Blue Gene Named Medal of Technology and Innovation Award Winner

Dr. Dobb's Journal  @ 01:31 EDT | October 07, 2009
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A high-performance, low-power, system-on-a-chip architecture that runs on Linux

The IBM Blue Gene series of energy-efficient supercomputers has been named the Medal of Technology and Innovation award winner, the highest honor for technological achievement for outstanding contributions related to the nation's competiveness, standard of living, and quality of life through the development and commercialization of technological products. The medal program is administered by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and is awarded annually to individuals, teams, and companies.

The Blue Gene leverages a high-performance, low-power, system-on-a-chip architecture offering extreme integration that dramatically improves reliability increases energy efficiency and reduces operating costs. Much of the software needed to operate Blue Gene comes from the open source community and was developed by laboratories and universities around the world. Argonne National Labs was involved in fostering that community as well as developing key components of the system software. For example, the Blue Gene leverages Argonne's MPICH, the version of the Message Passing Interface that scientists use to write parallel programs capable of scaling to hundreds of thousands of CPU cores. Computer scientists are also working on extending the capabilities of Blue Gene with advanced math libraries, improved parallel file systems, and even experimental operating systems such as ZeptoOS, which permits users to run Linux on the Blue Gene's compute nodes.

"The Blue Gene supercomputers are an outstanding example of our investment in nuclear security providing the tools to tackle broader national challenges," said NNSA Administrator Thomas D'Agostino. "This machine, which was originally developed to ensure the safety and reliability of our nuclear stockpile without testing, has led to amazing advances in science and discovery."

The U.S. Department of Energy began an R&D partnership with IBM in 2001 to develop the Blue Gene platform. Argonne National Lab and Lawrence Livermore National Lab worked on key aspects of the design and provided critical software components to ensure it was well suited to solve challenges in energy, the environment and national security.

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Real World Parallelism Webinar Series

  • November 17, 2009
    Visual Effects for Animation - presented by DreamWorks Animation
    Speaker: Ron Henderson (Bio)

    Ron Henderson manages the FX Tools group at DreamWorks Animation, where he is responsible for developing physical simulation and procedural modeling tools. These systems have been used for key visual effects in recent films such as Kung Fu Panda and Monsters vs. Aliens (March 2009).

    Prior to joining DreamWorks in 2002 he was a senior scientist at Caltech with a joint appointment to the Applied Math and Aeronautics departments, where he worked on efficient techniques for the direct numerical simulation of fluid turbulence.

    Abstract:
    In this webinar, Ron Henderson will show examples of visual effects, from hair and feathers to smoke and fire, from a variety of DreamWorks Animation feature films. He will discuss in general terms the kinds of techniques used to achieve particular visual effects. Finally, Henderson will show a detailed breakdown of the dam-breaking scene from Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, demonstrating how different elements of key frame animation, simulation, and rendering are combined in a real production shot.

  • December 1, 2009
    A Quick and Easy Way to Parallelize a Legacy Codebase with Intel® Threading Building Blocks (TBBs)
    Speaker: Bernard Laberge, Avid, Senior Principal Engineer (Bio)

    Bernard Laberge is a senior principal engineer in the video editors division at Avid. During his seven years with the company he has been actively involved in the replacement of the legacy video processing engines used by Avid editors with a common hardware-abstracted, component-based video processing engine currently running on the CPU with SIMD optimized code, GPU, and dedicated hardware.

    Abstract:
    Learn how to overcome the limitations of a thread-based scheduler, including dealing with the absence of recursive parallelism support and the inefficient handling of unbalanced processing load. Bernard Laberge addresses how Avid resolved the expensive refactoring of their thread-based scheduler into a task-based solution by choosing Intel® Threading Building Blocks (TBBs). He explores how Avid was able to easily integrate the Intel TBBs into their video editor applications and more than 5 million lines of code.

  • December 15, 2009
    How to Use Intel® Parallel Studio to Streamline Code Development in a Multicore Environment
    Speaker: Matt Dunbar, Director for Performance Technology, SIMULIA (Bio)

    Matt Dunbar is the director for performance technology at SIMULIA. Since joining the company in 1993, he has worked on parallelization of the Abaqus suite of products, initially for shared memory architectures and more recently for distributed memory architectures. Dunbar has also been intimately involved in selecting both the hardware and software tools used in the development of the Abaqus product line.

    Abstract:
    Resolve elusive, costly multithreading errors quickly and efficiently with Intel® Parallel Studio. While many coding problems that lead to bugs in software applications are typically straightforward logic errors, errors in managing memory and in multithreading code can sometimes take weeks to months to diagnose and fix. Matt Dunbar explores how and why taking advantage of multicore processors through multithreaded code is critical for compute-intensive applications. While spotlighting his work on SIMULIA's Abaqus finite element solver, Dunbar addresses the need for multicore execution and shares his experiences using Intel Parallel Studio to streamline code development in a multicore environment.