Supercomputing

since 1978 was dealing with problems of concurrency for cluster, parallel, distributed computers. every mobile hangs, every computer, including super-super delays and wait, making billions of circles of waiting the event to synchronise. I recently in my archives have found a lecture that was requested by BCS colleagues, as well as one big US Computer conference  orgcommitee. Part of it was included in our second edition of the Software Design for Resilient Computer Systems. But Book is expensive and students can't buy. Thus this lecture notes worth to publish on Academia.

This is my invited lecture for Belorussian University of Informatics and Raditechnics on current, super and advanced computer architectures, with observation of physical and implementation drawbacks and possible future in this area. Shown how to cope with the problems by introducing a new architecture we call it PRE-smart ERA, performance, reliability, energy-efficiency smart Evolving Architecture.

Neuronanorobotics is the application of medical nanorobots to the human brain. This paper proposes three specific classes of neuronanorobots, named endoneurobots, gliabots and synaptobots, which together can non-destructively map and monitor the structural changes occurring on the 86 x 10 9 neurons and the 2.42 x 10 14 synapses in the human brain, while also recording the synaptic-processed 4.31 x 10 15 spikes/sec carrying electrical functional information processed in the neuronal and synaptic network.

Debugging large-scale parallel applications is challenging. In most HPC applications, parallel tasks progress in a coordinated fashion, and thus a fault in one task can quickly propagate to other tasks, making it difficult to debug. Finding the least-progressed tasks can significantly reduce the effort to identify the task where the fault originated. However, existing approaches for detecting them suffer low accuracy and large overheads; either they use imprecise static analysis or are unable to infer progress dependence inside loops. We present a loop-aware progress-dependence analysis tool, Prodometer, which determines relative progress among parallel tasks via dynamic analysis. Our fault-injection experiments suggest that its accuracy and precision are over 90% for most cases and that it scales well up to 16,384 MPI tasks. Further, our case study shows that it significantly helped diagnosing a perplexing error in MPI, which only manifested at large scale.

Cloud computing offers scalable on-demand services to consumers with greater flexibility and lesser infrastructure investment. Since Cloud services are delivered using classical network protocols and formats over the Internet, implicit vulnerabilities existing in these protocols as well as threats introduced by newer architectures raise many security and privacy concerns. In this paper, we survey the factors affecting Cloud computing adoption, vulnerabilities and attacks, and identify relevant solution directives to strengthen security ...

Big Data (BD) platforms have a long tradition of leveraging trends and technologies from the broader computer network and communication community. For several years, dedicated servers of homogeneous clusters were employed as the dominant paradigm in BD networks. In recent years, the BD landscape has changed, porting different deployment architectures with various network models. This trend has resulted in various associated opportunities and challenges that induce BD practitioners to achieve the next-generation BD vision. In particular, addressing the BD velocity with batch and micro-batch processing. Nevertheless, the literature misses an extensive study of the associated impacts of adopting these new deployment architectures, giving it holds a significant research interest. This study addresses the previous concern, offering a comprehensive review of the architectural elements of BD batch query deployment models and environments. A novel taxonomy is proposed to classify these models based on their underlying communication systems. We first discuss the batch query processing requirements as comparison criteria of BD communication models and compare their salient features. The benefits/challenges of these environments away from BD traditional on-premise dedicated clusters are presented. Thereafter, we provide an extensive survey of the modern BD deployment architectures, categorizing them based on their underlying infrastructure. Finally, several directions are outlined for future research on improving the state-of-the-art of BD landscape and provide recommendations for the BD practitioners on emerging environments supporting BD applications and the general large-scale data analytics.

On March 31, 1985, Vladimir Alexandrov, the best known climate scientist in the Soviet Union because of his global campaign against nuclear winter with Carl Sagan, vanished while attending a conference in Spain on nuclear-free zones.

He was probably a spy, although for whom - the United States, the Soviet Union, both - remains unclear.

His case remains unsolved, perhaps because it wouldn't be in the interest of either government. Here's what's known of this strange tale, as I reported it back in 1986. There isn't much more to say even now. Send ideas to revkin@nytimes.com

For more on nuclear winter, read my award-winning 1985 Science Digest cover story: http://www.slideshare.net/Revkin/hard-facts-about-nuclear-winter-1985

Neuronanorobotics is the application of medical nanorobots to the human brain. This paper proposes three specific classes of neuronanorobots, named endoneurobots, gliabots and synaptobots, which together can non-destructively map and monitor the structural changes occurring on the 86 x 10 9 neurons and the 2.42 x 10 14 synapses in the human brain, while also recording the synaptic-processed 4.31 x 10 15 spikes/sec carrying electrical functional information processed in the neuronal and synaptic

RESUMO: O artigo procura apresentar a supercomputação aplicada como tecnologia de apoio à pesquisa e à educação no Brasil, bem como sua relevância no desenvolvimento desses segmentos para o País. O estudo tem por base metodológica a pesquisa documental realizada em publicações eletrônicas disponibilizadas na internet e em entrevistas via sistema nacional de telecomunicação por voz com algumas coordenações e direções de instituições e organizações como o Laboratório Nacional de Computação Científica e a Rede Nacional de Ensino e Pesquisa. O objetivo é que esse material possa ser aplicado como apoio complementar aos conteúdos de disciplinas de contexto tecnológico que são ministradas em cursos de graduação que não pertençam ao segmento tecnológico a fim de contribuir para o aumento do espectro do campo de conhecimento dos novos profissionais de nível superior que atuarão no contexto da nova era digital.

Palavras-chave: Educação. Pesquisa. Supercomputação.

ABSTRACT: This article aims the supercomputing, applied as technology to support the research and education in Brazil, as well as its relevance in the development of these segments for the country. The methodological study is based on documentary research carried out in electronic publications available on the internet and in interviews via the national voice telecommunication system with some coordination and directions from institutions and organizations such as the National Laboratory for Scientific Computing and the National Teaching and Research Network. The objective is that this material can be applied as complementary support to the contents of technological contextual disciplines that are taught in undergraduate courses that do not belong to the technological segment in order to contribute to the increase of the spectrum of the field of knowledge of new professionals who will work in the context of the new digital age.

Keywords: Education. Research. Supercomputing.

Une révolution puissante est en marche. Cette révolution est celle du Calcul Intensif. Technologie clé, stratégique pour le futur, le calcul intensif concerne non seulement la puissance de calcul des supercalculateurs mais aussi une très large gamme d’applications. Un ordinateur « pétaflopique » a aujourd’hui une capacité de calcul équivalente à 100 000 exemplaires de l’ordinateur portable le plus rapide. Au-delà de la puissance, apparaît au premier plan l’intelligence humaine. Les recherches portent sur les technologies, les matériels et les logiciels, les architectures informatiques et les langages, par exemple. L’intelligence humaine est aussi en oeuvre avec la modélisation, la simulation. À l’origine de l’essor du calcul intensif figure la simulation nucléaire qui a permis de faire cesser les essais réels. Aujourd’hui, les applications favorisent découvertes et innovations dans de nombreuses disciplines scientifiques (de la physique... à la géophysique, en passant pas la biochimie), dans le secteur de l’énergie et du nucléaire, dans le domaine de la santé ou de l’environnement ainsi que dans de multiples secteurs industriels.

The ElectroMagnetic Circuit Parameters of the SuperLuminal Topology Proton. A TenFold greater undertaking than last year's Electron Parameters -- https://www.tinyurl.com/TwainElectron -- At all scales of our observed cosmos we observe three things: 1) the SuperPositional Helixoidal ElectroMagnetic Wave background ocean of all Frequencies and Wavelengths, 2) the flexible-size Standing-Wave-Lissajous-topology Electron 'charges' created from the superposition of two transverse EM Waves of (average) gamma ray frequencies, and 3) the fixed 137/1 Lissajous-Ring topology 'Mother' Proton charges of ~ 8.775 x 10^-16 meters (0.8774 Fermi) Radius R1, and Mass-Energy ~ 938 MeV.

Also available for review at https://tinyurl.com/StrangeVisitor.

We recognize myths for what they indicate about the values and beliefs of the cultures who were the authors and audiences of those myths; many of the earliest communicators of myth were telling stories about subjects they counted as people (somewhat) like themselves. Yet, despite our modern sophistication, today’s consumers of narrative still often treat fictions as though they are real, thinking and feeling people.  We are introduced to Superman, for instance, as a fiction, but circumstance often leads consumers to discursively treat that invented hero as a human subject.  Now, though, we verge on a technological future in which just such sympathies might become functionally useful. In our modern science fiction like Star Trek: The Next Generation and Westworld, we have already begun to imagine how we will come to treat our narrative inventions of tomorrow. Strange Visitor: Subjectivity, Simulation, and the Future of the First Superhero begins to ask what our actual responsibilities will become when fictions can be rendered with volition.  In its opening chapters, the text studies how we humanize a figure like Superman in our own perceptions, and how that treatment--along with his continuing narrative development--makes him a prime candidate for an experiment in complex, highly verisimilitudinous simulation.  Superman is a central point of consideration here simply because there is so much of him to consider. He may be the most content-dense fiction ever created, but the innumerable opportunities consumers have had to get to know the character mean that he is also eminently familiar.  Superman has maintained his presence in our media and discourses, across the decades, as consumer populations have continued to grow and our communications structures have commensurately evolved and expanded. Superman is the subject of this study not because he has become so popular, but because he has managed to stay that way at a particularly sharp inflection point in the history of human communications. 

But, the Man of Steel is often generalized as infallible and, therefore, rather dull.  The first part of this work--an expansive psychological assessment--troubles such a presumption, though, by examining the complex mind that has accrued within decades of narrative, across media, and which must be carefully navigated in any exhaustive analysis.  This first section also considers Superman’s relationship with his media consumers: from how we use him to form childhood bonds with one another, to how we respond to his continuing humanization.  For, Superman is powerfully determined by how audiences actually treat any given instance of the figure as Superman.  Today, we find that we can engage with particularly realistic media, encouraging us even more urgently to invest in the verisimilitude and humanity of the characters and places being presented, and doing so often makes a narrative more appealing.  Accordingly, Superman’s relationship with his own media is particularly convenient to an examination of the intersection between fictional narrative, high technology, and identity negotiation.  To understand Superman's potent humanization, the first half of this text presents an assessment of his identity from multiple essential perspectives, including those of his content creators and consumers, as well as the complex judgments of himself and his fictional society as they have been presented in his narratives. Diegetic evidence is considered in historical and psychological capacities in order to assess how Superman’s media has been constructed--practically from the beginning--to encourage consumers to invest themselves in the figure’s humanity and relatability.

In its second part, Strange Visitor moves from relevant questions of identity into a more practical application of those insights to current and emerging technologies.  We already enjoy vastly interactive ways of engaging with our fictions, and we can anticipate continuing advancements in the verisimilitude, interactability, and spontaneity of artificial intelligences.  Accordingly, fewer and fewer holes in the experiential tapestry of narrative will have to be ignored as both storytelling techniques and rendering technologies continue to evolve.  Soon, what we practically treat as a ‘human’ subject may have more to do with that figure’s specific engageability than with its biology or physical consistency.  Given the view of the detailed project proposal that constitutes the second part of this work, spontaneous, humanlike, autonomous simulations culled from fictional worlds could very well become reality within the foreseeable future.  Emerging from our science fiction dreams, several considerable, real-world technological initiatives would see us reconstruct the intellects of great thinkers, such as Gandhi, Curie, or Hawking. But, reconstructing and functionalizing the consciousness of a real person--living or dead--is an ethically dubious proposition from the start.  Instead of an original personality, though--seemingly ‘complete’ at first, but limited in contextual understanding--what if researchers built a simulated subject from the material of a robustly developed fiction?  If the first of our deep, humanlike engagements with such technology will be the most important, Superman seems a fitting choice, given how we have already embraced him on personal and cultural levels.

But, as real technologies advance toward that imagined outcome, we must also ask how the practical, livable terms of fictionality would change. How would our own responsibilities evolve as we produced and engaged with such personalities?  The prototypical solution I propose here--referred to as the Metropolis Simulation System--could be considered one of Andrew M. Butler’s necessary explorations into the role of the simulacrum (“Postmodernism and Science Fiction” 147).  Whatever of these speculations does or does not bear out, it is my hope with this text to show the reader that we must pay substantial attention to our future relationships with our media and computing technologies. Such a situation need not be feared, though, if we approach with the optimistic combination of thoughtfulness and adventurousness that a character like Superman can inspire.

Strange Visitor is intended for any who might have the interest and/or resources to help realize the rendering of a densely-developed fiction as an exemplary representative of humanlike, fully-engageable general artificial intelligence, including the developers of the many technologies referenced.  Portions of the work might also be used as an introduction into the complexities of mediated identity construction, while the critical questions presented could be utilized in advanced media studies courses, or as portions of a forward-thinking philosophy curriculum. Other segments may benefit discussions on popular fictions generally, the ethics of narrative, or psychological and identiary dynamics.

Neuronanorobotics is the application of medical nanorobots to the human brain. This paper proposes three specific classes of neuronanorobots, named endoneurobots, gliabots and synaptobots, which together can non-destructively map and monitor the structural changes occurring on the 86 x 10 9 neurons and the 2.42 x 10 14 synapses in the human brain, while also recording the synaptic-processed 4.31 x 10 15 spikes/sec carrying electrical functional information processed in the neuronal and synaptic

Within Philips Research, we have worked the past years to support several national an international translational research projects, by providing them with an IT infrastructure, data management, data curation, etc. This talk will show a number of these projects, what we have learned from them, and how we can work together with SURFsara in the future.

Parallel Unification
The research discussed in this presentation arises in the context of Parallel Theorem Proving and Logic Programming. These paradigms amount to searching a tree in which a path from root to leaf represents a set of choices, identifying a potential solution.
Examining alternative paths in parallel exploits so-called OR-parallelism whilst searching at different levels in parallel amounts to AND-parallelism. In addition, it is possible to parallelize the unification process, or use lazy evaluation involving delayed unification or bookkeeping [8].
Interestingly, unification has proven a problem both for sequential and parallel implementation. The standard unification algorithms used in Prolog systems are not sound, and the straightforward fixes lead to exponential execution time. There are, however, linear and near- linear time sound sequential algorithms. Unfortunately, even the unsound algorithms don’t parallelize well, and exhibit worst case linear performance.
This has lead to parallelization of unification being eschewed, although the pathological cases are rare. But unification has usefully been parallelized [1] and the pathological cases have been characterized [8].
Parallel Hardware
Theoretical characterization of the complexity of parallel unification and reasoning systems rends to rely implicitly or explicitly on a Parallel RAM (PRAM) model. The quicksort algorithm is a standard Prolog demonstration with expected N logN sequential performance. A simulated parallel reasoning system gave logN performance with its implicit PRAM model and a PRAM algorithm was derived from it [9]. Although there are now several such O(logN) algorithms around (and the derived QuickSort and RadixSort algorithms have amongst the lowest constants), there are actually O(log2N) algorithms which will execute faster in any achievable implementation! Ironically, there are also Ο(1) algorithms [2] which are similarly bad!!
The paper will discuss what these orders really mean and the factors which are hidden by the current models of parallelism. Indeed, the serial characterizations also hide many constants and are not truly scalable either! We characterize algorithms in terms of the memory bandwidth or buswidth, w, noting that a general sorting task involving N items will scale only if w >= logN with PRAM or Sequential RAM. With a constant w we can achieve O(wN) bit-level cost giving O(w log2N) bit-level delay [3]. Note that any parallel architecture whose connectivity and bandwidth doesn’t scale as logN will incur (possibly multiple) multiplicative factor(s) of logN.

The debate on technological development and the unfolding fourth technological revolution tends to neglect the role of the EU, relegating it to follower status. The leadership positions are occupied by the US and China, who compete with one another for technological supremacy. Yet, despite lagging behind in some areas, the EU is better placed than is often assumed and still stands a chance of guaranteeing the delivery of a technological revolution that is not only environmentally but also socially sustainable. This is critical in proposing a model of technological development alternative to that of China, in particular, and especially in such sectors as artificial intelligence, supercomputing and digital skills.

Artykuł powstał w bardzo "gorącym" okresie, kiedy status Krakowskiego Centrum Superkomputerowo-Sieciowego jako jednostki podlegającej bezpośrednio Ministerstwu Edukacji Narodowej został zakwestionowany i poszukiwana była nowa formuła jego działania. Jak zwykle w takich przypadkach - chętnych do przejęcia Cyfronetu było sporo. Autor stał na stanowisku, że jeśli to Centrum musi być gdzieś włączone organizacyjnie - to jednostką najbardziej predestynowaną do tego jest Akademia Górniczo-Hutnicza. Prezentowany artykuł był pierwszym publicznym wystąpieniem prezentującym i uzasadniającym takie stanowisko. Rok później autor jako rektor AGH wywalczył przyłączenie Cyfronetu do AGH najpierw na Kolegium Rektorów Szkół Wyższych Krakowa, a potem w Ministerstwie.

This paper describes the design of the Abstract Library for Parallel Search (ALPS), a framework for implementing scalable, parallel algorithms based on tree search. ALPS is specifically designed to support data-intensive algorithms, in which large amounts of data are required to describe each node in the search tree. Implementing such algorithms in a scalable manner is challenging both because of data storage requirements and communication overhead. ALPS incorporates a number of new ideas to address this challenge. The paper also describes the design of two other libraries forming a hierarchy built on top of ALPS. The first is the Branch, Constrain, and Price Software (BiCePS) library, a framework that supports the implementation of parallel branch and bound algorithms in which the bounds are obtained by solving some sort of relaxation, usually Lagrangian. In this layer, the notion of global data objects associated with the variables and constraints is introduced. These global objec...

Las administraciones públicas, en el cumplimiento de sus fines, han creado en las últimas décadas gran variedad de entidades (empresas, fundaciones, consorcios, etc.) para complementar o desarrollar, a través de organismos sujetos a su control –de forma plena– parte de sus políticas. En esta línea, destacamos que desde hace varios años se han analizado en la literatura los nuevos modelos de gestión en sectores como la sanidad o la educación; igualmente, destacamos que en una gran diversidad de políticas públicas se han ido creando entes instrumentales para el cumplimiento de los fines de los distintos niveles administrativos. En el presente artículo se examina, a través de un análisis comparativo, las distintas formas de entes instrumentales que crean las administraciones públicas para llevar a cabo las políticas de innovación, centrando el estudio en los centros de supercomputación y comparando entre este tipo de centros en España con los de otros países a través de las herramientas de benchmarking más utilizadas en esta materia.
In trying to achieve their goals in the last decades, Public Administrations have created a great variety of organizations (enterprises, foundations, consortiums, etc.) with the aim of completing or developing, through organizations under its total control, part of its policies. In this line, it is emphasized that the new management models literature concerning sectors such as health or education has been analyzed since several years ago. It is also emphasized that instrumental organizations have been created for reaching the goals of the different administrative levels through a great diversity of public policies. Using comparative analysis, this article examines the different types of instrumental organizations created by Public Administrations to carry out the policies of innovation. It focuses on High Performance Computing Centers for comparing centers located in Spain with those which exist abroad taking into account the most used benchmarking tools in this field.

Supercomputing facilities are becoming increasingly available for simulating activity dynamics in large-scale neuronal networks. On today's most advanced supercomputers, networks with up to a billion of neurons can be readily simulated. However, building biologically realistic, full-scale brain models requires more than just a huge number of neurons. In addition to network size, the detailed local and global anatomy of neuronal connections is of crucial importance. Moreover, anatomical connectivity is not fixed, but can rewire throughout life (structural plasticity)—an aspect that is missing in most current network models, in which plasticity is confined to changes in synaptic strength (synaptic plasticity). The papers in this Ebook, which may broadly be divided into three themes, aim to bring together high-performance computing with recent experimental and computational research in neuroanatomy. In the first theme (fiber connectivity), new methods are described for measuring and data-basing microscopic and macroscopic connectivity. In the second theme (structural plasticity), novel models are introduced that incorporate morphological plasticity and rewiring of anatomical connections. In the third theme (large-scale simulations), simulations of large-scale neuronal networks are presented with an emphasis on anatomical detail and plasticity mechanisms. Together, the articles in this Ebook make the reader aware of the methods and models by which large-scale brain networks running on supercomputers can be extended to include anatomical detail and plasticity.

Download the book from: http://www.frontiersin.org/books/Anatomy_and_Plasticity_in_Large-Scale_Brain_Models/1082

This paper gives an overview of the BlueGene/L Supercomputer. This is a
jointly funded research partnership between IBM and the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory as part of the United States Department of Energy ASCI Advanced
Architecture Research Program. Application performance and scaling studies have
recently been initiated with partners at a number of academic and government
institutions, including the San Diego Supercomputer Center and the California Institute of
Technology. This massively parallel system of 65,536 nodes is based on a new
architecture that exploits system-on-a-chip technology to deliver target peak processing
power of 360 teraFLOPS (trillion floating-point operations per second). The machine is scheduled to be operational in the 2004-2005 time frame, at price/performance and power
consumption/performance targets unobtainable with conventional architectures.