IEEE Conferences

Cloud HPC: Exploring the Growing Synergy between Cloud and High Performance Computing
Tuesday September 7, 17:10 - 18:30 UTC

Cloud computing is traditionally defined in terms of data and compute services that support on-demand applications that scale to thousands of simultaneous users. High Performance Computing (HPC) is associated with massive supercomputers that run highly parallel programs for small groups of users. However, over the last five years, the demands of the scientific and engineering research community have created an evolutionary pressure to merge the best innovations of these two models. HPC centers have started to use cloud-native technologies like data object stores and cloud tools and processes to develop and deploy software. On the other side, cloud data centers are integrating advanced accelerators on each node and deploy high-performance interconnects with latency optimizations known from HPC. Furthermore, the AI revolution that was initially nurtured by the public cloud companies with their hyperscale datacenters, is increasingly finding adoption in the scientific and engineering applications on supercomputers.

This panel brings together four acknowledge leaders with experience in both cloud computing and high performance scientific computing. The panel is moderated by Dennis Gannon and James Sexton.

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Panelists

Panel Chair: Dennis Gannon is Professor Emeritus in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. From 2008 until he retired in 2015 Dennis Gannon was with Microsoft Research, most recently as the Director of Cloud Research Strategy. His previous roles at Microsoft include directing research as a member of the Cloud Computing Research Group and the Extreme Computing Group. From 1985 to 2008 Gannon was with the Department of Computer Science at Indiana University where he was Science Director for the Indiana Pervasive Technology Labs and, for six years, Chair of the Department of Computer Science. He also chaired the original planning committee for the School of Informatics. He received the School of Informatics Hermes Award in 2006. He has published over 200 scientific articles and 4 books, including Cloud Computing for Science and Engineering with Ian Foster. His current work is documented in his blog http://esciencegroup.com He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of California, Davis.

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Kathy Yelick is the Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and the Executive Associate Dean for the Division of Computing, Data Science and Society at UC Berkeley. She is also a Senior Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Her research is in high performance computing, programming systems, parallel algorithms, and computational genomics. She is known for her work on Partitioned Global Address Space languages and automatic performance tuning, and she currently leads the ExaBiome project on microbiome analysis as part of Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project. Yelick was the Director of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) from 2008 to 2012 and led the Computing Sciences Area at Berkeley Lab from 2010 through 2019, where she oversaw NERSC, the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), and the Computational Research Division. Yelick is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) and received both the ACM/IEEE Ken Kennedy award and the ACM-W Athena award. She previously served as a member of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), the National Academies Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB), and the California Council on Science and Technology.

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Ian Foster is Senior Scientist and Distinguished Fellow, and also director of the Data Science and Learning Division, at Argonne National Laboratory, and the Arthur Holly Compton Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. His research deals with distributed, parallel, and data-intensive computing technologies, and innovative applications of those technologies to scientific problems in such domains as materials science, climate change, and biomedicine. He co-authored the book “Cloud Computing for Science and Engineering” with Dennis Gannon.

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Geoffrey Fox received a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Cambridge University, where he was Senior Wrangler. He is now a Professor in the Biocomplexity Institute & Initiative and Computer Science Department at the University of Virginia. He previously held positions at Caltech, Syracuse University, Florida State University, and Indiana University. after being a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and Peterhouse College Cambridge. He has supervised the Ph.D. of 75 students. He received the High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (HPDC) Achievement Award and the ACM - IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award for Foundational contributions to parallel computing in 2019. He is a Fellow of APS (Physics) and ACM (Computing) and works on the interdisciplinary interface between computing and applications. He is currently active in the industry consortium MLCommons/MLPerf.

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Kate Keahey is one of the pioneers of infrastructure cloud computing. She created the Nimbus project, recognized as the first open source Infrastructure-as-a-Service implementation, and continues to work on research aligning cloud computing concepts with the needs of scientific datacenters and applications. To facilitate such research for the community at large, Kate leads the Chameleon project, providing a deeply reconfigurable, large-scale, and open experimental platform for Computer Science research. To foster the recognition of contributions to science made by software projects, Kate co-founded and serves as co-Editor-in-Chief of the SoftwareX journal, a new format designed to publish software contributions. Kate is a Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and a Senior Fellow at the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago.