We are pleased to present you with this second volume of material that captures a snapshot of the rich history of practice in Contemporary High Performance Computing. As evidenced in the chapters of this book, High Performance Computing (HPC) continues to flourish, both in industry and research, both domestically and internationally. While much of the focus of HPC is on the hardware architectures, a significant ecosystem is responsible for this success. This book helps capture this broad ecosystem.
Why I Edited This Book
My goal with this series of books has been to highlight and document significant systems and facilities in HPC. With Volume 1, my main focus was proposed to be on the architectural design of important and successful HPC systems. However, as I started to interact with authors, I realized that HPC is about more than just hardware: it is an ecosystem that includes software, applications, facilities, educators, software developers, scientists, administrators, sponsors, and many others. Broadly speaking, HPC is growing internationally, so I invited contributions from a broad base of organizations including the USA, Japan, Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. This second volume is a snapshot of these contemporary HPC ecosystems. Each chapter is typically punctuated with a site’s flagship system.
My excitement about Volume 1 of this book grew as I started inviting authors to contribute: everyone said ‘yes!’ In fact, due to the limitations on hardback publishing, we had to create this second volume.
Topic Selection and Organization
For each contributed chapter, I asked the authors to provide snapshots of their contemporary HPC ecosystems, and to include the following content:
1. Program background and motivation
2. Applications and workloads
3. Keystone system overview
4. Hardware architecture
5. System software
6. Programming system
7. Storage, visualization, and analytics
8. Data center/facility
9. System statistics
Some of the authors followed this outline precisely while others found creative ways to include this content in a different structure. Once you read the book, I think that you will agree with me that most of the chapters have exceeded these expectations, and have provided a detailed snapshot of their HPC ecosystem, science, and organization.
Helping To Improve This Book
HPC and computing, in general, is a rapidly changing, large, and diverse field. If you have comments, corrections, or questions, please send a note to me at [email protected].