Contemporary High Performance Computing―From Petascale Toward Exascale

"Preface We are pleased to present you with this collection of material that captures a snapshot of the rich history of practice in Contemporary High Performance Computing. As evidenced in the chapters of this book, High Performance Computing continues to flourish, both in industry and research, both domestically and internationally. While much of the focus of HPC is on the hardware architectures, a significant ecosystem is responsible for this success. Why I edited this book My goal with this book has been to highlight significant systems and facilities in high performance computing. Early on, my main focus was proposed to be on the architectural design of important and successful HPC systems. However, I realized that HPC is about more than just hardware: it is an ecosystem that includes software, applications, facilities, educators, software developers, scientists, administrators, sponsors, and many other factors. This book is a snapshot of these contemporary HPC ecosystems, which are typically punctuated with a site's flagship system. Broadly speaking, HPC is growing internationally, so I invited contributions from a broad base of organizations including the USA, China, Japan, Russia, Germany, and Switzerland. My excitement about this book grew as I started inviting authors to contribute: everyone said 'yes!' In fact, due to the limitations on hardback publishing, we had to limit the number of chapters that we could include in this edition; however, change in HPC is accelerating, so a second edition of this book may be warranted. As I explain in the introduction, the rate of change in HPC is accelerating"--

Jeffrey S. Vetter holds a joint appointment at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). At ORNL, he is a Distinguished R&D Staff member and the founding Group Leader of the Future Technologies Group in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division. At Georgia Tech, Dr. Vetter is a professor in the Computational Science and Engineering School of the College of Computing, the principal investigator for the NSF Track 2D Experimental Computing Facility (Keeneland), and the director of the NVIDIA CUDA Center of Excellence. He earned a Ph.D. in computer science from Georgia Tech. A Senior Member of the IEEE and a Distinguished Scientist member of the ACM, Dr. Vetter has published over 110 peer-reviewed papers and has been a recipient of the ACM Gordon Bell Prize. His current research explores the role of emerging technologies in high performance computing.