ISC High Performance 2020 Digital

ISC High Performance 2020 Digital was held virtually online from May 22nd to May 25th because of COVID-19. The conference is one of the most popular and highly regarded high-performance computing conferences in the world, and you can get insight and experience from both academic and industry technologies related to HPC.

Some conclusions I want to make are the following. As Fugaku, the ARM architecture supercomputer, got first place in TOP500, the energy-efficient ARM architecture has great potential for high-performance systems. The fact that there are package managers for non-x86-64 architecture supercomputers can ease the need to waste time debugging compilations, and the architecture thought to be used only in smartphones and tablets now has what it takes for desktops. This is strongly supported by Amazon AWS deploying ARM CPU cloud instance servers that are set at a more effective price compared to Intel and AMD x86-64 CPUs. Intel is aiming for an era beyond the distinction of CPUs and GPUs and instead merging both together which can result in a lower latency in the current computing environment. AMD is catching up to Intel in the server CPU industry after the success of the Ryzen desktop CPU series with the new Epyc series, which provides a great advantage in terms of the number of cores per socket and innovated unified memory access. NVIDIA is promoting the InfiniBand interconnect for clusters and supercomputers after acquiring the industry leader Mellanox, stressing the importance of I/O in HPC architectures. The new Tesla A100 GPU accelerator focuses on tensor processing mainly for machine learning. Fugaku has been deployed earlier than scheduled and supercomputers worldwide are being used for molecular dynamics simulation and machine learning (mainly assisted by GPU accelerators in a majority of supercomputers) to target potential candidates for COVID-19 medications. The accelerated speed assisted by parallel computing in HPC will be a game changer for sure. I have experience with protein structural bioinformatics, and I will introduce the field at a later time.

Publicly available videos of the conference:

This is from 2019 but is nonetheless a very interesting keynote video: