HPC

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Big Iron, big data, big networks, big problems

Intel's Wilf Pinfold talks us through SC09

Interview High Performance Computing (HPC) is the Formula 1 of the tech industry. It has been the catalyst of developments in SMP, clustering and parallel programming. Massive improvements in system price performance is fuelling the proliferation of HPC systems for business analytics.

This fast growing market is much bigger than you think - worth a least $10bn a year, according to our resident HPC analyst, Dan Olds, of Gabriel Consulting.

SC09, in Portland, Oregon, is where the HPC community meets. More than 10,000 vendors, users, academics, students, scientists, bringing a broad base of knowledge to the conference. El Reg will be there next week.

So we asked Dan Olds to interview SC09 chair Dr. Wilf Pinfold, director for Intel's Extreme Scale Solutions, who has been involved in supercomputing for decades. Wilf is an interesting man, who discusses interesting things in this 35min webcast.

Dan sets the scene with an informative overview of the HPC market, and questions Wilf over usage and architectural trends. Among other things, Wilf discusses the challenges of extreme parallelism - how do you program systems that might have millions of threads for instance. He also runs through us the SC09 plugfest, the main scientific themes, papers and speakers at this year's conference.

We are broadcasting this interview in two audio flavours - one streamed with slides - and one as an MP3 download. Registration is not required.

SC09: Sneak peek with Wilf Pinfold (slides)

SCO9: Sneak peek with Wilf Pinfold (MP3)

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