AC3 Meeting Will Focus on Future of HPC Clusters.

Business/Technology Editors

ITHACA, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 28, 2000

On June 2, the Cornell Theory Center (CTC) will bring members of the Advanced Cluster Computing Consortium (AC3) together to present their visions for the future of cluster computing for large-scale, high performance applications in a day-long conference at Cornell. "Roadmaps to the Future of Cluster Computing," the first Annual Meeting of the AC3 membership will feature presentations from experts at Dell Computer, Intel, Microsoft, CTC, and NCSA, as well as from HPC tool developers.

"This session promises to provide a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art for the next generation of advanced high-performance clusters," explains CTC director Thomas F. Coleman who will kick off the day's sessions.

In the morning, AC3 infrastructure partners Intel, Dell, and Microsoft will present their visions for the future of HPC cluster computing. Reza Rooholamini, director of Dell's cluster development laboratory, will discuss their plans for cluster computing servers, interconnect technologies, and storage systems. Jenwei Hsieh, also of Dell's cluster group, will present recent performance benchmarks.

Rooholamini will be joined by Intel senior research scientist Timothy Mattson and Todd Needham, research manager from Microsoft, who will cover such topics as features of the Itanium IA-64 processor, plans for the McKinley processor, future technologies such as InfiniBand I/O architecture, and Windows 2000 HPC initiatives.

Afternoon sessions will include Cornell Computer Science faculty Kenneth Birman who will speak on "Cluster Computing Made Easy: New Tools for Scalable Servers and Services" and Johannes Gehrke who will provide new insights into data mining for large databases. Both CTC and NCSA will share their experiences with large-scale Windows NT clusters. And MPI Software Technology will be on hand to discuss software and tools. To wind up, a panel of HPC users will discuss recent application experiences on CTC's production systems, which include 256, 128, 48, and 8-processor Windows 2000 clusters, in a panel session moderated by Dave Lifka, CTC associate director for systems, and CTC research associate Gerd Heber will host a panel on HPC software initiatives.

The AC3 was established by CTC in conjunction with Dell, Intel, and Microsoft as a research and IT service consortium for business, higher education, and government agencies. AC3 projects include UNIX to NT porting, tool development, code optimization and parallelization, I/0 studies, benchmarking and performance studies, reliability research, and TCO studies.

To register for "Roadmaps to the Future of Cluster Computing," see http://www.tc.cornell.edu/AC3/News/Events/2000/ac3.2000.p1.html.

CTC is a high-performance computing and interdisciplinary research center located at Cornell University. CTC receives funding from Cornell University, New York State, a number of federal agencies, and Corporate Program members. For further information on CTC, please see http://www.tc.cornell.edu/ .