The Department of Energy (DOE) has been at the forefront of High Performance Computing (HPC) for over 40 years. Up until about 10 years ago, that meant massive simulations that might consume the entire machine for days. Like everyone, we rode Moore's law; we just did it bigger and badder and before everyone else. But there has been a "perfect storm" of changes in HPC: The end of Dennard scaling (the real law) is in sight; The meteoric rise of AI; The increasing complexity of the science driving the need for crosscutting teams, collaboration, and complex workflows. These have forced us to rethink everything, from what we buy to how we buy it. During this talk I will give you an overview of our facility and some of the changes that are happening and my "look into the crystal ball" as to what I think might happen, some highlights of the science that is done, and a brief peek behind the curtain into what it takes to deploy one of these monsters.
This will be a virtual meeting on Zoom. The link to this Zoom meeting will be found in the associated Meetup.com announcement once you RSVP Yes under its Date/Time as its Location. See above under the meeting's title where it says the meetup.com link.
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Our live meetings had been held at the Bolingbrook Fountaindale Library but we have been holding our meetings virtually since the pandemic began since March 2020. However, there is now the possibility of holding live meetings going forward but will be decided as each meeting is defined.
Bill Allcock is currently the Director of Operations for the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) and manages a software development team called the Advanced Integration Group (AIG). As Director of Operations he oversees all compute systems, storage, networking, and the associated services required to operate the facility. The AIG develops software necessary to support the ALCF, including user accounts, projects, allocations, the cluster accounting system, and contributing to the OpenPBS scheduling project, among many others. Prior to the ALCF, Allcock was a senior member of the Argonne Distributed Systems Laboratory working on the Globus project and computational grids. He served as team lead for the GridFTP software system which is still in heavy use today in the research space. He has also worked in industry as a process engineer, and instrumentation developer in the paper industry.
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