Torsten Hoefler’s blog

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 [...]

I guess I have to mention the craziest PC meeting I attended so far: IPDPS’10. Cindy Phillips, the PC chair scheduled the meeting for Friday 12/6/09 in Albuquerque (a while ago). We met at 6:30am at the hotel (I flew in late the day before and didn’t get too much sleep … which wasn’t really [...]

We got our POWER7 780 (MR) System on Friday and I just logged in . I’m alone on something like this:

htor@bd01:~> w
20:49:12 up 1 day, 1:01, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
USER TTY LOGIN@ IDLE [...]

The reason for my travel to India was attending the PPoPP conference which was held in conjunction with HPCA at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru. Most keynotes and the opening session was shared between the two conferences and I really liked the concept of having a hardware and a programming conference jointly. It [...]

After studying the Chicago Manual of Style (especially the references section), I decided on the following format to cite URLs.
There are two cases:
You cite a webpage (URL) only
1. the author of the webpage followed by a period (this is optional because it’s often impossible to determine authors of a webpage)
2. the title of the page [...]

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 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 [...]