Looking Back on SC12

Supercomputing 2012, the premier international conference and exhibition on high-performance computing and networking, took place in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, from 10 to 16 November 2012. JSC participated in the conference and exhibition for the fourteenth time in succession.

The role of JSC as a leading European high-performance computing centre was highlighted by it receiving the award for the "Fastest Supercomputer in Europe" from the TOP500 committee, the new 5 Petaflop IBM Blue Gene/Q installation JUQUEEN having become operational and accessible for users just before the conference.

JSC also received HPCwire's 2012 Reader's Choice Award for "Best use of HPC in life sciences" for using NVIDIA Tesla GPUs to uncover causes of and treatments for autism, Alzheimer's, and other neurological diseases. The application is currently being developed at Jülich's Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1).

JSC staff members actively contributed to the conference's programme, to tutorials and to various special interest meetings. Bernd Mohr, the only European member on the SC Steering Committee, acted as chair for the Awards Session.

At its booth, JSC presented its broad spectrum of activities together with scientific results obtained on its supercomputers in the form of displays, movies, animated presentations, and in individual consultations. Particular emphasis was placed on LLview, the interactive monitoring software for supercomputers. LLview is currently being used at a large number of supercomputing sites and it is also part of the Eclipse PTP environment for developing supercomputing applications. JSC also showcased DEEP, the European Exascale project coordinated by JSC. Next year, at SC13, all European Exascale projects will be presented jointly at a new dedicated booth.

JSC staff gave presentations at the Intel and NVIDIA booths and demonstrated the interoperability of the UNICORE middleware with other international technologies in the context of XSEDE at the University of Virginia booth as well as at the Italian Grid Initiative booth. Finally, JSC staff also managed the PRACE booth.

More detailed information and pictures are available at:
http://www.fz-juelich.de/ias/jsc/events/sc12.
(Contact: Dr. Walter Nadler)

from JSC News No. 209, 19 December 2012