SC2015: From Genome and Epilepsy to Climate Change

The opening act at Supercomputing 2015 (SC15) belonged to the wisecracking, drink-sipping, prank-pulling army doctor Hawkeye Pierce. To be precise, it went to Alan Alda, the Emmy-winning actor remembered by most for his portrayal of Pierce in the TV series M.A.S.H. Alda is also a visiting professor at Stony Brook University, a judge on Math-O-Vision, and the host of Scientific American Frontiers (no longer on air), all of which make him a fitting person to launch the annual event devoted to high performance computing (HPC), a phenomenon powering many scientific breakthroughs.

Harnessing supercomputers to process, analyze, and visualize natural phenomenons used to be a luxury confined to well-funded university researchers and large enterprises with big IT budgets. But the era of personal HPC, powered by appliances catering to small- and midsize businesses, signals a shift in the climate.

“As HPC transforms science, science transforms HPC, and it propels us forward,” said Diane Bryant, Intel’s senior VP and GM of data center group.

Appearing as a recorded voice during Bryant’s talk, Intel’s cofounder and former chairman Gordon Moore observed, “We’re generating huge data sets in a lot of different areas, and it requires the capability of supercomputers to handle them. This enables the third way of doing science. For years we had to look at experiments and theories. But these can only handle relatively simple cases. With the advent of HPC now, very complex problems can be tackled in a useful way.”

With HPC, computer models emerge to represent highly complex natural systems, such as galaxy formations.

“The next generation Intel Xeon5, which is [codenamed] Knights Landing, will deliver the performance of at least 15,000 Pentium Pros ... It is more than two ASCI Red supercomputers in a single chip,” Bryant said.

In 1997, Intel built ASCI Red for Sandia National Laboratories. Powered by Pentium Pro processors, the machine set a milestone in HPC as the first to achieve Teraflop speed.