The National Center for Supercomputing Applications’ Blue Waters and the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) projects are hosting the annual Extreme Scaling Workshop on July 15-16, 2012, in Chicago.

Petascale systems provide computational science teams with effective, scalable, sustained computing platforms. The research community expects these systems to provide sustained petascale performance on a broad range of science and engineering applications and algorithms, from applications that are compute-intensive to those that are data- and memory-intensive.

The workshop will address algorithmic and applications challenges and solutions in large-scale computing systems with limited memory and I/O bandwidth. The presentations and discussions are intended to assist the computational science and engineering community in making effective use of petascale through extreme-scale systems, across the spectrum of local campus-scale systems to national systems.

Workshop Audience
Scientists, engineers, and high-performance technologists from colleges, universities, laboratories, industry, HPC centers, and other organizations conducting related work are encouraged to attend. Workshop participants will address the issues and will help identify current activities and future needs in order to help the overall computational science community make effective use of petascale through extreme-scale systems, and across the spectrum of local systems through national/international systems.

The continued growth in the number of cores per chip and accelerator-based hybrid systems requires expanded application-driven requirements for new computational models and methods, improved parallel programming algorithms, software development for parallel and distributed systems and application flexibility. Similarly, memory bandwidth limitations and increased challenges of data movement require significantly greater effort in fundamental approaches to application methods.

Achieving the full potential of these new systems, with all their advanced technology components, requires additional effort on the part of the science teams. Fortunately, these efforts are completely aligned with what science teams have to do in order to use almost any system over the next decade.

Workshop Agenda
The workshop begins at noon on Sunday, July 15, and ends at 5 p.m. on Monday, July 16. The event includes a keynote on Sunday afternoon, along with a series of 90-minute sessions that include two presentations and a discussion of the issues raised in the presentations. After the workshop, proceedings—including the papers, presentations, and a summary of the discussions—will be made available via the ACM Digital Library.

The list of talks and presenters is posted on the workshop website: www.xsede.org/web/xscale/agenda.

Workshop Registration
A workshop fee of $125 helps cover the cost of meals, including lunch and dinner on Sunday, and breakfast and lunch on Monday, along with breaks each day. Register before July 15 for the best rates.

Housing
The workshop and accommodations are at the Radisson Hotel Chicago O’Hare, 1450 E. Touhy Ave., Des Plaines, IL, at a nightly room rate of $100 plus taxes. All costs associated with housing and travel are the responsibility of the participants. Use this link to make hotel reservations and receive the conference rate: http://www.radisson.com/extremescalingworkshop.

This workshop is being offered in cooperation with ACM SIGHPC, sighpc.org.

Contact
For more information, contact Scott Lathrop, NCSA, at lathrop@illinois.edu.