROJECT.

Karl is a Technical Specialist for High Performance Computing (HPC) on Microsoft
Azure. He is part of the Microsoft’s Global Black Belt Team – a specialist team
focused on advanced workloads – and works with customers, partners, and
colleagues focused in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) region. Prior
to joining Microsoft in 2016, he previously spent 15+ years in technical roles,
including Linux & HPC engineer, architect, trainer – and working in Oil & Gas,
Financial, and Life Science domains. He tweets as @karlpodesta and is from
Dublin, Ireland.



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ERICH FOCHT

Heading the Research & Development group, NEC

TITLE: PROGRAMMING HETEROGENEITY

ABSTRACT: THE SLOW-DOWN OF DENNARD SCALING HAS LED TO A SIGNIFICANT INCREASE IN
PROCESSOR INNOVATIONS AND HARDWARE HETEROGENEITY. THE JOURNEY TO EXASCALE AS
WELL AS EXPLOSION OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE APPLICATIONS REFLECTS THE WIDENING
RANGE OF COMPUTER ARCHITECTURES AND FORCES US TO ADJUST THE APPROACH TO
PROGRAMMING AND PORTABILITY. THE TALK SKETCHES VARIOUS PATHS WE EXPLORE FOR
DEALING WITH THE INCREASINGLY HETEROGENEOUS HARDWARE LANDSCAPE.

Dr. Erich Focht has studied physics and did his PhD in theoretical Physics in
Aachen and at the John von Neumann Institute for Computing, Juelich. The work on
quantum field theories on the lattice required programming of simulations on
supercomputers of various architectures, re-connecting to an older passion for
electronics and computers. He started working for NEC’s European HPC division in
1996 optimizing CFD and structural mechanics algorithms for the NEC SX-4 and
subsequent parallel vector supercomputers. At the advent of Itanium NUMA
machines Erich switched to Linux kernel development focussing on NUMA scheduling
and memory management, working in cross-vendor collaborations to prepare Linux
for large machines. Shortly after Beowulf clusters appeared Erich’s involvement
in various open source projects lead to research and development work in Linux
cluster system software, distributed systems, single system image and grid
software. He worked on the design and early implementation of the parallel file
system XtreemFS and built for several years parallel file system products based
on Lustre for NEC’s HPC customers. Currently Erich leads a research and
development group at NEC HPC Europe. Nowadays his work topics cover system
software and compilers for heterogeneous computing with NEC’s SX-Aurora Vector
Engine, supporting cooperation projects related to the Vector Engine, augmenting
HPC simulations with AI and integrating cloud technologies into HPC clusters.



Video not available x


NICOLAS DUBÉ

Fellow and Vice-President, Chief Technologist High-Performance Computing
Business Unit, HPE

TITLE: A VISION FOR THE POST-EXASCALE ERA

ABSTRACT: WITH THE IMMINENT EXASCALE CAPABILITY, THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY IS
ABOUT TO TACKLE CHALLENGES THAT WERE CONSIDERED TOO LARGE AND TOO COMPLEX JUST A
FEW YEARS AGO. BUT HOW WILL THIS NEW GENERATION OF SUPERCOMPUTING TECHNOLOGY
IMPACT THE BROADER IT MARKET OVER TIME? BEING AT THE FOREFRONT OF SUCH KEY
INNOVATIONS, CAN THE HPC COMMUNITY DRIVE AN OPEN WORKFLOW ECOSYSTEM TO PROVIDE
AN ALTERNATIVE TO THE VERTICALLY LOCKED-IN SOLUTIONS? JOIN THIS TALK TO
ENTERTAIN A MORE OPEN, ACCESSIBLE AND DECENTRALIZED VISION OF THE IT INDUSTRY
FOR THE NEXT DECADE, WHERE WORKLOADS AND DATA CAN FLOW FLUIDLY ACROSS SYSTEM
ARCHITECTURES AND ORGANIZATIONS.

As the Chief Technologist for HPC at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Nic leads
the team building the largest supercomputers in the world with a focus on energy
efficiency, usability and application performance at scale. He is also driving
HPE’s post-exascale strategy, that will couple exascale supercomputers to
sensors at the edge, further enable the booming silicon landscape, provide a
redefined data model that spans across traditional filesystems and enable
workflow fluidity through new software runtime environments and alternative
provisioning systems. He has served as the technical lead for the Advanced
Development Group, architected HPE’s exascale PathForward program in
collaboration with the US Dept. of Energy, spearheaded ARM enablement in HPC and
designed many leadership HPC systems. Nic regularly advocates for a greener IT
industry and open source software projects with the goal of constantly enhancing
and broadening the impact of leadership computing.



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PHIL MURPHY

Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer at Cornelis Networks

TITLE: CORNELIS NETWORKS OMNI-PATH: PURPOSE BUILT HIGH-PERFORMANCE FABRICS FOR
HPC/HPDA/AI

ABSTRACT: THE CONVERGENCE OF TRADITIONAL HPC MODELING/SIMULATION, HPDA AND AI ON
A SINGLE COMPUTE CLUSTER BRINGS NEW CHALLENGES TO THE FABRIC DESIGN BUT THE
REQUIRED FUNDAMENTAL INTERCONNECT PERFORMANCE CHARACTERISTICS OF LOW LATENCY,
EXTREME MESSAGE RATE, AND SCALABLE BANDWIDTH REMAIN PARAMOUNT. PHIL WILL DISCUSS
THE FABRIC DESIGN TRADE-OFFS REQUIRED TO DELIVER THESE FUNDAMENTALS. HE WILL
ALSO DISCUSS HOW CORNELIS NETWORKS IS LEVERAGING LIBFABRIC/OPENFABRICS
INTERFACES TO IMPROVE REAL APPLICATION PERFORMANCE WHILE TAKING ADVANTAGE OF
INDUSTRY-WIDE INNOVATIONS IN COMMUNICATIONS LIBRARIES AND PROGRAMMING
FRAMEWORKS.

As CEO of Cornelis Networks, Phil is responsible for the overall management and
strategic direction of the company. Prior to co-founding Cornelis Networks, Phil
served as a director at Intel Corporation, responsible for fabric platform
planning and architecture, product positioning, and business development
support. Prior to that role, Phil served as vice president of engineering and
vice president of HPC technology within QLogic’s Network Solutions Group,
responsible for the design, development, and evangelizing of all
high-performance computing products, as well as all storage area network
switching products. Before joining QLogic, Phil was vice president of
engineering at SilverStorm Technologies, which he co-founded in 2000 and which
was acquired by QLogic in 2006. SilverStorm’s core focus was on providing
complete network solutions for high performance computing clusters. Prior to
co-founding SilverStorm, Phil served as director of engineering at Unisys
Corporation and was responsible for all I/O development across the company’s
diverse product lines.

Phil holds a BS in Mathematics from St. Joseph’s University and an MS in
Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania.



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WOLFGANG GENTZSCH

President and Co-founder of UberCloud

TITLE: USING DISTRIBUTED HPC TECHNOLOGY FOR BUILDING AN AUTOMATED, SELF-SERVICE,
TRULY MULTI-CLOUD SIMULATION PLATFORM

ABSTRACT: MANY COMPANIES ARE FINDING THAT REPLICATING AN EXISTING ON-PREMISE HPC
ARCHITECTURE IN THE CLOUD DOES NOT LEAD TO THE DESIRED BREAKTHROUGH
IMPROVEMENTS. WITH THIS IN MIND, FROM DAY ONE, A FULLY AUTOMATED, SELF-SERVICE,
AND MULTI-CLOUD ENGINEERING SIMULATION PLATFORM HAS BEEN BUILT WITH CLOUD
COMPUTING IN MIND, RESULTING IN HIGHLY INCREASED PRODUCTIVITY OF THE HPC
ENGINEERS, SIGNIFICANTLY IMPROVING IT SECURITY, REDUCING CLOUD COSTS AND
ADMINISTRATIVE OVERHEAD TO A MINIMUM, AND MAINTAINING FULL CONTROL FOR ENGINEERS
AND CORPORATE IT OVER THEIR HPC CLOUD ENVIRONMENT AND CORPORATE ASSETS.

THIS PLATFORM HAS BEEN IMPLEMENTED ON GOOGLE CLOUD PLATFORM (GCP) FOR 3DT
HOLDINGS FOR THEIR HIGHLY COMPLEX LIVING HEART PROJECT AND MACHINE LEARNING,
WITH THE FINAL RESULT OF REDUCING SIMULATION TIMES FROM MANY HOURS PER
SIMULATION TO JUST A FEW SECONDS HIGHLY ACCURATE PREDICTION OF AN OPTIMAL
MEDICAL DEVICE PLACEMENT DURING HEART SURGERY.

THE TEAM RAN 1500 SIMULATIONS NEEDED TO TRAIN THE ML ALGORITHM. THE WHOLE
SIMULATION PROCESS TOOK PLACE AS A MULTI-CLOUD APPROACH, WITH ALL COMPUTATIONS
RUNNING ON GOOGLE GCP, AND MANAGEMENT, MONITORING, AND HEALTH-CHECKS
ORCHESTRATED FROM AZURE CLOUD PERFORMED THROUGH SUSE’S KUBERNETES MANAGEMENT
PLATFORM RANCHER IMPLEMENTED ON AZURE.

TECHNOLOGY USED: UBERCLOUD ENGINEERING SIMULATION PLATFORM, MULTI-NODE HPC
DOCKER, KUBERNETES, SUSE RANCHER, DASSAULT ABAQUS, TENSORFLOW, PREEMPTIBLE GCP
INSTANCES (C2_STANDARD_60), MANAGED KUBERNETES CLUSTERS (GKE), GOOGLE FILESTORE,
TERRAFORM, AND DCV REMOTE VISUALIZATION.

CO-AUTHORS: WOLFGANG GENTZSCH, PRESIDENT UBERCLOUD, DANIEL GRUBER, DIRECTOR OF
ARCHITECTURE AT UBERCLOUD; YAGHOUB DABIRI, SCIENTIST AT 3DT HOLDINGS; JULIUS
GUCCIONE, PROFESSOR OF SURGERY AT THE UCSF MEDICAL CENTER, SAN FRANCISCO; AND
GHASSAN KASSAB, PRESIDENT AT CALIFORNIA MEDICAL INNOVATIONS INSTITUTE, SAN
DIEGO.

Wolfgang Gentzsch is president and co-founder of UberCloud which offers an
automated self-service on-demand Engineering Simulation Platform and
high-performance Engineering Simulation Containers to manufacturing, energy,
financial services, life-sciences and other compute- and data-intensive
applications. Wolfgang was the chairman of the International ISC Cloud
Conference series from 2010 to 2015. Previously, he was an Advisor to the EU
projects EUDAT and DEISA. He directed the German D-Grid Initiative and the North
Carolina Statewide Grid, and was a member of the Board of Directors of the Open
Grid Forum and of the US President’s Council of Advisors for Science and
Technology, PCAST, from 2005 to 2008.

Previously, Wolfgang was a professor of computer science and mathematics at
several universities in North Carolina, USA, and Regensburg, Germany, and held
leading positions at the MCNC North Carolina Grid and Data Center in Durham, Sun
Microsystems in California, the DLR German Aerospace Center in Gottingen, and
the Max-Planck-Institute for Plasmaphysics in Munich. In the 90s, he founded HPC
software companies Genias and Gridware which developed the well-known
distributed HPC workload management system Grid Engine. Gridware has been
acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2000 and Grid Engine (via Sun, Oracle, and
Univa) is now part of Altair Engineering.

View recording x


FOUZHAN HOSSEINI

Project lead and Technical Manager at NAG Ltd

TITLE: MEET THE POP COE: GETTING INSIGHT INTO HPC CODE BEHAVIOR

ABSTRACT: HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING (HPC), INCLUDING IN THE CLOUD, IS NOW
ACCESSIBLE TO A MUCH WIDER RANGE OF USERS. HOWEVER, MAJORITY OF THE NEW AND
TRADITIONAL HPC USERS STILL STRUGGLE TO UNDERSTAND THE PERFORMANCE BOTTLENECKS
OF THEIR APPLICATIONS AND THE ASSOCIATED COMPUTATION COST IN TERMS OF TIME,
MONEY OR ENERGY. THE EFFICIENT USE OF HPC FACILITIES REMAINS A MAJOR CHALLENGE.

THE PERFORMANCE OPTIMISATION AND PRODUCTIVITY (POP) CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE, FUNDED
BY THE EU, HAS ESTABLISHED A QUANTITATIVE METHODOLOGY FOR PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT
OF HPC APPLICATIONS. THIS METHODOLOGY USES A STANDARD, CROSS DOMAIN AND SCALE,
SET OF HIERARCHICAL METRICS, WHERE EACH REPRESENTS THE RELATIVE IMPACT OF ONE
CAUSE OF INEFFICIENCY IN HPC APPLICATIONS. THESE METRICS HAVE PROVEN INVALUABLE
IN IDENTIFICATION OF INEFFICIENT KERNELS FOR CODE REFACTORING. IN THIS TALK, I
WILL REVIEW THE POP MPI METRICS AS WELL AS THE EXTENSION OF OUR METRICS WHICH
GIVE UNIQUE INSIGHT INTO THE PERFORMANCE OF HYBRID OPENMP AND MPI CODES. WE WILL
SEE EXAMPLES OF HOW THIS METHODOLOGY IS BEING USED TO HELP ORGANIZATIONS OVER
EUROPE TO IMPROVE THEIR HPC CODE.

Fouzhan Hosseini is a project lead and technical manager at NAG Ltd where her
team contributes to the EU funded Performance Optimization and Productivity
Centre of Excellence in High Performance Computing. She has over ten years of
experience in building parallel applications on various platforms from multi-
and many-core hardware to computer clusters exploiting low- to high-level
programming technologies where performance always appears as a key part of the
work. With a strong background in computer science, she is passionate about
promoting best practices in parallel programming and working with HPC users to
improve the performance of their codes. Before joining NAG, she had various
research and teaching positions at the University of Leeds, UK, the Istituto
Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy, and the University of Tehran, Iran. She is Chair
of the NAG Women in HPC (WHPC) Chapter and advocates for diversity and inclusion
at work.
View recording x


PEKKA MANNINEN

Director of the LUMI Leadership Computing Facility

TITLE: LUMI: EUROPE’S FLAGSHIP SUPERCOMPUTER

ABSTRACT: THE EUROHPC INITIATIVE IS A JOINT EFFORT BY THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION
AND 32 COUNTRIES TO ESTABLISH A WORLD-CLASS ECOSYSTEM IN SUPERCOMPUTING TO
EUROPE (READ MORE AT HTTPS://EUROHPC-JU.EUROPA.EU/). ONE OF ITS FIRST CONCRETE
EFFORTS IS TO INSTALL THREE LEADERSHIP-CLASS SUPERCOMPUTERS, EACH OF WHICH WILL
BE AMONG THE TOP 10 SYSTEMS IN THE WORLD. WE WILL DISCUSS ONE OF THESE SYSTEMS,
LUMI TO BE LOCATED IN KAJAANI, FINLAND. LUMI WILL BE THE FASTEST SUPERCOMPUTER
IN EUROPE AND IN GENERAL ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL AND ADVANCED COMPUTING SYSTEMS
ON THE PLANET AT THE TIME OF ITS INSTALLATION. IN THIS TALK, WE WILL WALK
THROUGH THE TECHNICAL ARCHITECTURE OF THE LUMI INFRASTRUCTURE.

Dr. Pekka Manninen is the director of the LUMI Leadership Computing Facility. He
has a long experience in HPC and HPC infrastructures and has been involved in
several pan-European e-infrastructure initiatives over the course of years. He
holds a PhD in theoretical physics and is an Adjunct Professor at the University
of Helsinki.
View recording x


ANDREW KING

Director of Performance Research, D-Wave

TITLE: WHAT A COMPUTATIONAL PERFORMANCE ADVANTAGE MEANS FOR THE FUTURE OF
PRACTICAL QUANTUM COMPUTING

ABSTRACT: EARLIER THIS YEAR, D-WAVE PUBLISHED A MILESTONE PEER-REVIEWED STUDY IN
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS IN COLLABORATION WITH SCIENTISTS AT GOOGLE. THEY WERE ABLE
TO DEMONSTRATE A COMPUTATIONAL PERFORMANCE ADVANTAGE FOR A QUANTUM COMPUTER,
INCREASING WITH BOTH SIMULATION SIZE AND PROBLEM HARDNESS, TO OVER 3 MILLION
TIMES THAT OF CORRESPONDING CLASSICAL METHODS. NOTABLY, THIS WORK WAS ACHIEVED
ON A PRACTICAL APPLICATION WITH REAL-WORLD IMPLICATIONS, SIMULATING THE
TOPOLOGICAL PHENOMENA BEHIND THE 2016 NOBEL PRIZE IN PHYSICS.

THIS PERFORMANCE ADVANTAGE, EXHIBITED IN A COMPLEX QUANTUM SIMULATION OF
MATERIALS, IS A MEANINGFUL STEP IN THE JOURNEY TOWARD APPLICATIONS ADVANTAGE IN
QUANTUM COMPUTING. TO-DATE, THIS WORK IS THE CLEAREST EVIDENCE YET THAT QUANTUM
EFFECTS PROVIDE A COMPUTATIONAL ADVANTAGE IN D-WAVE PROCESSORS.

IN THIS SESSION, DR. ANDREW KING, DIRECTOR OF PERFORMANCE RESEARCH AT D-WAVE AND
ONE OF THE AUTHORS OF THE PAPER, WILL SHARE MORE ON THE MILESTONE STUDY AND
PAPER, AND EXPLAIN WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE FUTURE OF PRACTICAL QUANTUM COMPUTING.

Andrew King is Director of Performance Research at D-Wave, the practical quantum
computing company. His work on quantum annealing ranges from studying hybrid
performance and applications of D-Wave processors to quantum simulation of
magnetic spin systems. His recent research has demonstrated a computational
scaling advantage over classical Monte Carlo methods in the quantum simulation
of geometrically frustrated lattice, offering the clearest look yet at
relaxation dynamics of an open quantum system on over a thousand Ising spins.
Andrew received his Ph.D in Computer Science at McGill University and has been
with D-Wave since 2013.
View recording x


HERBERT HUBER

Head of High Performance Systems Division at Leibniz Supercomputing Centre

TITLE: ENERGY EFFICIENT SUPERCOMPUTING AT LRZ

ABSTRACT: THE LECTURE PRESENTS THE ACTIVITIES OF THE LEIBNIZ SUPERCOMPUTING
CENTRE REGARDING ENERGY EFFICIENT COMPUTING. IN PARTICULAR, THE “4 PILLAR
FRAMEWORK FOR ENERGY EFFICIENT HPC DATA CENTERS” WILL BE INTRODUCED WHICH IS
USED BY LRZ TO IDENTIFY AREAS FOR FURTHER IMPROVEMENT AND RESEARCH. THE 4
PILLARS ARE: 1. BUILDING INFRASTRUCTURE; 2. HPC HARDWARE; 3. HPC SYSTEM
SOFTWARE; AND 4. HPC APPLICATIONS. THE ADVANTAGES OF ENERGY EFFICIENT SYSTEM
COOLING, SYSTEM HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGIES WILL BE DEMONSTRATED USING
THE ACTUAL LRZ SUPERCOMPUTER SUPERMUC-NG.

Dr. Herbert Huber obtained a PhD in physics from the
Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich (LMU) in 1998. He joined BADW-LRZ in the
year 1997 and is actually leading the “High-Performance Systems” department of
BADW-LRZ. The focus of his work and his research interests are energy-efficient
high-performance computer infrastructures (processor and system architecture,
interconnection network, file systems) and supercomputing centres.
View recording x


TSHIAMO MOTSHEGWA

BEng, PhD, Department of Computer Science, University of Botswana

TITLE: DEVELOPMENTS IN AFRICAN CYBER-INFRASTRUCTURE TO SUPPORT OPEN SCIENCE &
OPEN DATA

ABSTRACT: GLOBALLY THERE IS MOVEMENT IN THE TRAJECTORY OF DEVELOPING A GLOBAL
OPEN SCIENCE CLOUD (GOSC) AIMED AT SUPPORTING RESEARCH COLLABORATIONS ACROSS
CONTINENTS TO ASSIST IN ADDRESSING GLOBAL SCIENCE CHALLENGES – FOR EXAMPLE UN
SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS (SDGS), CLIMATE CHANGE, INFECTIOUS DISEASES, AND
COORDINATION OF GLOBAL DISASTER RISK REDUCTION.

CONTINENTS, REGIONS, AND COUNTRIES ARE ALSO ACTIVELY DEVELOPING OPEN SCIENCE
PLATFORMS AND INVESTING IN UNDERLYING CYBERINFRASTRUCTURES TO ADVANCE THEIR
RESEARCH SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION (RSTI) ECOSYSTEMS, ENHANCE
COLLABORATION AND INCREASE THEIR COMPETITIVENESS AND CRITICALLY, USE RSTI AS A
DRIVER FOR NATIONAL AND CONTINENTAL PRIORITIES.

THIS TALK HIGHLIGHTS THE MOVEMENT TOWARD DEVELOPMENT OF A PAN AFRICAN
CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE TO SUPPORT ADVANCEMENT OF THE CONTINENT’S SCIENCE ENTERPRISE
THROUGH OPEN SCIENCE AND OPEN DATA. FURTHERMORE, THE CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE WILL
PROMOTE COLLABORATION AND SUPPORT ADDRESSING HIGHER LEVEL AFRICAN PRIORITY AREAS
AND CHALLENGES THROUGH LEVERAGING THE MEDIUM OF RESEARCH, SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY
AND INNOVATION, AND THEREBY CONTRIBUTE TO AFRICAN ADVANCEMENT AND INTEGRATION TO
HELP DELIVER ON THE AFRICAN VISION – AGENDA 2063 – THE AFRICA WE WANT

TO THIS END, A DISCUSSION OF THE AFRICAN OPEN SCIENCE PLATFORM (AOSP) IS GIVEN.
AOSP PILOT STUDY CONDUCTED AN AUDIT AND PROVIDED FRAMEWORKS TO GUIDE COUNTRIES
IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF REQUISITE POLICIES, INFRASTRUCTURE, INCENTIVES, AND HUMAN
CAPITAL TO FACILITATE LEVERAGING OF OPEN SCIENCE AND OPEN DATA AMIDST THE
DIGITAL REVOLUTION – WITH ALL THE CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES PRESENTED.

FURTHERMORE, AFRICAN REGIONAL BLOCKS ALSO HAVE INITIATIVES ALIGNED WITH AOSP –
FOR EXAMPLE, THE SOUTHERN AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT COMMUNITY CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE
FRAMEWORK – (SADC CI) HAS BEEN APPROVED BY GOVERNMENTS. IT IS CURRENTLY
SUPPORTING SOME REGIONAL PROJECTS AND WAS CONSULTED IN THE AOSP PILOT PROJECT.
THE SADC CI FACILITATES A REGIONAL COLLABORATIVE ECOSYSTEM FOR RESEARCH,
INNOVATION, AND TEACHING BY CREATING A SHARED COMMONS FOR DATA, COMPUTATIONAL
PLATFORMS AND HUMAN CAPITAL DEVELOPMENT OVER A FABRIC OF HIGH-SPEED CONNECTIVITY
AFFORDED BY NATIONAL EDUCATION AND RESEARCH NETWORKS (NRENS)

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THESE CYBERINFRASTRUCTURES PROVIDES A BASIS, BEDROCK AND
CAPACITY FOR AFRICAN PARTICIPATION AND CONTRIBUTION TO THE WIDER GLOBAL SCIENCE
ENTERPRISE AND ENDEAVOUR – THIS ESPECIALLY GIVEN ONGOING AND UPCOMING PROJECTS
OF CONSEQUENCE IN THE CONTINENT SUCH AS THE SQUARE KILOMETER ARRAY (SKA),
H3AFRICA -HUMAN HEREDITY AND GENOMICS, WEATHER AND CLIMATE CHANGE PROJECTS AND
OTHERS.

Dr Tshiamo Motshegwa is an academic based at the Department of Computer Science,
Faculty of Science at the University of Botswana where he is a lecturer and
leads the High-Performance Computing and Data Science Research cluster and the
University-Industry-Government cocreation Platform. He received a BEng 1:1
(Hons) in Computer Systems Engineering and a Ph.D. in Computer Science- both at
the School of Mathematics, Computer Science and Engineering, City,University Of
London, UK.

He has had visiting fellowships at British Telecom Research & Innovation Labs
(BTexact Technologies) at Intelligent Business Systems Group, Adastral Park
Ipswich, UK and fellowships at the UNESCO International Center For Theoretical
Physics (ICTP), Trieste Italy and internship at British Energy Plc, Lancashire,
UK.

Dr Motshegwa serves on the Botswana Government’s Ministry of Tertiary Education,
Science and Technology (MOTE) task team for the Botswana Space Science strategy
overarching developments and opportunities in space sciences and technologies.
He serves to engage at the Ministry regarding the National Digital
Transformation Initiative for research, science , technology innovation
ecosystems through cyberinfrastructure for digital revolution, capacity building
and digital skills.

View recording x


MARY-JANE BOPAPE

Senior manager: Research at the South African Weather Service

TITLE: IMPLEMENTATION OF THE SADC CYBER-INFRASTRUCTURE FRAMEWORK: FOCUS ON
WEATHER MODELLING

ABSTRACT: WEATHER FORECASTING BEYOND THE NOWCASTING TIMESCALE RELIES ON THE USE
OF NUMERICAL WEATHER AND CLIMATE MODELS. THE USE OF THESE MODELS IS LIMITED ON
THE AFRICAN CONTINENT BECAUSE THEY REQUIRE SUPERCOMPUTING FACILITIES TO RUN OVER
LARGE DOMAINS WITH HIGHER RESOLUTION. THE AVAILABILITY OF SUPERCOMPUTING
FACILITIES IS HOWEVER INCREASING ON THE CONTINENT DUE NATIONAL INITIATIVES AND
REGIONAL INITIATIVES SUCH AS THE SOUTHERN AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT COMMUNITY (SADC)
CYBER-INFRASTRUCTURE (CI) FRAMEWORK WHICH WAS APPROVED BY THE RELEVANT MINISTERS
IN 2016. THE PRESENTATION WILL GIVE AN OVERVIEW OF A PROJECT FOCUSING ON
NUMERICAL WEATHER PREDICTION (NWP) FUNDED BY THE SOUTH AFRICAN DEPARTMENT OF
SCIENCE AND INNOVATION AND ALSO THROUGH THE CLIMATE RESEARCH FOR DEVELOPMENT
(CR4D) FELLOWSHIP IN SIX SADC COUNTRIES. THROUGH THE PROJECT THREE WORKSHOPS
WERE HELD AND STUDIES OF THE SENSITIVITY OF HEAVY RAINFALL EVENTS IN ALL SIX
COUNTRIES TO DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF THE WEATHER RESEARCH AND FORECASTING (WRF)
MODEL WERE INVESTIGATED. A NUMBER OF PEER REVIEWED ARTICLES HAVE RESULTED FROM
THE PROJECT, AND FOR SOME COUNTRIES THESE WERE FIRST EVER PAPERS ON NWP, WHILE
SOME AUTHORS LEAD THE WRITING OF PAPERS FOR THE FIRST TIME. THE PRESENTATION
WILL ALSO TOUCH ON LESSONS LEARNT AND PROPOSED WAY FORWARD.

Mary-Jane Bopape is a senior manager: Research at the South African Weather
Service. She holds a PhD degree in meteorology has worked as a Postdoctoral
Research Fellow at the University of Reading. She also worked at the Council for
Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) Natural Resources and Environment
(NRE) and Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) with a focus on climate
change studies. She has received a number of awards including the African
Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) Next Einstein Initiative (NEI)
Fellowship for Women in Climate Change Science, 2019 Climate Research for
Development (CR4D) fellowship and 2008 World Meteorological Organization (WMO)
award for young researchers. She was recognised by the President of South Africa
as a pathfinder in his 9 August 2019 speech on women’s day. She served on the
Executive council of the South African Society for Atmospheric Sciences (SASAS)
for a number of terms and is currently the co-president of the society. She
co-supervises a number of postgraduate students in different universities in
South Africa.

View recording x


ONUR MUTLU

Professor of Computer Science Information Technology and Electrical Engineering
department ETH Zurich

TITLE: INTELLIGENT ARCHITECTURES FOR INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS

ABSTRACT: COMPUTING IS BOTTLENECKED BY DATA. LARGE AMOUNTS OF DATA OVERWHELM
STORAGE CAPABILITY, COMMUNICATION CAPABILITY, AND COMPUTATION CAPABILITY OF THE
MODERN MACHINES WE DESIGN TODAY. AS A RESULT, MANY KEY APPLICATIONS’
PERFORMANCE, EFFICIENCY AND SCALABILITY ARE BOTTLENECKED BY DATA MOVEMENT. WE
DESCRIBE THREE MAJOR SHORTCOMINGS OF MODERN ARCHITECTURES IN TERMS OF 1) DEALING
WITH DATA, 2) TAKING ADVANTAGE OF THE VAST AMOUNTS OF DATA, AND 3) EXPLOITING
DIFFERENT SEMANTIC PROPERTIES OF APPLICATION DATA. WE ARGUE THAT AN INTELLIGENT
ARCHITECTURE SHOULD BE DESIGNED TO HANDLE DATA WELL. WE SHOW THAT HANDLING DATA
WELL REQUIRES DESIGNING SYSTEM ARCHITECTURES BASED ON THREE KEY PRINCIPLES: 1)
DATA-CENTRIC, 2) DATA-DRIVEN, 3) DATA-AWARE. WE GIVE SEVERAL EXAMPLES FOR HOW TO
EXPLOIT EACH OF THESE PRINCIPLES TO DESIGN A MUCH MORE EFFICIENT AND
HIGH-PERFORMANCE COMPUTING SYSTEM. WE WILL ESPECIALLY DISCUSS RECENT RESEARCH
THAT AIMS TO FUNDAMENTALLY REDUCE MEMORY LATENCY AND ENERGY, AND PRACTICALLY
ENABLE COMPUTATION CLOSE TO DATA, WITH AT LEAST TWO PROMISING NOVEL DIRECTIONS:
1) PERFORMING COMPUTATION IN MEMORY BY EXPLOITING THE ANALOG OPERATIONAL
PROPERTIES OF MEMORY, WITH LOW-COST CHANGES, 2) EXPLOITING THE LOGIC LAYER IN
3D-STACKED MEMORY TECHNOLOGY IN VARIOUS WAYS TO ACCELERATE IMPORTANT
DATA-INTENSIVE APPLICATIONS. WE DISCUSS HOW TO ENABLE ADOPTION OF SUCH
FUNDAMENTALLY MORE INTELLIGENT ARCHITECTURES, WHICH WE BELIEVE ARE KEY TO
EFFICIENCY, PERFORMANCE, AND SUSTAINABILITY. WE CONCLUDE WITH SOME GUIDING
PRINCIPLES FOR FUTURE COMPUTING ARCHITECTURE AND SYSTEM DESIGNS.

Onur Mutlu is a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich. He is also a
faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University, where he previously held the
Strecker Early Career Professorship. His current broader research interests are
in computer architecture, systems, hardware security, and bioinformatics. A
variety of techniques he, along with his group and collaborators, has invented
over the years have influenced industry and have been employed in commercial
microprocessors and memory/storage systems. He obtained his PhD and MS in ECE
from the University of Texas at Austin and BS degrees in Computer Engineering
and Psychology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He started the
Computer Architecture Group at Microsoft Research (2006-2009), and held various
product and research positions at Intel Corporation, Advanced Micro Devices,
VMware, and Google.

He received the IEEE High Performance Computer Architecture Test of Time Award,
the IEEE Computer Society Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award, ACM
SIGARCH Maurice Wilkes Award, the inaugural IEEE Computer Society Young Computer
Architect Award, the inaugural Intel Early Career Faculty Award, US National
Science Foundation CAREER Award, Carnegie Mellon University Ladd Research Award,
faculty partnership awards from various companies, and a healthy number of best
paper or “Top Pick” paper recognitions at various computer systems,
architecture, and security venues. He is an ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow for, and an
elected member of the Academy of Europe (Academia Europaea).

His computer architecture and digital logic design course lectures and materials
are freely available on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/OnurMutluLectures), and
his research group makes a wide variety of software and hardware artifacts
freely available online (https://safari.ethz.ch/). For more information, please
see his webpage at https://people.inf.ethz.ch/omutlu/.

Video not available x


BRYCE MEREDIG

Chief Science Officer and co-founder of Citrine Informatics

TITLE: DESIGNING NEXT-GENERATION MATERIALS WITH MACHINE LEARNING

ABSTRACT: THE DEVELOPMENT OF IMPROVED MATERIALS IS CRITICAL TO HUMAN PROGRESS,
IN AREAS RANGING FROM SPACE EXPLORATION TO ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY.
TRADITIONAL MATERIALS DEVELOPMENT EFFORTS FACE DIFFICULTY IN DELIVERING
BREAKTHROUGH MATERIALS AT THE ACCELERATING PACE DEMANDED BY CONSUMERS,
REGULATORS, AND SOCIETY AS A WHOLE. IN THIS RAPIDLY CHANGING ENVIRONMENT,
DATA-DRIVEN APPROACHES SUCH AS MACHINE LEARNING (ML) OFFER THE POSSIBILITY OF
REDUCING THE TIMESCALE OF MATERIALS INNOVATION. IN THIS TALK, I WILL DISCUSS HOW
MACHINE LEARNING (ML) CAN ACCELERATE MATERIALS DESIGN, AND HOW ML CAN BE USED IN
CONJUNCTION WITH PHYSICS-BASED SIMULATIONS TO IMPROVE OUR ABILITY TO PREDICT
MATERIALS PROPERTIES IN SILICO. I WILL ALSO ADDRESS SOME OF THE MATERIALS
SCIENCE-SPECIFIC METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS THAT ARISE WHEN APPLYING ML TO
MATERIALS DESIGN.

Dr. Bryce Meredig is cofounder and Chief Science Officer of Citrine Informatics,
a materials informatics platform company, where he leads the External Research
Department (ERD). ERD conducts publishable research with collaborators in
academia, government, and industry. Dr. Meredig’s research interests include the
development and validation of physics-informed machine learning methods specific
to applications in materials science and chemistry; integration of physics-based
simulations with machine learning; and data infrastructure for materials
science. Dr. Meredig received his PhD from Northwestern University and BAS and
MBA from Stanford University.

View recording x


KATE KEAHEY

Senior Scientist, MCS, Argonne National Lab CASE, University of Chicago

TITLE: CHAMELEON: TAKING SCIENCE FROM CLOUD TO EDGE

ABSTRACT: NEW RESEARCH IDEAS REQUIRE AN INSTRUMENT WHERE THEY CAN BE DEVELOPED,
TESTED – AND SHARED. TO SUPPORT COMPUTER SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS SUCH INSTRUMENT HAS
TO SUPPORT A DIVERSITY OF HARDWARE CONFIGURATIONS, DEPLOYMENT AT SCALE, DEEP
RECONFIGRABILITY, AND MECHANISMS FOR SHARING SO THAT NEW RESULTS CAN TRIGGER
FURTHER INNOVATION. MOST IMPORTANTLY — SINCE SCIENCE DOES NOT STAND STILL – SUCH
INSTRUMENT REQUIRES CONSTANT ADAPTATION TO SUPPORT AN EVER INCREASING RANGE OF
EXPERIMENTS DRIVEN BY EMERGENT IDEAS AND OPPORTUNITIES.

THE NSF-FUNDED CHAMELEON TESTBED FOR SYSTEMS RESEARCH AND EDUCATION
(WWW.CHAMELEONCLOUD.ORG) HAS BEEN DEVELOPED TO PROVIDE ALL THOSE CAPABILITIES.
THE TESTBED PROVIDES MANY THOUSANDS OF CORES AND OVER 5PB OF STORAGE HOSTED AT
THREE SITES (UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, TEXAS ADVANCED COMPUTING CENTER, AND
NORTHWESTERN) CONNECTED BY 100 GBPS NETWORKS. THE HARDWARE CONSISTS OF A LARGE
HOMOGENOUS PARTITIONS TO FACILITATE EXPERIMENTS AT SCALE, ALONGSIDE A DIVERSE
SET OF HARDWARE CONSISTING OF ACCELERATORS, STORAGE HIERARCHY NODES WITH A MIX
OF HDDS, SDDS, AND NVME, HIGH-BANDWIDTH I/0 STORAGE, SDN-ENABLED NETWORKING
HARDWARE, AND EDGE DEVICES. TO SUPPORT EXPERIMENTS RANGING FROM WORK IN
OPERATING SYSTEMS THROUGH NETWORKING TO EDGE COMPUTING, CHAMELEON PROVIDES A
RANGE OF RECONFIGURABILITY OPTIONS FROM BARE METAL TO VIRTUAL MACHINE
MANAGEMENT. TO DATE, THE TESTBED HAS SUPPORTED 5,000+ USERS AND 700+ RESEARCH
AND EDUCATION PROJECTS AND HAS JUST BEEN RENEWED UNTIL THE END OF 2024.

THIS TALK WILL DESCRIBE THE GOALS, DESIGN STRATEGY, AND THE EXISTING AND FUTURE
CAPABILITIES OF THE TESTBED, AS WELL AS SOME OF THE RESEARCH AND EDUCATION
PROJECTS OUR USERS ARE WORKING ON. I WILL ALSO DESCRIBE HOW CHAMELEON IS
EVOLVING TO SUPPORT NEW RESEARCH DIRECTIONS, IN PARTICULAR EDGE AND IOT-BASED
RESEARCH AND APPLICATIONS. FINALLY, I WILL INTRODUCE THE SERVICES AND TOOLS WE
CREATED TO SUPPORT SHARING OF EXPERIMENTS, CURRICULA, AND OTHER DIGITALLY
EXPRESSED ARTIFACTS THAT ALLOW SCIENCE TO BE SHARED VIA ACTIVE INVOLVEMENT AND
FOSTER REPRODUCIBILITY.

Kate Keahey is one of the pioneers of infrastructure cloud computing. She
created the Nimbus project, recognized as the first open source
Infrastructure-as-a-Service implementation, and continues to work on research
aligning cloud computing concepts with the needs of scientific datacenters and
applications. To facilitate such research for the community at large, Kate leads
the Chameleon project, providing a deeply reconfigurable, large-scale, and open
experimental platform for Computer Science research. To foster the recognition
of contributions to science made by software projects, Kate co-founded and
serves as co-Editor-in-Chief of the SoftwareX journal, a new format designed to
publish software contributions. Kate is a Scientist at Argonne National
Laboratory and a Senior Fellow at the Computation Institute at the University of
Chicago.

View recording x


SUNITA CHANDRASEKARAN

Assistant Professor, Department of Computer & Information Sciences, University
of Delaware

TITLE: BEST PRACTICES FOR A PRODUCTIVE (YET PERFORMANCE) SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

ABSTRACT: THIS TALK WILL TAKE THE AUDIENCE THROUGH THE JOURNEY OF FOLLOWING THE
BEST PRACTICES FOR CREATING A PRODUCTIVE YET PERFORMANT SOFTWARE. THE JOURNEY
WILL ENTAIL EXPERIENCES GATHERED FROM PORTING REAL-WORLD APPLICATIONS FROM ONE
SYSTEM TO ANOTHER, FROM INTERACTIONS WITH SCIENTISTS FROM VARIOUS DOMAINS AND
FROM CHALLENGES ENCOUNTERED IN A MULTIDISCIPLINARY MULTIPLE TEAM-BASED
COLLABORATIVE PROJECTS. STORIES WILL ALSO FOCUS ON STRATEGIES TO PREPARE THE
NEXT GENERATION WORKFORCE AS THEY MARCH TO JOIN/LEAD TEAMS DEVELOPING RESEARCH
SOFTWARE.

Sunita Chandrasekaran is an Assistant Professor with the Department of Computer
and Information Sciences at the University of Delaware, USA. She received her
Ph.D. in 2012 on Tools and Algorithms for High-Level Algorithm Mapping to FPGAs
from the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological
University, Singapore. Her research spans High Performance Computing,
interdisciplinary science, machine learning and data science. She is a recipient
of the 2016 IEEE-CS TCHPC Award for Excellence for Early Career Researchers in
High Performance Computing. Chandrasekaran has been involved in the technical
program and organization committees of several conferences and workshops
including SC, ISC, IPDPS, IEEE Cluster, CCGrid, WACCPD, AsHES and P3MA.

Video not available x


NEIL THOMPSON

Innovation Scholar MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and
the Initiative on the Digital Economy

TITLE: THE APPROXIMATE FUTURE OF COMPUTING

ABSTRACT: TECHNICAL AND ECONOMIC TRENDS IN HARDWARE ARE PUSHING COMPUTING
TOWARDS SPECIALIZATION, OPENING UP NEW OPPORTUNITIES TO CUSTOMIZE TO PARTICULAR
ALGORITHMS. BUT THAT IS ONLY ONE PART OF THE STORY. THERE ARE ALSO NEW TRENDS IN
ALGORITHMS RE-SHAPING COMPUTING. THIS TALK WILL SURVEY THESE BIG TRENDS AND
OFFER SOME SUGGESTIONS FOR WHAT THEY WILL MEAN FOR THE FUTURE OF COMPUTING

Dr. Neil Thompson is an Innovation Scholar at MIT’s Computer Science and
Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Initiative on the Digital Economy. He is
also an Associate Member of the Broad Institute. Previously, Neil was an
Assistant Professor of Innovation and Strategy at the MIT Sloan School of
Management, where he co-directed the Experimental Innovation Lab (X-Lab), and a
Visiting Professor at the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard. Neil
have advised businesses and government on the future of Moore’s Law and has been
on National Academies panels on transformational technologies and scientific
reliability. He did his PhD in Business and Public Policy at Berkeley, where he
also did Masters degrees in Computer Science and Statistics. Neil has a masters
in Economics from the London School of Economics, and undergraduate degrees in
Physics and International Development. Prior to academia, he worked at
organizations such as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, Bain and
Company, The United Nations, the World Bank, and the Canadian Parliament.

View recording x


BOGDAN ROSA

Professor in the Centre of Numerical Weather Prediction at Institute of
Meteorology and Water Management – National Research Institute (IMWM-NRI).

TITLE: COMPUTATIONAL CHALLENGES IN MODELLING CLOUD MICROPHYSICAL PROCESSES

ABSTRACT: RELIABLE WEATHER FORECASTS REQUIRE AN ACCURATE DESCRIPTION OF CLOUD
MICROPHYSICAL PROCESSES. THESE PHENOMENA CANNOT BE FULLY RESOLVED IN NUMERICAL
WEATHER PREDICTIONS (NWP) SYSTEMS BECAUSE THEIR CHARACTERISTIC LENGTH SCALES ARE
SEVERAL ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE SMALLER THAN THOSE DEFINING LARGE-SCALE ATMOSPHERIC
FLOWS. A COMMON STRATEGY TO OVERCOME THIS PROBLEM IS TO REPRESENT ONLY SOME
STATISTICAL FEATURES OF THE DROPLET DYNAMICS BY USING SO-CALLED
PARAMETERISATIONS. PARTICULARLY IMPORTANT ARE KINEMATIC AND DYNAMIC COLLISION
STATISTICS AND THE DROPLET SETTLING VELOCITY. INACCURACIES IN THE
PARAMETERIZATION SCHEMES IN NWP SYSTEMS ARE ONE OF THE MAIN SOURCES OF THE
UNCERTAINTY OF THE NUMERICAL FORECASTS. DEVELOPING MORE REALISTIC SCHEMES
REQUIRES DETAILED KNOWLEDGE OF THESE PROCESSES AT DROPLET SCALE. AS A MULTISCALE
PHENOMENON, CLOUD SIMULATION REPRESENTS ONE OF THE MOST DIFFICULT SCIENTIFIC AND
COMPUTATIONAL CHALLENGES.

FAST PROGRESS IN HIGH PERFORMANCE SUPERCOMPUTERS OPENED NEW PERSPECTIVES TO
QUANTIFY THE STATISTICAL PROPERTIES OF THE ATMOSPHERIC CLOUDS. FROM THE
NUMERICAL POINT OF VIEW, THE PROBLEM COMES DOWN TO MODELLING MULTIPHASE FLOWS
I.E., TURBULENT FLOWS WITH A DISPERSE PHASE. TYPICALLY, THE CONTINUOUS PHASE
(AIR FLOW) IS SOLVED IN THE EULERIAN APPROACH EMPLOYING DIRECT NUMERICAL
SIMULATIONS (DNS) OR LARGE EDDY SIMULATIONS (LES). THE DISPERSED PHASE
(DROPLETS) IS TREATED USING THE LAGRANGIAN APPROACH ALONG WITH THE
POINT-PARTICLE ASSUMPTION. MOST PREVIOUS STUDIES (DNS OR LES) WERE LIMITED TO
1-WAY OR 2-WAY MOMENTUM COUPLING. THE IMPORTANT PHYSICAL PHENOMENON, SUCH AS
HYDRODYNAMIC INTERACTIONS BETWEEN DROPLETS HAS OFTEN BEEN NEGLECTED. THE REASONS
FOR THESE SIMPLIFICATIONS ARE THE LACK OF EFFICIENT COMPUTATIONAL METHOD AND THE
HIGH COMPUTING COST OF SUCH SIMULATIONS. IN TURN, HIGHLY ACCURATE FULLY RESOLVED
SIMULATIONS OF TURBULENCE WITH FINITE-SIZE PARTICLES HAVE BECOME POSSIBLE ONLY
IN RECENT YEARS AND ARE LIMITED TO A RELATIVELY SMALL NUMBER OF DROPLETS. HERE I
DISCUSS THE APPLICABILITY OF DIFFERENT COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES AND THEIR
LIMITATIONS IN THE CONTEXT OF COMPUTING POWER DEMAND.

Dr. Bogdan Rosa is a Professor in the Centre of Numerical Weather Prediction at
Institute of Meteorology and Water Management – National Research Institute
(IMWM-NRI).

Bogdan Rosa gained his M.Sc. in physics at the University of Warsaw in 2000,
followed by the Ph.D. in 2005. The subject matter of his doctoral research
concerned numerical modelling of high-Reynolds-number flows around the airborne
ultra-fast thermometer. Afterwards, he spent 3 years as a postdoctoral fellow at
the University of Delaware, where he was involved in developing parallel
computational tools to study cloud microphysical processes. In the meantime, he
collaborated with the National Center for Atmospheric Research on modelling
multiphase flows and droplet dynamics. Since 2009, Dr. Rosa has been working at
IMWM-NRI. Apart of modelling of turbulent clouds his current projects involve
adaptation of the numerical model EULAG into an operational weather prediction
model of the European COSMO consortium.

In 2018, Dr. Rosa received the habilitation from Wroclaw University of Science
and Technology in technical sciences. His scientific achievements include over
20 articles published in peer-reviewed scientific journals and more than 100
papers in conference proceedings. He built upon his expertise in atmospheric
processes by working with scientists from Germany, Iran, China, USA, Venezuela,
and Japan. Bogdan Rosa has led several national and international projects
including three grants from the National Science Centre. Additionally, he was a
laureate and leader of several computational projects awarded by
Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling UW.

View recording x


JEAN-MARC DENIS

Chair of the Board, European Processor Initiative

TITLE: FUTURE SUPERCOMPUTERS ARE GAME CHANGERS FOR PROCESSOR ARCHITECTURE. WHY?

ABSTRACT: THE RISE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN HPCAND DATA DELUGE, COMBINED
WITH THE TRANSITION FROM MONOLITHIC APPLICATIONS TOWARD COMPLEX WORKFLOWS
COMBINING CLASSICAL HPC MODELS WITH AI LEAD THE HPC COMMUNITY, ESPECIALLY THE
HARDWARE ARCHITECTS TO RECONSIDER HOW THE NEXT GENERATION SUPERCOMPUTERS ARE
DESIGNED. THE RECENT EVOLUTIONS IN THE HPC HARDWARE TECHNOLOGIES LANDSCAPE, WITH
MORE AND MORE ACCELERATORS AND THE END OF THE X86 DOMINATION ARE ALSO KEY
PARAMETERS TO BE TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT BY THE HPC ECOSYSTEM FROM HARDWARE DESIGNERS
TO END-USERS.

IN THIS TALK, THE TRANSITION FROM EXISTING HOMOGENOUS TO FUTURE MODULAR
ARCHITECTURES IS DISCUSSED. THE CONSEQUENCES ON THE GENERAL-PURPOSE PROCESSOR
ARE ADDRESSED. THESE CONSIDERATIONS RULED THE DESIGN OF THE EUROPEAN LOW POWER
HPC PROCESSOR THAT WILL BE USED IN THE FUTURE EUROPEAN EXASCALE AND
POST-EXASCALE SUPERCOMPUTERS. WE ALSO ELABORATE ON THE FIRST INFORMATION RELATED
TO RHEA, THE FIRST EUROPEAN HPC PROCESSOR.

Since July 2021, Jean-Marc has joined SiPearl, the company designing the
European HPC microprocessor, as Chief Strategy Officer.

After five years of research in the development of new solvers for the for
Maxwell equations at Matra Defense (France) as mathematician from 1990 to 1995,
Jean-Marc Denis had several technical positions in the HPC industry between 1995
to 2004 from HPC pre-sales to Senior Solution Architect.

Since mid of 2004 Jean-Marc has worked at Bull SAS head Quarter (France) where
he has started the HPC activity. In less than 10 years, the HPC revenue at Bull
exploded from nothing in 2004 to 200M EUR in 2015, making Bull the undisputed
leader of the European HPC industry and the fourth in the world. From 2011 to
the end of 2016, Jean-Marc has leaded the worldwide business activity with the
goal to consolidate the ATOS/Bull position in Europe and to make ATOS/Bull a
worldwide leader in Extreme Computing with footprint in Middle-East, Asia,
Africa and South America.

From 2018 to 2020, Jean-Marc has been the head of Strategy and Plan at
Atos/Bull, in charge of the global cross-Business Unit Strategy and of the
definition of the 3 years business plan. In 2016 and 2017, Jean-Marc has been in
charge of the definition of the strategy for the BigData Division at ATOS/Bull.
From the beginning of 2020 to mi 2021, Jean-Marc has been Chief of Staff of the
Innovation and Strategy Division at Atos. In addition, since mid-2018, Jean-Marc
has been also elected as Chair of the Board of the European Processor Initiative
(EPI).

In parallel to his activities at ATOS/Bull, from 2008 to 2015, Jean-Marc Denis
has taught “Supercomputer Architecture” concepts in Master 2 degree at the
University of Reims Champagne Ardennes (URCA), France.

Education

 * Masters degree in Mathematics (U. of Tours, France, 1989)
 * Masters degree in Computer Science (U. of Toulouse, France, 1990)
 * Engineering diploma in Computer science, (ENSEEIHT, Toulouse, France, 1990)

View recording x


ANDERS JENSEN

Executive Director of the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking
(EuroHPC JU)

TITLE: EUROHPC JU AT FULL THROTTLE

ABSTRACT: THE EUROPEAN HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING JOINT UNDERTAKING (EUROHPC JU)
IS A JOINT INITIATIVE BETWEEN THE EUROPEAN UNION, EUROPEAN COUNTRIES, AND
PRIVATE PARTNERS TO DEVELOP A WORLD CLASS SUPERCOMPUTING ECOSYSTEM IN EUROPE.
THE EUROHPC JOINT UNDERTAKING ALLOWS THE EU AND EUROHPC PARTICIPATING COUNTRIES
TO COORDINATE THEIR EFFORTS AND POOL THEIR RESOURCES WITH THE OBJECTIVE OF
DEPLOYING WORLD-CLASS EXASCALE SUPERCOMPUTERS IN EUROPE.

BY MAKING EUROPE A WORLD LEADER IN HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING (HPC), THE EUROHPC
JU SEEKS TO PROVIDE COMPUTING CAPACITY, IMPROVE COOPERATION IN ADVANCED
SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH, BOOST INDUSTRIAL COMPETITIVENESS, AND ENSURE EUROPEAN
TECHNOLOGICAL AND DIGITAL AUTONOMY.

IN THIS TALK, ANDERS DAM JENSEN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE EUROHPC JU, WILL
OFFER AN UPDATE ON THE CURRENT STATE OF PLAY AND HIS INSIGHTS ON THE FUTURE OF
EUROPEAN HPC.

Anders Dam Jensen has a lifelong interest in supercomputers, dating from his
time in university. He started his professional career with 10 years of
engineering work developing computing hardware, firmware, and software for
embedded systems. He pioneered IEEE802.11 wireless network technology in the
nineties while working for Symbol Technologies.

After a decade working with hardcore engineering and product development, Anders
shifted into management as he joined Cargolux Airlines International as Director
IT. Over the next decade, Anders was instrumental in the spin-off of the
Cargolux IT department into CHAMP Cargosystems S.A. With Anders as CTO, CHAMP
Cargosystems grew to become the largest supplier of IT services to the air cargo
industry.

In 2011, Anders was selected as the Director ICTM for the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO), responsible for all Information and IT services as well as
one of the largest classified networks in Europe. In 2020, Anders was appointed
as Executive Director for the European High Performance Computing Joint
Undertaking, a joint initiative between the EU, European countries and private
partners to develop a World Class Supercomputing Ecosystem in Europe with a
proposed budget of 8 billion euro. Anders holds a Master of Science Degree as
well as a Master of Business Administration degree from Technical University of
Denmark. He is based in Luxembourg, married to Mette, and has two children.

Video not available x


IRENE QUALTERS

Associate Laboratory Director for Simulation and Computation at Los Alamos
National Laboratory

TITLE: THE ENDURING ROLE OF HPC: ADVANCING SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING

Irene Qualters serves as the Associate Laboratory Director for Simulation and
Computation at Los Alamos National Laboratory, a U.S. Department of Energy
national laboratory. She previously served as a Senior Science Advisor in the
Computing and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate of the
National Science Foundation (NSF), where she had responsibility for developing
NSF’s vision and portfolio of investments in high performance computing, and has
played a leadership role in interagency, industry, and academic engagements to
advance computing.

Prior to her NSF career, Irene had a distinguished 30-year career in industry,
with a number of executive leadership positions in research and development in
the technology sector. During her 20 years at Cray Research, she was a pioneer
in the development of high performance parallel processing technologies to
accelerate scientific discovery. Subsequently as Vice President, she led
Information Systems for Merck Research Labs, focusing on software, data and
computing capabilities to advance all phases of pharmaceutical R&D.

View recording x


HIROAKI KITANO

President at The Systems Biology Institute, Tokyo, a Professor at Okinawa
Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University, Okinawa, a President &
CEO at Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc., Tokyo, a Representative
Director and CEO, Sony AI Inc., Tokyo and an Executive Vice President at Sony
Group Corporation, Tokyo

TITLE: NOBEL TURING CHALLENGE – CREATING THE ENGINE OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY

ABSTRACT: ONE OF THE MOST EXCITING AND DISRUPTIVE RESEARCH IN AI IS TO DEVELOP
AI SYSTEMS THAT CAN MAKE MAJOR SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY BY ITSELF WITH HIGH-LEVEL OF
AUTONOMY. IN THIS TALK, I PROPOSE “NOBEL TURING CHALLENGE” TO THE GRAND
CHALLENGE BRIDGING AI AND OTHER SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITIES. THE CHALLENGE CALLS FOR
DEVELOPMENT OF AI SYSTEMS THAT CAN MAKE MAJOR SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERIES SOME OF
WHICH WORTH NOBEL PRIZE, AND THE NOBEL COMMITTEE, AND THE REST OF THE SCIENTIFIC
COMMUNITY, MAY NOT BE ABLE TO DISTINGUISH IF IT WAS DISCOVERED BY HUMAN
SCIENTIST OR AI (KITANO, H., AI MAGAZINE, 37(1) 2016). THIS CHALLENGE IS
PARTICULARLY SIGNIFICANT IN BIOMEDICAL DOMAIN WHERE PROGRESS OF SYSTEMS BIOLOGY
(KITANO, H., SCIENCE, 295, 1662-1664, 2002; KITANO, H., NATURE, 420, 206-210,
2002) RESULTED IN TOTAL OVERFLOW OF DATA AND KNOWLEDGE FAR BEYOND HUMAN
COMPREHENSION. AFTER 20 YEARS OF MY JOURNEY IN SYSTEMS BIOLOGY RESEARCH, I HAVE
CONCLUDED THAT NEXT MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH IN SYSTEMS BIOLOGY REQUIRES AI-DRIVEN
SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. INITIALLY, IT SHALL BE INTRODUCED AS AI-ASSISTED SCIENCE,
BUT IT WILL RESULT IN AI SCIENTISTS WITH HIGH-LEVEL OF AUTONOMY. THIS CHALLENGE
POSES A SERIES OF FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS ON THE NATURE OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY,
LIMITS OF HUMAN COGNITION, IMPLICATIONS OF INDIVIDUAL PATHS TOWARD MAJOR
DISCOVERIES, COMPUTATIONAL MEANING OF SERENDIPITY OR SCIENTIFIC INTUITION, AND
MANY OTHER ISSUES THAT MAY BRING AI RESEARCH INTO THE NEXT STAGE.

Hiroaki Kitano is a President at The Systems Biology Institute, Tokyo, a
Professor at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University,
Okinawa, a President & CEO at Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc., Tokyo, a
Representative Director and CEO, Sony AI Inc., Tokyo and an Executive Vice
President at Sony Group Corporation, Tokyo.

He received a B.A. in physics from the International Christian University,
Tokyo, and a Ph.D. in computer science from Kyoto University, Kyoto. Since 1988,
he has been a visiting researcher at the Center for Machine Translation at
Carnegie Mellon University, USA. His research career includes a Project Director
at Kitano Symbiotic Systems Project, ERATO, Japan Science and Technology
Corporation, Tokyo, followed by a Project Director at Kitano Symbiotic Systems
Project, ERATO-SORST, Japan Science and Technology Agency, Tokyo, a Group
Director of Laboratory for Disease Systems Modeling at RIKEN Center for
Integrative Medical Sciences, Kanagawa, a visiting professor of Keio University,
Kanagawa, a visiting professor of the University of Tokyo, Tokyo, and so on.

Kitano is also an Editor-in-Chief of npj Systems Biology and Applications, and a
Founding Trustee of The RoboCup Federation.

Kitano served and is currently serving as scientific advisor for numerous
companies and research institutions internationally including ALSTOM, Mitsubishi
Chemical Holdings, European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Imperial
College London, Univ. Manchester, and Swiss Systems-X Program.

Kitano received The Computers and Thought Award from the International Joint
Conferences on Artificial Intelligence in 1993, Prix Ars Electronica 2000, Japan
Design Culture Award 2001, Good Design Award 2001, and Nature’s 2009 Japan
Mid-career Award for Creative Mentoring in Science, as well as being an invited
artist for Biennale di Venezia 2000 and Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) New York at
Worksphere Exhibition in 2001. He has been named a fellow of the Association for
the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence for 2021. His research interests
include computational biology, artificial intelligence, massively parallel
computer, autonomous robot, systems biology, and open energy system.

View recording x


ROBERTO CAR

Recipient of the 2020 ACM Gordon Bell Prize, Professor at Department of
Chemistry, Princeton University

TITLE: MACHINE LEARNING BASED AB-INITIO MOLECULAR DYNAMICS

ABSTRACT: COMPUTATIONAL COST SEVERELY LIMITS THE RANGE OF AB INITIO MOLECULAR
DYNAMICS SIMULATIONS. MACHINE LEARNING TECHNIQUES ARE RAPIDLY CHANGING THIS
STATE OF AFFAIRS. DEEP NEURAL NETWORKS, THAT LEARN THE INTERATOMIC POTENTIAL
ENERGY SURFACE FROM AB-INITIO DATA, MAKE POSSIBLE SIMULATIONS WITH QUANTUM
MECHANICAL ACCURACY AT THE COST OF EMPIRICAL FORCE FIELDS. THESE APPROACHES CAN
MODEL NOT ONLY THE ATOMISTIC DYNAMICS BUT ALSO THE DIELECTRIC RESPONSE
PROPERTIES MEASURED IN EXPERIMENTS. I WILL DISCUSS, IN PARTICULAR, THE DEEP
POTENTIAL METHOD DEVELOPED AT PRINCETON. IN COMBINATION WITH INCREMENTAL
LEARNING TECHNIQUES, THIS APPROACH MAKES POSSIBLE TO CONSTRUCT, WITH MINIMAL
LEARNING COST, REACTIVE POTENTIALS THAT ARE ACCURATE OVER A VAST RANGE OF
THERMODYNAMIC CONDITIONS, SUCH AS THE PRESSURE AND TEMPERATURE REGIMES
UNDERLYING MOLECULAR AND IONIC PHASES OF WATER. THE METHODOLOGY WILL BE
ILLUSTRATED WITH APPLICATIONS TO PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY.

Roberto Car is a theoretical condensed matter physicist and physical chemist. He
is known for the ab-initio molecular dynamics method that he introduced with
Michele Parrinello, and for electronic structure and simulation studies of
disordered systems. Car was born in Trieste (Italy) and graduated from the Milan
Politecnico (Technical University of Milan). After postdoctoral appointments at
EPFL (Switzerland) and at the IBM TJ Watson research Center, he held physics
professor positions at SISSA and at the University of Geneva (Switzerland).

Since 1999 he is professor of chemistry and the Princeton Institute for the
Science and Technology of Materials at Princeton University, where he is also
associated professor of physics and the Program in Applied and Computational
Mathematics.

Car has been awarded numerous prizes, including the 1990 Europhysics Prize, the
1995 APS Rahman Prize, the 2009 Dirac Medal of the ICTP, the 2009 IEEE Fernbach
Award, the 2010 Berni J. Alder CECAM Prize for Computational Physics, the 2012
Fermi Prize of the Italian Physical Society, the 2016 ACS Theoretical Chemistry
Award, and the 2021 Franklin Medal for Chemistry. Car holds honorary degrees
from Italian and Swiss Universities. He is a member of the National Academy of
Sciences of the USA since 2016.


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