Seeing the world in parallel

The world is parallel.  Well, maybe not the world, but computing certainly is now dominated by the need to use parallel computing.

I just returned from the annual “SC” conference, held this year in Seattle.  The full name of the conference is the “International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis,” and it is an amazing conference. The excitement and importance of parallel computing were evident in the records set this year – total attendance of over 10,000, nearly 5000 in the technical program, record numbers of papers submitted; the list goes on. 

If you haven’t been to SC, or haven’t been recently, the conference is a blend of a strong technical conference (peer-reviewed papers with an acceptance rate of about 20%; by many measures, a high impact conference with many influential and highly-cited papers) and a vibrant exhibit hall with a mix of industry and research exhibits showcasing the everything from the device technology needed for building systems to the research being conducted with the world’s largest and fastest systems. Many of the exhibitors, both industrial and research, showed their progress in solving the parallel computing problem – not just for the large scale systems, but for all scales, from single chip to the million core systems to be deployed next year. 

It was a reminder that neither the low end (with the volume of customers) nor the high end (which has been using parallel computing for decades) has all of the answers.  To learn how to solve the challenges of parallel computing, we will need to take advantage both of the long experience in high-end computing and the fresh perspectives coming from the use of increasing amounts of parallelism in a wide range of commodity products.

And now for my plug – The University of Illinois has started a new parallel computing institute to focus the considerable skills and expertise at Illinois in better meeting the challenges of parallel computing.  This blog will comment on all aspects of parallel computing, with contributions from a variety of viewpoints. I’m interested in your feedback, and hope that you will join us on our collective journey into a world where parallel computing is ubiquitous.