The Purdue-Industry HPC Workshop, held on March 20, 2007 at the Burton Morgan Entrepreneurship Center of Purdue's Discovery Park, brought together experts and users of high-performance computing technology from industry and from Purdue.

The response to the workshop exceeded expectations! The capacity of the workshop venue, holding 80 attendees, had already filled before the workshop begun. Most attendees stayed throughout all morning talks and the luncheon presentation; the afternoon roundtable discussions similarly drew a large number of participants, filling the breakout rooms to capacity. Several industry sponsors supported the event.

The events started with a reception on the evening before the workshop, at which the Purdue Provost, Dr. Sally Mason, welcomed the guests and commented on the relevance of high-performance computing technology and collaborations between industry and Purdue.

The actual workshop program was opened by Professor Rudi Eigenmann, Interim Director of the Computing Research Institute, followed by welcoming remarks of Gerry McCartney, Interim Vice President of Information Technology and Professor Bob Bernhard, Associate Vice President for Research.

Dr. Tilak Agerwala, Vice President, Systems, IBM Research, gave the keynote presentation, entitled "High Performance Computing, Innovation, and Accelerating Discovery". A second invited speaker from industry was Steve Kirsch, Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems, giving a talk on "Multi-core Processors: The Dream of Infinite Processing Power or the Nightmare of Reality."

Two talks from Purdue faculty completed the morning program. Rudi Eigenmann, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, talked about "High Performance Computing Going Mainstream" and Tasos Lyrintzis, Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics Engineering, presented "Examples of High Performance Computing in Aerospace Engineering."

A luncheon address was given by Sangtae Kim, Professor of Chemical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, entitled "Pharmaceutical Informatics and a Pathway to Personalized Medicines in the Peta-Scale Era."

In afternoon breakout sessions the attendees discussed the four topics "State of the Art of HPC", "Future of high-end computing", "Future of multicore", and "HPC Education." The workshop concluded with summaries of these sessions.

After-workshop events included a demo by Gerhard Klimeck, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering on "nanoHUB.org - serving thousands of researchers and educators with interactive HPC-based simulations in nanotechnology" and a tour to the Discovery Park's Birck Nanotechnology Center.

WHAT THE WORKSHOP ACCOMPLISHED

The workshop gave testimony to the already high and continuously growing importance of computational simulation techniques as essential tools to achieve competitiveness in engineering tasks. Today, many engineering and science processes are unthinkable without the aid of computational simulation. Simulation lowers the cost of experimentation to test product functionality and safety significantly. "If we had to build trucks just to crash many of them for safety testing, we would not be in business" said an attendee of the International Truck & Engine company, Fort Wayne. Others pointed out that design by simulation is already being used in a large number of every- day products, including bottle caps and infant diapers.

Another area of rapidly increasing important is in software engineering tools and techniques to program multicore computer systems. Parallel programs must be written for such architectures, employing several threads (today four, but up to thousand in the foreseeable future) that work on a task concurrently, in concert. Parallel programming has been pioneered in the area of high-performance computing. Because all computers will use multicore architectures in the near future, these techniques are now become applicable to virtually every aspect of life that involves computer-based products.

The Purdue-Industry HPC Workshop is likely the first of a series of annual workshops. Please direct inquiries and comments to cri@purdue.edu.

WORKSHOP HOST AND SPONSORS

The Computing Research Institute, Purdue's Research Center for Interdisciplinary HPC Projects, was the workshop host. Many other Purdue organizations contributed, including the Cyber Center, several other Purdue Discovery Park Centers, ITaP, and faculty from many departments.

Images: Click on thumbnail to view full size.

Video Clips: Click here to view the videos of the welcoming remarks, presentations and round table discussions

Agenda