SEMINAR

Introduction to High Performance Linear Algebra (Parts III and IV)

Department of Computer Science and Statistics
University of Southern Mississippi

ABSTRACT

Over the last few years a number of changes occurred in the area of high performance computing. First, in the mid-1990's a number of vendors have "disappeared" from the high performance computing arena. This process resulted, among others, in a rapid convergence of HPC hardware architectures into few, relatively similar, developmental lines. More recently, we have witnessed the introduction of clusters of cheap and powerful PC's which provide a more economical way of approaching medium size computational problems. Similarly, in the area of HPC software we also observe a slow convergence toward a few tools, which gained popularity and became de-facto standards for software writing. In addition, a number of software libraries have been developed and by now are in their n-th releases guaranteeing high quality and dependability. These are all signs of the maturing discipline, which is coming out of the initial stages of uncertainty into a stage of sustained growth.

While these processes take place, a wide spread problem of the difficulty of moving toward parallel computing is also being recognized. The same way as in the past researchers tried to run their "dusty-deck" codes on Cray computers and complained about the lack of performance, nowadays (already) vectorized codes have difficulty finding their way to parallel machines.

WHEN(day): Friday, January 12th and 19th, 2001

WHEN(time): 2:00pm

EVERYBODY IS INVITED