Hartree on tour | SC17 Recap

12-17 Nov 2017 | STFC exhibited at the world’s largest HPC conference in Denver, USA.

The Supercomputing 2017 (SC17) conference brought together 13,000 delegates from 71 countries to discuss the latest developments in HPC across the globe. The Hartree Centre was pleased to be part of the the Science and Technology Facilities Council stand alongside the Scientific Computing Department. Our team contributed to a variety of sessions in the technical programme as well as talks at vendor booths and presentations of our work with industry at the stand.

To kick off our involvement in SC17, Director of the Hartree Centre Alison Kennedy took part in a full day event focussed on diversifying the HPC community. This brought together advocates from across the HPC community and there were lots of lively discussions around the skills needed to thrive in a career in HPC, inclusivity and overcoming the roadblocks facing women and under-represented group in our workplace. As a founding member of Women in HPC, Alison’s commitment to supporting diversity at SC17 didn’t stop there. In fact, several members of the Hartree team supported the first allies and advocates day by chatting to lots of people about diversity and inclusion.

Milos Puzovic, our acting Future Technologies Group Leader started SC17 with a panel discussion as part of the annual workshop for the energy efficient HPC working group. He also participated in a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session on power, energy measurement and control by sharing his experiences of porting GEOPM to IBM Power8 with NVLink microarchitecture. His final BoF session saw interesting discussions on the state of practice of energy and power aware job scheduling and resource management.

​“It was great to hear about some of the work being carried out by other data centres in energy efficiency, particularly in measurements. This gives incentives that can be presented to users so that they can start programming for reducing their power consumption. However, for me, the emerging topics at SC17 were near data compute and the discussions around enabling deep learning on HPC hardware.”

Milos Puzovic

During the conference, the Top500 and Green500 lists were announced. It was fantastic to see Scafell Pike be ranked at number 53 in the world in the Green 500 list and at 84 in the Top 500. Congratulations to our colleagues at the University of Oxford who achieved a number 12 ranking in the Green500 list for their national Deep Learning supercomputer, JADE.