S E M I N A R:
High-Performance Computing at a Crossing Road: From Exascale and Convergence to Post-Moore’s Law Processors
by
Prof. Tarek El-Ghazawi
The George Washington University
The field of high-performance computing (HPC) or supercomputing refers to the building and using computing systems that are orders of magnitude faster than our common systems. Top supercomputers can perform in excess of 100 PetaFLOPS100 (trillion calculation per second). However their power consumption is hitting dangerous levels making next generations harder to build. However the U.S., China and many countries are racing to build an ExaFLOP supercomputer by 2020 or 2022 in some estimates, a supercomputer that can perform more than one million trillion calculations per second. Data volumes due social media and the internet of things (IoTs) have been exploding and AI has been a successful technique with advances in deep learning to leverage those large volumes of data. Those concurrent developments demand powerful supercomputers and have thus resulted in what is seen as the Convergence of Big Data and HPC. However, beyond the Exascale systems, it may become difficult to build computer systems in the same old way due to physical limits on speed, power, and integration levels of processors due to the breakdown of Moore’s Law and Dennard Scaling. In this talk we examine the progress in HPC and potential applications and capabilities of such convergence as the basis for a future smart world. We also take a leap into the far future to show dramatically different types of Post-Moore’s law processors under research and developments due to limitations of current technologies, such as neuromorphic processors that are inspired by the brain, nano-photonic computers and quantum computers.
Bio: Tarek El-Ghazawi is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The George Washington University, where he leads the university-wide Strategic Academic Program in High- Performance Computing. El-Ghazawi’s interests include high-performance computing, computer architectures, reconfigurable and embedded computing, nanophontonic based computing. He is one of the principal co-authors of the UPC parallel programming language. At present he is leading and co-leading efforts for Post-Moore’s Law processors including analog, nanophotonic and neuromorphic computing. Professor El-Ghazawi is a Fellow of the IEEE and selected as a Research Faculty Fellow of the IBM Center for Advanced Studies, Toronto. He was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award, from the Humboldt Foundation in Germany, the Alexander Schwarzkopf Prize for Technical Innovation, The IEEE Outstanding Leadership Award by the IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing, and the GW SEAS Distinguished Researcher Award. El-Ghazawi has served as a senior U.S. Fulbright Scholar. El-GHazawi is an IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Speaker and was selected a U.K. Royal Academy of Engineering Distinguished Vising Fellow. El-Ghazawi is the founding director of The GW Institute for Massively Parallel Applications and Computing Technologies (IMPACT) and was a founding Co-Director of the NSF Industry/University Center for High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing (CHREC).
DATE: 02 May 2019, Thusday @ 13:30
PLACE: EE- 01