HPC Asia/APAN 2009 Opening CeremonyThe High Performance Computing Asia 2009 (HPC Asia 2009) & Asia-Pacific Advanced Network 2009 (APAN 2009) International Conference & Exhibition was held in Kaohsiung Taiwan's Grand Hi-Lai Hotel March 2nd ~ 6th, 2009. The five day conference drew 441 participants from more than 20 countries. This, the first jointly-held event between the two conferences, created ample opportunities for researchers from both sides to mix.
The schedules for both conferences were quite full. For HPC Asia 2009, there were 2 tutorials, 8 topical lectures, 4 research workshops, and 18 thesis presentations. Topics included HPC applications, technology, and middleware. For APAN 2009, the topics focused on networking technology, environmental science applications, and international collaborations. Every conference slot had 3 ~ 5 workshops going on simultaneously. Vendors such as Chunghwa Telecom, NVIDIA, Super Micro, AMD, HP, and others set up booths in the exhibition hall also. TWNIC, Chunghwa Telecom, Cisco, and IBM presented 4 forums on industry trends as well.
Two tutorials were held for HPC Asia 2009, one entitled "High Performance Computing on GPUs with CUDA" and the other, "Market-Oriented Cloud and Grid Computing." The first tutorial illustrated how to use CUDA to activate the graphics processing unit for the purpose of HPC computing. The second tutorial was given by Dr. Buyya of Melboue, Australia who shared his experience in developing cloud computing middleware. Dr. Buyya also talked about cloud computing-related business opportunities of the future.
The HPC Asia/APAN 2009 keynote speeches were given by leaders in the HPC field including Dr. Jack Dongarra from National Oak Ridge Laboratory, U.S.A., Dr. William Kramer of the U.S.A.'s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Dr. Peter Arzberger of the Pacific Rim Application and Grid Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA), and Dr. Mark Seager of the U.S.A.'s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The focus of this year’s keynote speeches was on future trends in HPC development.
Dr. Jack Dongarra, creator of the TOP500 Supercomputer list (http://www.top500.org/), said that over the past 14 years, HPC computing power has grown 18,500 times! He went on to say that today's notebook PCs have the same computing power as the mainframes that made the TOP500 list just 10 years ago! Dr. Kramer is the vice chairman of the Blue Waters project, which seeks to create a petaflops HPC platform by the year 2011. He talked about how to create a petascale system based on his experience building a terascle system.
The conference topics focused primarily on applying HPC to the development of practical applications that can be used to impROVe daily living. One of the APAN talks, given by Dr. Seishi Ninomiya, Director of Japan's National Agricultural Research Center Department of Information Science & Technology, discussed ways to combine information technology with agriculture to solve problems such as food shortages and environmental damage. There were also meetings on topics including e-culture, e-science, medical workshops, and HDTV.
