Torsten Hoefler’s blog

Ranking conferences and journals is indeed a complex task. Different metrics exist and a plethora of different free and commercial rankings exists. My favorite ranking so far was the AUS conference ranking that based mostly on opinions of researchers. While this is probably the best metric, it can be very biased (Australian researchers only?) and [...]

A couple of days ago was one of those nights where I went back from the parties to my (slightly remote) hotel. I was passing OccupySeattle every day … but this time it was full of police. The funniest part was that the cops told me to leave while I was just walking by … [...]

We (the CS researchers working on parallel computing and HPC) finally made it! We got our own special interest group in ACM — SIGHPC. I think it’s a great opportunity for us to have a forum for the HPC researchers. I joined immediately.

I know, it seems like I’m only complaining in my blog in the last weeks … but seriously, something like this never happened to me before. You know, UIUC is a top-5 department in computer science and it is really astonishing how incompetent CITES (Campus Information Technologies and Educational Services) is.
For some unclear reason, [...]

Rich Brueckner from insideHPC interviews the Co-Chairs of HotI’11 (Fabrizio Petrini, Patrick Geoffray, and I) in a podcast. Citing one of the chairs “Listen to it, it’s fun! Three horrible accents but a great program!” .
http://insidehpc.com/2011/07/28/podcast-hot-interconnects-conference-looks-to-the-future-of-networks/

I have been appointed as Adjunct Assistant Professor in Computer Science at UIUC since last year. My first service to the CS department is teaching the lecture CS498 “Hot Topics in HPC: Networks and Fault Tolerance” together with Franck Cappello this semester. It is the first class that I teach in the US academic system [...]

Yes, we received the SC10 Best Paper Award for our paper “Characterizing the Influence of System Noise on Large-Scale Applications by Simulation”. Congratulations also to Timo and Andrew! SC10 is the premier international venue for HPC research and development. Only 50 of the 253 submitted papers have been accepted at SC10 and it was very [...]

This year’s Hot Interconnects Conference was very special. Not only was it at Google but I was in the committee as tutorials chair. The conference was very good and I really enjoyed the keynotes and the invited talks on Exascale interconnects and the many conversations I had. The tutorials also went very well. Here are [...]

This week, I attended the Workshop on Large Scale Application Performance in Chicago. I was shocked when I arrived at HPDC (sidenote, I took the train again and it was great!): everything seemed to be about Cloud or Grid or a combination of those (+Life Science). I still don’t fully understand what all this stuff [...]

This weekend, I attended the Advances in Message Passing workshop and the Supercomputing 2010 PC meeting. AMP was in Toronto and the SC meeting in New Orleans. Well, and the schedule was suboptimal. I had to leave AMP early and catch the last flight from Toronto to New Orleans (7pm). But AMP was clearly worth [...]