24th International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS’10)
June 1-4, 2010
Epochal Tsukuba (Tsukuba International Congress Center)
Tsukuba, Japan
Sponsored by ACM/SIGARCH

ICS is the premier international forum for the presentation of research results in high-performance computing systems.  In 2010 the conference will be held at the Epochal Tsukuba (Tsukuba International Congress Center) in Tsukuba City, the largest high-tech and academic
city in Japan.

Papers are solicited on all aspects of research, development, and application of high-performance experimental and commercial systems. Special emphasis will be given to work that leads to better understanding of the implications of the new era of million-scale parallelism and Exa-scale performance; including (but not limited to): Read the rest of this entry »

There will be a special session on Computational Intelligence on Consumer Games and Graphics Hardware (CIGPU 2010) as part of IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence Conference 2010 (WCCI-2010).

Building on the success of previous CIGPU sessions and workshops, CIGPU 2010 will further explore the role that GPU technologies can play in computational intelligence (CI) research.  Submissions of original research are invited on the use of parallel graphics hardware for computational intelligence.  Work might involve exploring new techniques for exploiting the hardware, new algorithms to implement on the hardware, new applications for accelerated CI, new ways of making the technology available to CI researchers or the utilisation of the next generation of technologies.

“Anyone who has implemented computational intelligence techniques using any parallel graphics hardware will want to submit to this special session.”

If you can’t make it to NVIDIA’s inaugural GPU Technology Conference, taking place Sept. 30 to Oct. 2, 2009 in San Jose, CA, you can watch a live webcast here.

Links for the live webcast, event coverage complete with blogs, photos and video interviews, and more details around the conference, including conference schedule, session abstracts and speaker bios can be found at www.nvidia.com/gtc.

The schedule of live webcasts is as follows:

• Wed. Sept 30 – 1:00 PM to 2:30 PM: Opening Keynote with Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO and Co-Founder, NVIDIA
• Wed. Sept 30 – 3:00 PM to 4:15 PM: General Session on Important Trends in Visual Computing
• Wed. Sept 30 – 4:30 PM to 5:45 PM: General Session on Breakthroughs in High Performance Computing
• Thurs. Oct 1 – 9:00 AM to 10:30 AM: Day 2 Keynote with Hanspeter Pfister, Professor and Computing Visionary, Harvard University
• Fri. Oct 2 – 8:30 AM to 10:00 AM: Day 3 Keynote with Richard Kerris, CTO, Lucasfilm

The Centre for Scientific Computing of the University of Cambridge is running advanced training courses this October covering GPGPU (with CUDA) and MPI. The courses offer a combination of lectures and hands-on tutorials. They will be lectured by Dr Mike Kirby, co-author (with George Karniadakis) of the textbook “Parallel Scientific Computing in C++ and MPI” (Cambridge University Press 2003).

At the end of the courses the participants will be qualified to start building their own parallel codes from scratch, or to further develop existing packages. More information is available on the course website.

Cranfield University, UK is pleased to offer a brand new 3-day course which introduces the programming techniques required to develop general-purpose software applications for GPU hardware. Using NVIDIA’s CUDA framework, the course will focus on the solution to common problems encountered whilst developing numerical applications on the GPU. This will include an introduction to the programming techniques required to take advantage of the architecture, as well as more advanced optimisation methodologies needed to get the most out of the platform.

Topics include:

• CUDA Programming Model
• GPU Device Architecture
• Performance Optimisation

The course is being held at Cranfield University between 30th November to 2nd December. More information is available on the course website.

Today NVIDIA and TopCoder launched the first contest in the CUDA SuperHero Challenge.

The first contest challenges participants to develop the highest performing solution for GPU-Accelerated Connected Component Labeling of images. CCL is a simple but computationally intensive image processing operation that is used in many applications including machine vision, real-time object recognition, and security.

TopCoder is a large community of over 200,000 members of which over 32,000 have been active participants in the last 90 days. Anyone can register to be a TopCoder to participate in the CUDA SuperHero Challenge.  Contestants around the world will be competing for some hard cash – and also the opportunity to be TopCoder’s first CUDA SuperHeroes.

The challenge is simple to understand and in fact simple to get a first implementation up and running;  but winning will take plenty of CUDA skill as the challenge will exercise many CUDA optimization techniques.

The winners will be announced at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference at the end of September. See the contest details here.

Slides from two full-day conference tutorials are now available:

• SPEEDUP 2009 Practical GPU Computing with NVIDIA CUDA: Lausanne, Switzerland, September 8, 2009 (Dominik Göddeke, Robert Strzodka and Christian Sigg)
• PPAM 2009 GPU and OpenCL Tutorials: Wroclaw, Poland, September 13, 2009 (Robert Strzodka, Dominik Behr and Dominik Göddeke)

Both tutorials present basics and advanced topics of scientific computing on GPUs, including ready-to-use GPU libraries, GPU architecture, case studies and many hands-on examples.

To assist contestants in the TopCoder and NVIDIA CUDA Superhero Challenge, from August 28th and continuing for one month, RenderStream will offer a promotional discount of up to $500 for the first ten PSC development systems they sell with  two or more C1060 cards or $800 for one S1070 integrated with a Twin Dual Quad Server (no more than two systems per customer). In addition, RenderStream will give a free NVIDIA Tesla C1060 to the customer who places highest in the contest.

For more information please visit http://www.renderstream.com/HPC.html or email info@renderstream.com.

NVIDIA Corporation today announced that it will be working with TopCoder, a competitive software development community, on the CUDA Superhero Challenge, a series of contests for computer programmers who will harness the parallel processing power of the NVIDIA CUDA architecture to solve some of computing’s biggest challenges. More details are available on the Topcoder homepage.

GPUs are evolving as massively threaded vector machines. While the primary design goal of the GPUs is efficient processing of the graphics stack, the massive parallelism available in these chips has lately opened up the possibility of carrying out general-purpose computing on them. This computing paradigm is called GPGPU. Although manually mapping regular data-parallel applications to GPUs has been explored quite extensively, making truly general-purpose computing feasible on GPUs requires answering a number of important questions. This half-day workshop aims at bringing together the researchers and practitioners in this rapidly evolving area with a goal of addressing issues related to programming languages, programming models, compiler optimizations, and architecture to make GPGPU a conducive execution environment for regular as well as irregular applications.

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following.

• New GPU architecture features to enhance GPGPU
• Memory system innovations to enhance GPGPU
• Implications of GPGPU on memory consistency models
• Architecture support for single-chip CPU-GPU integration
• Programming models and language support for GPGPU
• Compiler Optimization for GPGPU
• Debugging/Performance visualization tools for GPGPU
• Efficient synchronization support for GPGPU
• Performance evaluation of irregular applications on GPUs
• Energy-efficiency studies on GPGPU
• GPGPU benchmarks

This half-day workshop will be held in conjunction with HPCA 2010 in Bangalore in January 2010.

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