Dr. Ben Ralston – Talk

Vendor Panel Briefing

Panel Chair: Dr. Ben Ralston, Head of CS, AWE, UK

What will be your company’s HPC successes in 2009?

In your allotted presentation time of five minutes please arrive at an answer to the above question by addressing your four hypotheses below. Please provide a specific answer to each question. The 2009 time frame is selected to give freedom to your imagination. We are not looking for company commitment, rather to understand an expert’s expectations. Please try to exercise your imagination as much as possible.

Hypothesis 1. With HPC users’ relentless appetite for compute power, one could expect 1 PFLOPS peak systems ~ 2009. (What is your company’s technology to achieve this?)

Hypothesis 2. Increased system peak is no use without increasing performance achieved by user workloads. (How will your company increase application scalability by then?)
(Morning Session Only)

Hypothesis 3. The whole IT market may continue to grow, but HPC markets may decrease as a proportion of this. (What is your company’s view of the future size of the HPC market? How do you think HPC customers can realistically help you?)

Hypothesis 4. HPC achieves increasing benefits to users through vendor competition. (Who do you expect to be your closest competitors in 2009? Where are you watching for new competitors to come from?)

Hypothesis 5. Moore’s Law expects chip densities to double about every 18 months.

(How many more years do you expect this ‘law’ to hold? What new technologies can your company offer in the future to continue business growth?)
(Afternoon Session Only)

You are invited to present in reverse alphabetic order of vendor name; the audience can ask questions after, but not during, each presentation, as follows:

10:30 Ben Ralston3.30 Ben Ralston
10:35 Andreas Bechtolsheim, Sun3.35 David Barkai, Intel
10.45 Steve Reinhardt, SGI3.45 Jay Owen, AMD
10.55 Richard Kaufmann, HP3.55 Further Questions
11.05 Ruud Haring, IBM4.00 Finish
11.15 Steve Scott, Cray 
11.25 Further Questions 
11.30 Finish