Invited Talks
In the past, SC conferences have featured a variety of invited talks under various names such as Masterworks, plenary talks, and state of the field. To reduce confusion, in SC12 we are grouping them under a single banner: Invited Talks. Overall, SC serves as the premier venue for high performance computing, networking and storage. Thus, the Invited Talks feature leaders who detail innovative work in these areas and their application to the world's most challenging problems. At SC12 you can hear about the latest innovations in computing and how they are fueling new approaches to addressing the toughest and most complex questions of our time.
SC12 Invited Plenary Speakers Provide Full Range of Exascale Perspectives
The Invited Plenary Speakers are confirmed and ready to tell you about their take on current supercomputers and the changes that are coming in the next generations of systems. Wednesday morning features Henry Markram, a professor of neuroscience at the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology (EPFL), and Mitsuo Yokokawa, the director of the Operations and Computer Technologies Division, RIKEN Advanced Institute for Computational Science. The Thursday morning speakers are William Harrod, the Research Division Director in the Advanced Scientific Computing Research program in the Office of Science at the Department of Energy (DOE), and Steve Scott, Chief Technology Officer of the Tesla business unit at NVIDIA,
Markram is is the founder of the Brain Mind Institute, founder and director of the Blue Brain Project, founder and coordinator of the Human Brain Project and co-foudner and president of Frontiers. He is known as the man who plans to simulate the complete human brain. His talk, entitled "Simulating the Human Brain: An Extreme Challenge for Computing", will detail all aspects of brain simulations. By attending his talk, you will learn that building and simulating brain models across its spatial (nine orders of magnitude) and temporal (twelve orders of magnitude) scales will demand extreme solutions for data management, cloud-based computing, internet-based interactivity, visualization and supercomputing.
Yokokawa, who won a Gordon Bell Prize at SC11 and was engaged in the development project of the Earth Simulator, has a critical role in Japan's "K" Computer. His talk, entitled "The K Computer - Toward Its Productive Application to Our Life", will provide a detailed discussion of the K Computer's architecture and a historical perspective on its design and deployment. More importantly, he will highlight the application goals and successes of that system.
Harrod brings an important perspective of the US government's large-scale computing funding directions. Before joining DOE, he was a Program Manager in the Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO) in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) where he oversaw the innovative High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program and initiated the Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) program. His talk, entitled "A Journey to Exascale Computing", will focus on the strategy and plans for developing and deploying energy efficient, highly programmable exascale computers by the early 2020s. As a key figure in US exascale planning, you can expect his talk to provide a detailed perspective on recently announced DOE programs as well as the likely shape of exascale systems that will emerge from them.
Scott, previously Chief Architect for several successful supercomputing systems produced by Cray Inc., will speak about "The Evolution of GPU Accelerated Computing." He will provide insight not only into Nvidia's role in several deployed systems but also into how they hope to continue that trend. His talk will explain how graphics processing units have become common in energy efficient supercomputing systems and how they are likely to evolve in order to reach ambitious exascale goals.
SC12 Invited Speakers Provide Unique Perspectives on Systems,
Architecture, Algorithms and Applications
Every day of SC12 will feature talks by supercomputing leaders from industry,government and academia. Following the keynote, talks will detail the trials and tribulations of siting two new large scale systems (LLNL's Sequoia and ORNL's Titan). The next invited speaker session will provide a close look at how energy consumption is becoming the dominant issue for supercomputing systems. The last Tuesday session will detail important algorithmic advances. On Wednesday, how computer architecture trends will shape future simulation and large-scale data systems. After lunch on Wednesday, you can learn about the latest advances in compiling for accelerators. The final session on Wednesday will feature talks on applications that have major influence on society. The morning session on Thursday will again feature the major new systems at LLNL and ORNL, but this time you will learn how well applications perform on those systems and what it takes to achieve that level of performance. Finally, Thursday afternoon will close with talks that detail scientific advances that have been achieved through large-scale simulations.