Newsletter 07/09

And the winner is... - ISC Awards Announced

The opening session of ISC is renowned for launching big news. Traditionally, the session has heralded the much-anticipated release of the TOP500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world, but at ISC’09, the session will also be the forum for recognizing the winners of the two ISC Awards, sponsored by Intel and Sun Microsystems.

Also at this year’s opening session, the PRACE Award will be presented for the second time. PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, will award a prize to the best scientific paper by a European student or young scientist. As with the ISC Awards, the winner of the PRACE Award is chosen by the ISC Award Committee.
ISC’09 drew a record submisson of 54 papers and the ISC Award Committee had quite a difficult job in declaring the winners from these excellent submissions, as committee chair Prof. Dr. Michael Resch commented.
The Awards will be presented on the first conference day, Tuesday, June 23.
The year’s best papers are:

• PRACE Award Winning Paper, Scientific Session 1

“High Scalability Multipole Method. Solving Half Billion of Unknowns”
Authors: J. C. Mouriño, A. Gómez, J. M. Taboada, L. Landesa, J. M. Bértolo, F. Obelleiro, J. L. Rodríguez
Supercomputing Center of Galicia (CESGA), Universidad de Extremadura, Universidad de Vigo, Spain

• ISC’09 Award Winning Paper, Scientific Session 2

“Toward Message Passing for a Million Processes: Characterizing MPI on a Massive Scale Blue Gene/P,”
Authors: P. Balaji (who wins the ISC Award for the second time in a row!), A. Chan, R. Thakur, E. Lusk, Argonne National Laboratory, USA and W. Gropp, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

• ISC’09 Award Winning Paper, Scientific Session 3

“Faster FAST: Multicore Acceleration of Streaming Financial Data”
Authors: D. Pasetto, V. Agarwal, D. A. Bader, L. Dan, L.-K. Liu, M. Perrone, F. Petrini
IBM TJ Watson Research Center, USA, IBM Computational Science Center, Ireland & Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

Schedules for the award-winning submissions as well as for the complete Scientific Day are available from the ISC website.

Early birds – Save money on the bigger, better ISC’09

With the move to Hamburg, ISC will not only be bigger, but also better (and more flexible).
What’s bigger?
ISC now offers an innovative 4-day conference program with special emphasis on three key research areas—climate modeling, aeronautics and cloud computing—and an exhibition with more than 120 exhibitors in the collegial atmosphere for which ISC is famous for.
What’s better?
ISC’09 introduces a new pricing system with lower registration fees and options to attend one day, or two, three or four. The icing on the cake is that you can save even more money by taking advantage early bird registration. Keep the deadline in mind—early bird savings disappear after Monday, May 25.
Snag it now.

Coup de HPC – ISC Keynote talks

In ISC’s 24-year history the keynote talks are a vital element, a compendium of HPC coups. The speakers present crisp, compact statements of current trends, from hardware evolution to a future when smart systems will free up human intellect to focus on the most critical challenges. Each talk deserves a place in your busy ISC schedule.
Starting on Tuesday, June 23, with Andreas von Bechtholsheim, the legendary co-founder of Sun Microsystems and founder and Chief Development Officer of Arista Networks, will discuss “The Evolution of Interconnects for High Performance Computing.”

He’s followed by Prof. Dr. Thomas Sterling, the Arnaud & Edwards Professor of Computer Science at Louisiana State University. On Wednesday, June 24, he will share his views in a look at the past year in his talk “HPC Achievement & Impact – 2009”. With his usual wit and insight, Sterling will examine the beginning of the Petaflops Era.

On Thursday, June 25, Prof. Dr. Gunter Dueck, Chief Technologist & Distinguished Engineer at IBM in Germany,” will give a sure-to-be remembered talk on “Lean Brain Management – More Success & Efficiency by Saving Intelligence.” In it, Dueck advocates a new cold-blooded view on the use of intelligence or skill at work.

Last but not least Prof. Dr. Edgar Körner, President, of the Honda Research Institute Europe in Germany, will discuss “The Brain-Like Vision” on Friday, June 26. According to Körner, “Understanding essential principles of how the brain organizes behavior may enable us to provide our technical artifacts at least with some aspects of brain-like intelligence. Our approach is based on the assumption that the essence of brain computing is not in the local processing or learning algorithm but in the way the brain organizes processing.”

A more detailed look on the ISC’09 keynote sessions, can be found at

www.supercomp.de/isc09/Keynotes

Going the extra mile - Hamburg Tip

Walking tours are one of the best ways to get an impression of the city of Hamburg, a city with more bridges than Venice and more green space than almost any other city in Europe. We have some suggestions and it depends on you which one appeals your taste best.

The sportive way to discover the city: Sightseeing on the double
Why not take to the streets? There are places that will strike you with both their beauty and their utility for long strolls or jogs. After a full day at ISC’09, you don’t want to spend a lot of time planning your after-hours relaxation. You can run across the city while sightseeing at the same time. Sprint past the Speicherstadt (the old port warehouse district), wave to the River Elbe (Hamburg’s link to the North Sea), cross bridges and salute the church “Michel” (Hamburg’s unofficial symbol). If you like it more unhurried, but still like a great view, try the tour “Treppenviertel Blankenese” in a now-upscale area once home to sea captains. Tour guides are available early in the morning as well as in the evening.
Guided tours in English and German language can be booked at
The website is only in German, but register in English and you get the response in English.www.touristjogging.de

A historical tour to a storytelling place: Ballinstadt Emigrants’ World
Between 1850 und 1939, Hamburg served as the “Gateway to the World” for some 5 million European emigrants heading across the Atlantic to America. While these people sought a new beginning in the “land of plenty”, they first had to wait for their ship to sail. Up to 5000 people were housed at the same time in the huge emigrant halls built by Albert Ballin, General Manager of the renowned German shipping company HAPAG. The biggest genealogical database in the world with more than 600 million entries makes it possible to track the path of one’s own family.
www.ballinstadt.de/en

A modern city presented in a modern way: The GPS tour
Hamburg is the first German city to offer its visitors the opportunity to be guided by a virtual guide on different routes through Hamburg via GPS. The audio-visual cityguide supplies comprehensive and exciting pieces of information about the sights to see and shows a part of a map with exact location. You simply rent a device at the Tourist Information in the main train station (the Hauptbahnhof).
You have the choice of a City-Walk across the city center and the shopping promenades, a tour on the legendary “Reeperbahn”, and a Hafencity stroll along the shores of the waterways with Landungsbrücken, and the historical “Speicherstadt”. Every tour is about 2 to 3 hours.
A GPS virtual tour for half a day is 8€, the whole day costs 12€.
Rental at Tourist Information at the main station, exit Kirchenallee, U/S-Bahn “Hauptbahnhof”.

Viel Spass! (Have fun!)