Research for Petascale Computing Technologies for Science and Engineering Workshop

April 20, 2006
8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.
NCSA Auditorium
1205 W. Clark St., Urbana

Petascale computing is now a realizable goal that will impact all of science and engineering. But the best pathway -- the pathway that will realize the full potential of petascale computers to drive science and engineering -- is unclear. Future computers cannot rely on continuing increases in clock speed to drive performance increases. Instead, tomorrow's computing systems will include processors with multiple "processor cores" on each chip, special application accelerators, and reprogrammable logic devices. Several of these types of processors may be included in a single system, interconnected by a high-performance communications fabric. Individual processors may even have heterogeneous "processor cores," as in the new Cell processor from IBM, Sony, and Toshiba. These technologies have the potential to dramatically increase the fidelity and range of computational simulations as well as the scope and responsiveness of data mining, analysis, and visualization applications. However, they also pose significant technical problems that must be addressed before their full potential can be realized.

This workshop on Research for Petascale Computing Technologies for Science and Engineering will explore the issues surrounding petascale computing with presentations by Marc Snir (head of the UIUC Department of Computer Science), Wen-mei Hwu (professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering), Rob Pennington (leader of NCSA's Innovative Systems Laboratory), Chandrika Kamath (an expert in data-intensive computing from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), Phillip Colella (an expert in applied mathematics from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), and Robert Harrison (an expert in scientific applications from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville). The meeting will conclude with a panel discussion and with questions/comments from the participants.

The full agenda is now available.