Vielen Dank, Frankfurt: ISC19

Once a year in Frankfurt, the world’s High-Performance Computing (HPC) community come together to take part in the prestigious International Supercomputing Conference (ISC). Researchers, supporters and infrastructure providers share a wealth of knowledge via workshops, tutorials, keynotes, and presentations which focus wholly on industry topics, critical to the development of HPC.  

Australia hosts two Tier-One HPC Facilities which play a major role in the international community and this year both Pawsey Supercomputing Centre and National Computation Infrastructure (NCI) combined their expertise in the form of a booth where people from all over the HPC world could view what #HPCAustralia has to offer.  The booth attracted discussions around Australian services, infrastructure, upcoming employment opportunities and of course the main attraction Pawsey’s toy kangaroos with their own adoption certificate.

It isn’t all about work for the Pawsey team, between the booth, workshops, presentations and meetings, Pawsey managed to not only fit in a tour of the spectacular European Space Agency facilities but also experienced walking through the  Volkersbrunn forest (which looks like Hansel and Gretel’s forest) and spending time with our resident German speaking team members’ family based in Frankfurt and sharing a traditional German cuisine.

As always, being at ISC was a fantastic experience for Pawsey staff – old and new; first-time and returning.

International Collaboration

Pawsey staff actively engage in broadening its national and international reach by forging formal collaborative relationships and strategic alliances with a variety of internationally recognised centres.

With this in mind and the conference being held in Frankfurt,  Pawsey had the opportunity to meet with many of its collaborative partners and after continuing discussions around joint projects, jumped at an invitation to tour the facilities of the European Space Agency in Darmstadt.

PRACE, SigHPC and Pawsey also continued their conversations on upskilling researchers and HPC specialists from around the world, and collaboration around training, education and outreach activities.

Pawsey supports and encourages diversity in its working environment and we’re proud to be sponsors of the Women in High-Performance Computing (WHPC) networking reception where staff networked with WHPC Chapter members from across the world, discussing inclusivity, diversity and equality in the workplace and all aspects of life.

The Top500

Pawsey would like to congratulate the Top500 supercomputers, recently announced at ISC19. The top of the list remains largely unchanged, with only two new entries in the top 10, one of which was an existing system that was upgraded with additional capacity. The Top 5 Supercomputers from around the world are:

First and Second

Two IBM-built supercomputers, Summit and Sierra, installed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, respectively, retain the first two positions on the list.

Third

The Sunway TaihuLight, a system developed by China’s National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC) and installed at the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, holds the number three position with 93.0 petaflops. It’s powered by more than 10 million SW26010 processor cores.

Fourth

At number four is the Tianhe-2A (Milky Way-2A) supercomputer, developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) and deployed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzhou.

Fifth

Frontera, the only new supercomputer in the top 10, attained its number five ranking by delivering 23.5 petaflops on HPL. The Dell C6420 system, powered by Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 processors, is installed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas.

See you next time…

The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre and NCI will have a shared booth in Denver this year for Supercomputing 2019. Join us at booth #2101

Pawsey have also just booked in their booth for ISC2020 – see you at booth #L-416.

To see more Pawsey events, visit pawsey.org.au/events or follow us on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

Volkersbrunn, Germany

Volkersbrunn, Germany

PRACE director's keynote

PRACE director's keynote

Pawsey staff at ISC2019

Pawsey staff at ISC2019

Pawsey @ ESA, Darmstadt

Pawsey @ ESA, Darmstadt

Pawsey @ WHPC Reception