Contemporary High Performance Computing: From Petascale toward Exascale

Contemporary High Performance Computing: From Petascale toward Exascale focuses on the ecosystems surrounding the world’s leading centers for high performance computing (HPC). It covers many of the important factors involved in each ecosystem: computer architectures, software, applications, facilities, and sponsors.

The first part of the book examines significant trends in HPC systems, including computer architectures, applications, performance, and software. It discusses the growth from terascale to petascale computing and the influence of the TOP500 and Green500 lists. The second part of the book provides a comprehensive overview of 18 HPC ecosystems from around the world. Each chapter in this section describes programmatic motivation for HPC and their important applications; a flagship HPC system overview covering computer architecture, system software, programming systems, storage, visualization, and analytics support; and an overview of their data center/facility. The last part of the book addresses the role of clouds and grids in HPC, including chapters on the Magellan, FutureGrid, and LLGrid projects.

With contributions from top researchers directly involved in designing, deploying, and using these supercomputing systems, this book captures a global picture of the state of the art in HPC.

Jeffrey S. Vetter holds a joint appointment at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). At ORNL, he is a Distinguished R&D Staff member and the founding Group Leader of the Future Technologies Group in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division. At Georgia Tech, Dr. Vetter is a professor in the Computational Science and Engineering School of the College of Computing, the principal investigator for the NSF Track 2D Experimental Computing Facility (Keeneland), and the director of the NVIDIA CUDA Center of Excellence. He earned a Ph.D. in computer science from Georgia Tech. A Senior Member of the IEEE and a Distinguished Scientist member of the ACM, Dr. Vetter has published over 110 peer-reviewed papers and has been a recipient of the ACM Gordon Bell Prize. His current research explores the role of emerging technologies in high performance computing.