Intelligent Computing & Codesign Lab

HPC and the Excluded Middle

By Daniel Reed October 24, 2010

I have repeatedly been told by both business leaders and academic researchers that they want “turnkey” HPC solutions that have the simplicity of desktop tools but the power of massively parallel computing. Such desktop tools would allow non-experts to create complex models quickly and easily, evaluate those models in parallel, and correlate the results with experimental and observational data. Unlike ultra-high-performance computing, this is about maximizing human productivity rather than obtaining the largest fraction of possible HPC platform performance. Most often, users will trade hardware performance for simplicity and convenience. This is an opportunity and a challenge, an opportunity to create domain-specific tools with high expressivity and a challenge to translate the output of those tools into efficient, parallel computations.

via HPC and the Excluded Middle | blog@CACM | Communications of the ACM.

By Yale Patt. Good for future instructors as well as good students.

My Ten Commandments for Good Teaching – Know the material – Want to teach – Genuinely respect your students and show it – Set the bar high; students will measure up – Emphasize understanding; de-emphasize memorization – Take responsibility for what is covered – Dont even try to cover the material – Encourage interruptions; dont be afraid to digress – Dont forget those three little words – Reserved for future use

via Ten Commandments for Good Teaching.

The HPC lab will present a paper in DATE (Design Automation and Test in Europe) — a premier conference on design automation. The title of the paper is “I2CRF: Incremental Interconnect Customization for Embedded Reconfigurable Fabrics”, and is about how to do design specialization to exploit the characteristics of application domain in the context of reconfigurable computing.

Conference website:   http://www.date-conference.com/