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,

Open, Scalable, and Portable 3D Data Visualization

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Written by Number Six

Published: 03 November 2021

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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:

Intersect360 Updated HPC Forecast Available

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Written by Number Six

Published: 21 August 2020

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Updated Forcaset Intersect360

HPC and hyperscale analyst Addison Snell from Intersect360 Research gave a presentation on August 6, 2020. The entire presentation and slides are available on Intersect 360 webpage (Thanks i360).

If you are curious how HPC may play out in the COVID-19 pandemic, watch the presentation (including questions at the end). Slides are also helpful, but Addison provides good context . For the impatient, here are the conclusions:

• Demand for high-performance computing endures. HPC is a long-term, stable growth market.
• Regardless of COVID-19, dynamics were shifting toward:
  • Increase in cloud computing, or other cloud-like deployments
  • Increase in government spending
• COVID-19 accelerates both of these trends
• HPC vendors should expect purchases to be delayed in 2020, followed by a boom year in 2021 as sales cycles come back in. However, not all lost revenue is recaptured.
• There is significant risk in this forecast. Two significant factors are:
  1. How long COVID-19 persists as an economic damper.
  2. The health of HPC vendors and their ability to ride out the market instability.