The venue for this year’s 20th anniversary event is Hernstein Castle in Vienna. For three days, internationally recognised supercomputer experts, developers, meteorologists, engineers and researchers will exchange information about current trends, experience and research projects involving supercomputer systems. The annual meeting of NEC supercomputer users is regarded as one of the industry’s most renowned events of its kind.
On the threshold of petaflops
The unit FLOPS, or floating-point operations per second, describes the number of calculations a processor performs each second. The move from tera- to petaflops represents an enormous development leap for the industry. Discussions this year therefore focus particularly on the latest developments in Japan’s RIKEN research project, where NEC, Fujitsu Siemens and Hitachi are working together to develop the world’s fastest computer by 2011. Particular attention is being paid to the latest research into petaflop computing and groundbreaking developments in simulating the global climate or predicting earthquakes.
Dr Tadashi Watanabe will open the NEC User Group conference on 7 April with a presentation on the subject. The renowned head of the RIKEN project is one of the leading developers of NEC supercomputers, including the NEC SX series, and has contributed his expertise to the industry for decades. In addition to numerous international awards, he became the first Japanese recipient of the IEEE Computer Society’s Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award in the United States in 2006.
Science and industry on equal terms
Professor Michael Resch, Director of the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) and Chairman of the NEC User Group, is calling for stronger support for cutting-edge research through interdisciplinary global exchange. According to Resch, cooperation with the industry’s leading manufacturers is indispensable. HLRS and NEC have worked closely together for years, and their cooperation also produced the Teraflop Workbench research project. One of the decisive findings from this partnership is that official benchmarks such as the Top500 ranking reflect real-world performance in practical use only to a marginal extent.
