Presentations and the Road Show

This is an exciting time in high performance computing: technology now allows small teams to build interesting things that the big companies are just too complacent or fat to even consider. This is especially true of Big N parallel computing systems that normal people can use. Here are some presentations that I assembled while I was building interesting systems at SiCortex.


SC08: Broadening the HPC Franchise, Austin, TX, 20-Nov-2008

Too few computational scientists have the tools that are necessary for effective use of parallel machines. We need to do something about that. This is my view of what we should do as an industry.

     Adobe PDF: SC08_SiCortex.pdf


SC08: Green500 Birds of a Feather, Austin, TX, 19-Nov-2008

For a while now, I’ve been razzing some of the larger vendors for their “paint it green” initiatives. This year’s SC08 floor show was replete with green and too much of it was buncombe and hucksterism. It is time for the industry to develop useful green-ness metrics before the vendors develop a bogus alternative. This presentation is part of my contribution to the effort.

    Adobe PDF: SC08_GreenBOF.pdf


Society of Exploration Geophysicists, Las Vegas, NV, 14-Nov-2008

Multicore, GPGPU, Multi-multi-core are all points in a vast design space. This presentation suggests that the chief attribute of each architecture is its method of providing bandwidth between the memory system and the arithmetic units. Each technique has its charms, but in the context of massive parallelism, communication costs soon dominate for large problems. This presentation proposes a framework for reasoning about the competing solutions.

    Adobe PDF: SEG_vendpres_08_corrected.pdf


Hot Interconnects: A Network Fabric for Scalable Multiprocessor Systems, Palo Alto, CA, 27-Aug-2008

This presentation is a technical overview of the SiCortex fabric.

     Adobe PDF: HI_2008.pdf


Exhibitor’s Forum: International Supercomputer Conference, Dresden, 19-Jun-2008

Why would anyone start a new computer company? Why isn’t innovation in computing dead? The workshop presentation describes industry trends and points out the opportunity that SiCortex is exploiting to provide more effective and efficient parallel computing systems.

     Adobe PDF: ISC08.pdf


Workshop on Large Scale Parallel Processing, Miami, 18-Apr-2008

This is an early version of the ISC08 talk, with particular attention to the industry context that creates opportunities for new computer companies.

Warning: These are very large files (> 10MB each). Click at your leisure and wait for the bits to arrive.

  1. Flash Player: LSPP Flash Presentation

  2. Adobe PDF: LSPP_Apr_2008.pdf


Presentation to MIT QCD Friday Seminar, Cambridge, MA, 2-May-2008

This is a product overview, as close to a sales talk as you’ll see here.

     Adobe PDF: MIT_Apr_2008.pdf