| ISC High Performance | |
|---|---|
 Summit being named the world's fastest supercomputer at ISC High Performance 2018 | |
| Status | Active |
| Genre | Conferences |
| Founder | Dr. Hans Werner Meuer |
The ISC High Performance, formerly known as the International Supercomputing Conference, is a yearly conference on supercomputing which has been held in Europe since 1986. It stands as the oldest supercomputing conference in the world.
In 1986 Professor Dr. Hans Werner Meuer, director of the computer centre and professor for computer science at the University of Mannheim (Germany) co-founded and organized the "Mannheim Supercomputer Seminar" which had 81 participants. [1] This was held yearly and became the annual International Supercomputing Conference and Exhibition (ISC). In 2015, the name was officially changed to ISC High Performance. The conference is attended by speakers, vendors, and researchers from all over the world. Since 1993 the conference has been the venue for one of the twice yearly TOP500 announcements where the fastest 500 supercomputers in the world are named. The other annual announcement is in November at the SC Conference (The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis) in the USA.
The conference celebrated 30 years with the 19 June 2016 meeting in Frankfurt, Germany. [2] Its 33rd edition in 2019 attracted a record number of participants – 164 exhibitors, and 3,573 visitors from 64 countries. [3]
| Year | Location | Conference |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Hamburg, Germany | ISC High Performance |
| 2023 | ||
| 2022 | ||
| 2021 | online-only | |
| 2020 | online-only | |
| 2019 [4] | Frankfurt, Germany | |
| 2018 [5] | ||
| 2017 [6] | ||
| 2016 [7] | ||
| 2015 | ||
| 2014 | Leipzig, Germany | International Supercomputing Conference |
| 2013 | ||
| 2012 | Hamburg, Germany | |
| 2011 | ||
| 2010 | ||
| 2009 | ||
| 2008 | Dresden, Germany | |
| 2007 | ||
| 2006 | ||
| 2005 | Heidelberg, Germany | |
| 2004 | ||
| 2003 | ||
| 2002 | ||
| 1993 | Mannheim, Germany | Mannheim Supercomputer Seminar |
A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2017, supercomputers have existed which can perform over 1017 FLOPS (a hundred quadrillion FLOPS, 100 petaFLOPS or 100 PFLOPS). For comparison, a desktop computer has performance in the range of hundreds of gigaFLOPS (1011) to tens of teraFLOPS (1013). Since November 2017, all of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run on Linux-based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in the United States, the European Union, Taiwan, Japan, and China to build faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers.
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is a state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale cyberinfrastructure that advances research, science and engineering based in the United States. NCSA operates as a unit of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and provides high-performance computing resources to researchers across the country. Support for NCSA comes from the National Science Foundation, the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, business and industry partners, and other federal agencies.
Blue Gene was an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with low power consumption.
PARAM is a series of Indian supercomputers designed and assembled by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Pune. PARAM means "supreme" in the Sanskrit language, whilst also creating an acronym for "PARAllel Machine". As of November 2022, the fastest machine in the series is the PARAM Siddhi AI which ranks 63rd in world, with an Rpeak of 5.267 petaflops.
High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems.
The Whetstone benchmark is a synthetic benchmark for evaluating the performance of computers. It was first written in ALGOL 60 in 1972 at the Technical Support Unit of the Department of Trade and Industry in the United Kingdom. It was derived from statistics on program behaviour gathered on the KDF9 computer at NPL National Physical Laboratory, using a modified version of its Whetstone ALGOL 60 compiler. The workload on the machine was represented as a set of frequencies of execution of the 124 instructions of the Whetstone Code. The Whetstone Compiler was built at the Atomic Power Division of the English Electric Company in Whetstone, Leicestershire, England, hence its name. Dr. B.A. Wichman at NPL produced a set of 42 simple ALGOL 60 statements, which in a suitable combination matched the execution statistics.
ASCI Red was the first computer built under the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI), the supercomputing initiative of the United States government created to help the maintenance of the United States nuclear arsenal after the 1992 moratorium on nuclear testing.
David A. Bader is a Distinguished Professor and Director of the Institute for Data Science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Previously, he served as the Chair of the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Computational Science & Engineering, where he was also a founding professor, and the executive director of High-Performance Computing at the Georgia Tech College of Computing. In 2007, he was named the first director of the Sony Toshiba IBM Center of Competence for the Cell Processor at Georgia Tech.
Hans Meuer was a professor of computer science at the University of Mannheim, managing director of Prometeus GmbH and general chair of the International Supercomputing Conference. In 1986, he became co-founder and organizer of the first Mannheim Supercomputer Conference, which has been held annually but known as the International Supercomputing Conference since 2001.
The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coincides with the International Supercomputing Conference in June, and the second is presented at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in November. The project aims to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing and bases rankings on HPL benchmarks, a portable implementation of the high-performance LINPACK benchmark written in Fortran for distributed-memory computers.
The Green500 is a biannual ranking of supercomputers, from the TOP500 list of supercomputers, in terms of energy efficiency. The list measures performance per watt using the TOP500 measure of high performance LINPACK benchmarks at double-precision floating-point format.
Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA) was a consortium of major national supercomputing centres in Europe. Initiated in 2002, it became a European Union funded supercomputer project. The consortium of eleven national supercomputing centres from seven European countries promoted pan-European research on European high-performance computing systems by creating a European collaborative environment in the area of supercomputing.
Tianhe-I, Tianhe-1, or TH-1 is a supercomputer capable of an Rmax of 2.5 peta FLOPS. Located at the National Supercomputing Center of Tianjin, China, it was the fastest computer in the world from October 2010 to June 2011 and was one of the few petascale supercomputers in the world.
Exascale computing refers to computing systems capable of calculating at least "1018 IEEE 754 Double Precision (64-bit) operations (multiplications and/or additions) per second (exaFLOPS)"; it is a measure of supercomputer performance.
Supercomputing in India has a history going back to the 1980s. The Government of India created an indigenous development programme as they had difficulty purchasing foreign supercomputers. As of June 2023, the AIRAWAT supercomputer is the fastest supercomputer in India, having been ranked 75th fastest in the world in the TOP500 supercomputer list. AIRAWAT has been installed at the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Pune.
Japan operates a number of centers for supercomputing which hold world records in speed, with the K computer being the world's fastest from June 2011 to June 2012, and Fugaku holding the lead from June 2020 until June 2022.
The history of supercomputing goes back to the 1960s when a series of computers at Control Data Corporation (CDC) were designed by Seymour Cray to use innovative designs and parallelism to achieve superior computational peak performance. The CDC 6600, released in 1964, is generally considered the first supercomputer. However, some earlier computers were considered supercomputers for their day such as the 1954 IBM NORC in the 1950s, and in the early 1960s, the UNIVAC LARC (1960), the IBM 7030 Stretch (1962), and the Manchester Atlas (1962), all of which were of comparable power.
ACM SIGHPC is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on High Performance Computing, an international community of students, faculty, researchers, and practitioners working on research and in professional practice related to supercomputing, high-end computers, and cluster computing. The organization co-sponsors international conferences related to high performance and scientific computing, including: SC, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis; the Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing (PASC) Conference; Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing (PEARC); and PPoPP, the Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming.
The European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking is a public-private partnership in high-performance computing (HPC), enabling the pooling of European Union–level resources with the resources of participating EU Member States and participating associated states of the Horizon Europe and Digital Europe programmes, as well as private stakeholders. The Joint Undertaking has the twin stated aims of developing a pan-European supercomputing infrastructure, and supporting research and innovation activities. Located in Luxembourg City, Luxembourg, the Joint Undertaking started operating in November 2018 under the control of the European Commission and became autonomous in 2020.
Torsten Hoefler is a Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zurich and the Chief Architect for Machine Learning at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre. Previously, he led the Advanced Application and User Support team at the Blue Waters Directorate of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and held an adjunct professor position at the Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. His expertise lies in large-scale parallel computing and high-performance computing systems. He focuses on applications in large-scale artificial intelligence as well as climate sciences.