TechTalks from event: IEEE IPDPS 2011

Note 1: Only plenary sessions (keynotes, panels, and best papers) are accessible without requiring log-in. For other talks, you will need to log-in using the email you registered for IPDPS 2011. Note 2: Many of the talks (those without a thumbnail next to the their description below) are yet to be uploaded. Some of them were not recorded because of technical problems. We are working with the corresponding authors to upload the self-recorded versions here. We sincerely thank all authors for their efforts in making their videos available.

IPDPS 2011 Keynotes and Panels

  • Keynote: Algorithm Engineering for Scalable Parallel External Sorting Authors: Peter Sanders, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
    The talk describes algorithm engineering (AE) as a methodology for algorithmic research where design, analysis, implementation and experimental evaluation of algorithms form a feedback cycle driving the development of efficient algorithm. Additional important components of the methodology include realistic models, algorithm libraries, and collections of realistic benchmark instances. We use one main example throughout this paper: sorting huge data sets using many multi-core processors and disks. The described system broke records for the GraySort and MinuteSort sorting benchmarks and helped with the record for the JouleSort benchmark.
  • 25th Year Panel: LOOKING BACK Authors: Moderator: Yves Robert, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France
    The 25th year of IPDPS gives us the opportunity to look back and (to attempt) to assess what has gone wrong, what has gone well, and what came as a surprise, in the field of parallel and distributed processing. The panel members will give a few examples of striking events that took place in their area (covering Algorithms/ Applications/ Architectures/ Software). They will also give a short statement on how they would summarize the evolution of the field as a whole over the last 25 years. Panelists: William (Bill) Dally, Stanford & NVIDIA Jack Dongarra, University of Tennessee & Oak Ridge National Laboratory Satoshi Matsuoka, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan Rob Schreiber, HP Labs, Palo Alto Horst Simon, NERSC, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Uzi Vishkin, University of Maryland
  • Keynote: Architecture-aware Algorithms and Software for Peta and Exascale Computing Authors: Jack Dongarra, University of Tennessee & Oak Ridge National Laboratory
    In this talk we examine how high performance computing has changed over the last 10-year and look toward the future in terms of trends. These changes have had and will continue to have a major impact on our software. 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. We will look at five areas of research that will have an importance impact in the development of software and algorithms. We will focus on following themes: Redesign of software to fit multicore and hybrid architectures, Automatically tuned application software, Exploiting mixed precision for performance, The importance of fault tolerance, Communication avoiding algorithms.
  • 25th Year Panel: WHAT'S AHEAD Authors: Moderator: Per Stenström, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
    Parallel computing has become ubiquitous and relates to challenging computational problems in science via business-driven computing to mobile computing. The scope has widened dramatically over the last decade. This panel will debate and speculate on how the parallel computing landscape is expected to change in the years to come. Areas of focus will include: Computing platforms: How will we be able to maintain the performance growth of the past and what will be the major challenges in the next 10 years and beyond that? What technical barriers are anticipated and what disruptive technologies are behind the corner? Software: How will software infrastructures evolve to meet performance requirements in the next 10 years and beyond? How will we ever be able to hide parallelism obstacles for the masses and what is the road forward towards that? Algorithms: What will be the major computational problems to tackle in the next 10 years and beyond? What are the most challenging algorithmic problems to solve? Applications: What will be the next wave of grand challenge problems to focus on in the next 10 years and beyond? What will be the major performance driving applications in the general and mobile computing domains? Panelists: Doug Burger, Microsoft Research; Wen-mei Hwu, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Vipin Kumar, University of Minnesota; Kunle Olukotun, Stanford University; David Padua, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Burton Smith, Microsoft.
  • Keynote: Power, Programmability, and Granularity: The Challenges of ExaScale Computing Authors: William (Bill) Dally, Stanford/NVIDIA
    Reaching an ExaScale computer by the end of the decade, and enabling the continued performance scaling of smaller systems requires significant research breakthroughs in three key areas: power efficiency, programmability, and execution granularity. To build an ExaScale machine in a power budget of 20MW requires a 200-fold improvement in energy per instruction: from 2nJ to 10pJ. Only 4x is expected from improved technology. The remaining 50x must come from improvements in architecture and circuits. To program a machine of this scale requires more productive parallel programming environments - that make parallel programming as easy as sequential programming is today. Finally, problem size and memory size constraints prevent the continued use of weak scaling, requiring these machines to extract parallelism at very fine granularity - down to the level of a few instructions. This talk will discuss these challenges and current approaches to address them.