An Overview of High Performance Computing and Challenges for the Future

Jack Dongarra is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Tennessee. He also holds the title of Distinguished Research Staff in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Dongarra specializes in numerical algorithms in linear algebra, parallel computing, programming methodology and tools for parallel computers. He has contributed to the design and implementation of open source numerical software packages such as LINPACK, BLAS, LAPACK, and MPI. His LINPACK Benchmark is used to rate the world’s fastest supercomputers culminating in the yearly Top500 list.
Abstract: In this talk, Professor Dongarra will examine how high performance computing has changed over the last 10 years and look toward the future in terms of trends. These changes have had and will continue to have a major impact on our software. A new generation of software libraries and algorithms are needed for the effective and reliable use of (wide area) dynamic, distributed and parallel environments. Some of the software and algorithm challenges have already been encountered, such as management of communication and memory hierarchies through a combination of compile-time and run-time techniques, but the increased scale of computation, depth of memory hierarchies, range of latencies, and increased run-time environment variability will make these problems much harder. His talk will focus on the redesign of software to fit multicore architectures.
This Provost’s Lecture, co-sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Computational Science Students Association, will be held on Thursday, November 10, at 4 pm in the Charles B. Wang Center, Lecture Hall 2.
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