Jack Dongarra Likes Julia (the language)

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Written by Douglas Eadline

Published: 06 April 2022

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From the "What We Have Been Saying Dept"

Fresh from Julia Computing is a short note about HPC maven Jack Dongarra had to say about Julia.

2021 Turing Award Winner Jack Dongarra Says Julia Is ‘Much Better’ Than Other Languages and Should Perhaps Take Over: The winner of the 2021 Turing Award, often referred to as the ‘Nobel Prize of Computing’, is Jack Dongarra. Dongarra says Julia is ‘much better’ than other languages and should perhaps take over. According to ZDNet:

“While hardware speeds up matrix multiplication, [Jack] Dongarra is, again, mindful of the needs of the scientists and the software writer. ‘I grew up writing FORTRAN, and today we have much better mechanisms’ such as the Julia programming language and Jupyter Notebooks. What's needed now, he said, are more ways to ‘express those computations in an easy way,’ meaning linear algebra computations such as matrix multiplications. Specifically, more tools are needed to abstract the details. ‘Making the scientist more productive is the right way to go,’ he said. Asked what software programming paradigm should perhaps take over, Dongarra suggested the Julia language is one good candidate …”

Of course some forward looking sites, (cough, cough) have been highlighting Julia for ten years,

2021 Hybrid Beowulf Bash and PID Game

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Written by Douglas Eadline

Published: 09 November 2021

Hits: 544

The 2021 Beowulf Bash has gone hybrid. We were looking forward to a face-to-face event, but the never ending pandemic situation has caused us to change course. In any case, like last year we will have a Zoom based get together with some flash panels to discuss the following interesting topics:

• Composable Computing - Will the next generation of HPC computing be built-to-order at run time? Dynamic infrastructure represents a new way provision just the right amount of bare-metal hardware for your application. This panel will discuss the concept of composable computing and how it can used in HPC.
• RISC-V For HPC Open ISA RISC-V processors are beginning to arrive in many different vertical markets. What are the latest designs and roadmaps to this the new processor for HPC?
• Benchmarking For HPC Since the beginning of HPC, benchmarks, like the Top500, have been historically important. This panel will discuss modern benchmarking strategies and resources in today's changing HPC landscape.

We will also break away and visit the on-site Bash where we will be holding an old-school Bash at a local and possibly respectable establishment. Registration information (for both the Zoom and on-site event) and an event time-line can be found by signing up on the snarky invite. (BTW: We are also collecting some basic demographics on the registration this year.)

Disrupt Forward: Announcing the Beowulf Foundation

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Written by Douglas Eadline

Published: 16 November 2021

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From the self reference department

The Beowulf Foundation was announced by Douglas Eadline and Lara Kisielewska at the SC 2021 Beowulf Bash in St Louis. The idea for a “Foundation” emerged from the continued discussion amongst the Beowulf community about the supporting the “Beowulf Ethos,” that began with the Beowulf Project at NASA using commodity hardware and open source software to build high-performance systems at low cost. Initially considered an anomaly, the “wrong ideas” demonstrated by the Beowulf Project changed the face of modern supercomputing.

The goal of the Beowulf Foundation is not to relive the past, but to support the “wrong” ideas of the future that may lead to further breakthroughs in high performance computing. As stated by Eadline:

Open, Scalable, and Portable 3D Data Visualization

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Written by Number Six

Published: 03 November 2021

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From the "So That is What My Data Look Like" Department

A new open source, portable, and scalable 3D visualization standard is in the works. Announced by Khronos Group ANARI (Analytic Rendering Interface) 1.0 Provisional Specification for scientific visualization and scalable 3D Data visualization. ANARI will enable users to quickly and easily build a scene description and create 3D images. Most importantly, ANARI doesn’t specify the rendering details; the rendering gets left to the backend engine which provides a simplified way to develop a visualization application with cross-vendor portability including ray tracing. From the announcement:

"The scientific visualization ecosystem includes key visualization application vendors such as VMD, VTK/ParaView, and VisIt that have actively participated in ANARI’s design. There are also early ANARI implementations in development by AMD, Intel and NVIDIA that will provide access to their Radeon ProRender, OSPRay, and VisRTX rendering engines respectively".

The specification is provisional and a full version 1 should be released soon (there is an open SDK available). There is also a good (and short) Overview Video that explains the benefits of ANARI.

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