During the first half of August we took part in the Argonne Training Program on Extreme Scale Computing (ATPESC) and worked for a few days in the Argonne Leading Computing Facilities center (ALCF) just outside of Chicago, Illinois. The training consisted of lectures and presentations on software and hardware advances as well as hands-on exercises using the supercomputers of Argonne. We had the chance to meet people working on some of the most influential high-performance computing projects like core members of the MPI Forum or the OpenMP committee.
Developers from leading companies like Nvidia presented their vision of future virtual reality technologies, and others from Intel and IBM showed current and upcoming architectures using quantum technologies. For most of the presented hardware, we were provided with hands on examples or given access to supercomputers where we could test our research applications. Each day concluded with a lecture by a special guest. Insights, anecdotal stories and a lifetime’s worth of advice were offered to us by people like the founding developer of MATLAB or one of the designers of the highly successful ARM architecture. Other presenters shared research strategies with different objectives: from planning how to reach Mars down to how to register human brain images at the neuron level. It was an eye-opening experience to meet other people who share the same passion, but have unique approaches to exascale computing.
These experiences will inform our research and maybe even the rest of our lives. Our last stop before coming back to ODU was the ALCF center where we worked on our projects. The Argonne National Lab has a rich history of projects, starting with research for nuclear power plants. Their research today includes projects that cover the entire spectrum of computational sciences. Working there every day was a humbling and inspiring experience. Working and thinking “out of our box” (or in our case, ODU cubicles) unveiled many new ways of solving problems, and also brought us into contact with a wide variety of ideas and people of all professions. The innumerable experiences and knowledge gained in those few days were totally worth it.
Note: Videos of the talks and presentation slides can be obtained at:
https://extremecomputingtraining.anl.gov/archive/atpesc-2017/agenda-2017/