Torsten Hoefler’s blog

Yes, still stuck in Rainland. This year’s SC was the best I ever attended to be honest. It felt like I know everybody and I was invited to two to three parties every evening (awesome). My work was presented at the MPI Forum BoF and the FASTOS BoF. I was also invited to present parts [...]

They should have called the place “Rainland” but ok, I brought an umbrella .
This week’s MPI Forum was very interesting! Marc Snir presented his convincing hybrid proposal. It’s really nice and orthogonal to the current standard. It needs some minor polishing and an implementation and seems ready to go.
We had some incremental discussions [...]

I finally finished a page where I put some topology maps of some of today’s supercomputers: http://www.unixer.de/research/topologies/. It has no real purpose, but it’s pretty! I hope you like it . Please let me know if you have a large system or know admins who are willing to donate topologies for my collection — [...]

I’ve been at the inauguration (dedication ceremony) of the new $32 Mio datacenter. I have to say this building is impressive for a data center and reminds me of my times in the German army. I think everybody would agree to call it “the bunker”. It is designed to withstand an F5 tornado, but it [...]

I presented our initial work on Offloading Collective Operations, which is the definition of an Assembly language for group operations (GOAL), at ICPP’09 in Vienna. I was rather disappointed by this year’s ICPP. We had some problems with the program selection already before the conference (I’ll happily tell you details on request) and the final [...]

This year’s EuroPVM/MPI was held in Helsinki (not quite, but close to it). I stayed in Hanasaari, a beautiful island with a small hotel and conference center on it. It’s a bit remote but nicely surrounded by nature.
The conference was nice, I learned about formal verification of MPI programs in the first day’s tutorial. This [...]

I just came back from lunch after the MPI Forum meeting in Helsinki. This meeting focused again (the last time) on MPI 2.2. We finished the review of the final document and edited several minor things. Bill did a great job in chairing and pushing the MPI 2.2 work and the overall editing. Unfortunately, we [...]

I attended the Hot Interconnects conference for the second time and it was as great as last year! This conference is rather convincing because it is a single-track conference with only a small number of highly interesting papers. And still, the attendance is huge, unlike on some other conferences where people only come when they [...]

We just finished all voting on the last MPI-2.2 tickets! This means that MPI-2.2 is fixed now, no changes are possible. The remaining work is simply to merge the accepted tickets into the final draft that will be voted on next time in Helsinki. I just finished editing my parts of the standard draft. Everything [...]

I’m just back from IPDPS 2009. Overall, it was a nice conference, some ups and downs included as usual. I had several papers at workshops from which I had to present three (I was planning on two only, but one of my co-authors fell sick and couldn’t attend). They were all very well received (better [...]