Some interesting topics discussed:
- Exascale: 10^18 floating point operations per second! Machines with this capacities will come in a couple years in the biggest data centres. It is kind of a race.
- Reliability: supercomputers can have fatal silent failures too!
- SKA: Square Kilometer Array which is a huge astronomy project involving 6 countries. The data it will produce is in a scale not seen yet. In general it is a complex project with complicated politics.
- DALiuGE: a task ordering software they developed
- RCU: Utility for synchronization on multi-processing. The developer of this gave an inside on how he is tracking his bugs and how he is trying to find them. Statistically there are 1-3 bugs per 100 lines!
- Waggle: Intelligent sensors from Argonne labs that have some computing capabilities.
- Posits: A new way to represent floats by Gustafson, the guy that created the Gustafson law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustafson's_law)
- Buzzwords: IA, IoT etc.
- What is the future in HPC for NZ?