CCGrid2010
May 17-20, 2010, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Keynote Speech

1. Title: Enabling the Next Generation of Scalable Clusters

Professor William D. Gropp
Paul and Cynthia Saylor Professor of Computer Science
Computer Science Department
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Urbana, Illinois
http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/homes/wgropp/index.htm
Abstract:
Clusters revolutionized computing by making supercomputer capabilities widely available. But one of the main drivers of that revolution, the rapid doubling of processor clock rates, ran out of steam several years ago. To maintain (or even increase) the historic rate of improvement in computing power, processor designs are rapidly increasing parallelism at all levels, including more functional units, more cores, and ways to share resources among threads. Heterogeneous designs that use more specialized processors such as GPGPUs are becoming common. The scale of high-end systems is also getting larger, with 1000-core systems becoming commonplace and systems with over 300,000 cores planned for 2011. However, the software and algorithms for these systems are still basically the same as when the cluster revolution began. Drawing on experiences with the sustained PetaFLOPS system, called Blue Waters, to be installed at Illinois in 2011, and with exploratory work into Exascale system designs, this talk will discuss some of the challenges facing the cluster community as scalability becomes increasingly important and reviews some of the developments in algorithms, programming models, and software frameworks that must complement the evolution of cluster hardware.
Biography:
William Gropp is the Paul and Cynthia Saylor Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Deputy Directory for Research for the Institute of Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. After receiving his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1982, he held the positions of assistant (1982-1988) and associate (1988-1990) professor in the Computer Science Department of Yale University. In 1990, he joined the Numerical Analysis group at Argonne, where he held the positions of Senior Scientist (1998-2007) and Associate Division Director (2000-2006). His research interests are in parallel computing, software for scientific computing, and numerical methods for partial differential equations. He is a co-author of "Using MPI: Portable Parallel Programming with the Message-Passing Interface", and is a chapter author in the MPI-2 Forum. His current projects include the design and implementation of MPICH, a portable implementation of the MPI Message-Passing Standard, the design and implementation of PETSc, a parallel, numerical library for PDEs, and research into programming models for parallel architectures. He is a Fellow of ACM and IEEE and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

2. Title: Sky Computing: When Multiple Clouds Become One

Professor José A.B. Fortes
BellSouth Eminent Scholar
Director, NSF Center for Autonomic Computing
The University of Florida, Gainesville, USA
http://www.acis.ufl.edu/fortes/
Abstract:
The growing number of announced commercial and scientific clouds strongly suggests that in the near future these providers will be differentiated according to the types of their services, their cost, availability and quality. Users will be able to use these and other criteria to determine which clouds best suit their needs, a plausible scenario being the case when users need to aggregate capabilities provided by different clouds. In such scenarios it will be essential to provide virtual networking technologies that enable providers to support cross-cloud communication and users to deploy cross-cloud applications. This talk will describe one such technology, its salient features and remaining challenges. It will also put forward the idea of virtual clouds, i.e. providers of computing services overlaid on more than one cloud. A virtual cloud spans across multiple cloud providers and presents the view of a single logical cloud. Virtual clouds would enable high-level computing services to be provided by third-parties who do not own physical resources, could be short or long lived and highly dynamic. Enabling technologies, challenges and examples of sky computing will be presented.
Biography:
Jose Fortes is Professor and BellSouth Eminent Scholar at the University of Florida where he founded and directs both the Advanced Computing and Information Systems laboratory and the NSF Industry/University Cooperative Center for Autonomic Computing. His research interests are in the areas of distributed computing, autonomic computing, computer architecture, parallel processing and fault-tolerant computing. He has lead the development and deployment of Grid-computing software used in several cyberinfrastructures for e-Science and digital government. They include In-VIGO, which was the first grid-computing system to use virtualization technologies, and PUNCH, which was an early example of a software-as-a-service provider. His research has been funded by, among others, the AT&T Foundation, Army Research Office, Citrix, General Electric, IBM, Intel, National Science Foundation, Northrop-Grumman, NASA, Office of Naval Research and the Semiconductor Research Corporation. Jose Fortes is a Fellow of the IEEE and has authored or coauthored over 180 technical papers.