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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,

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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:

Read more: Disrupt Forward: Announcing the Beowulf Foundation Add new comment

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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.
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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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Give your HPC resume a performance boost by creating a Resume Profile

If your job search was a parallel program, then your resume would be the code that outputs interviews. You wouldn’t want to scale up your job count until your code is optimized and bug free, right?

An inefficient resume can cause you a lot of wasted time, extending your job search out for several months. Sure, brute forcing your job search by sending out 100’s of resumes will typically land you a job, eventually. But it’s likely that you will burn-out before then, or get into a “I’ll take anything I can get” mindset.

So what can you do to optimize your resume to increase your interview rate?

There are several ways, but one stands out in my book as the most important, and that is adding a resume profile at the top of your resume.

Read more: Scale Up Your HPC Job Interviews Add new comment

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