Newsgroups: comp.parallel.mpi
From: giovanni@liverpool.ac.uk (Mr G. Interi)
Subject: COMMERCIAL AND SCIENTIFIC PARALLEL COMPUTING
Organization: The University of Liverpool
Date: Thu, 1 Dec 1994 10:13:41 GMT
Message-ID: <D04n2u.AI5@liverpool.ac.uk>


                       THE UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL
                                    
                            The Institute of
                     Advanced Scientific Computation
                                    
                                    
                        COMMERCIAL AND SCIENTIFIC
                           PARALLEL COMPUTING;
                          SEEKING COMMON GROUND
                                    
                      Thursday December 8th, 1994,
         Senate Room, Senate House, The University of Liverpool
                                    
        A Joint Liverpool Parallel Computing Club/ACT-UETP event
                                    
                                    
COMMERCIAL AND SCIENTIFIC PARALLEL COMPUTING:
SEEKING COMMON GROUND

Parallel computing is growing up.  Long the domain of scientists and engineers, parallel computing is also benefiting an increasing number of commercial users.
The movement of parallel computing into mainstream commercial activities has 
been taking place for some time, but it is only recently that commercial 
parallel computing has become such a hot topic.  Reasons for this include:

* vendor offerings are now providing the communications performance, flexibility
  and above all reliability that commercial applications require,
* many commercial users are faced with high performance computing problems that
  can only be solved using parallel computers,
* distributed database systems and client/server systems have evolved to the 
  point where many commercial users are comfortable with the idea of message 
  passing, distributed memory systems,
* the demand from scientific/engineering users for parallel systems that 
  integrate with existing facilities has led to parallel systems that have 
  mainstream operating systems and that run standard workstation software,
* new technologies, such as video on demand, have captured the public's
  imagination but require significant computing resources to be achievable.

Future parallel architectures will be heavily influenced by commercial user needs, but the overlap of these needs with those of the scientific and engineering communities is considerable and needs to be exploited.

The purpose of this half-day meeting is threefold:
* to highlight some of the commercial high performance computing problems,
* to show the types of parallel architectures being designed to solve some of 
  these problems,
* to encourage the exploration of common needs and solutions between all 
  parallel computing users.

To assist us with these explorations, we have invited three speakers to give us some perspective into commercial parallel computing and some of the surrounding practical issues.  These are Jon Kerridge, NTSC, Sheffield, Colin Skelton, ICL, Manchester and Philip Bull, IBM.


PROGRAMME

9.30 Coffee and registration

10.00     Introduction
     Cliff Addison, Institute of Advanced Scientific Computation, 
     University of Liverpool.

10.15     Highly Parallel Database Machines; A Critical HPC Application
     Jon Kerridge, National Transputer Support Centre, and the University of Sheffield.

11.00     Coffee

11.15     Goldrush:  A Parallel Database Server for Information Processing.  
     Colin Skelton, ICL, Manchester.

12.00     The SP2 System:  Towards Mainstream Parallel Computing, 
     Philip Bull, IBM UK Ltd.

12.45     Buffet lunch and opportunity for informal discussion

FUTURE EVENTS

February 22nd 1995  Porting Commercial Packages onto Distributed Memory Machines,
               with speakers from Smith System Engineering Ltd., British
               Aerospace, Daresbury Laboratory, and the University of Liverpool.

June 1995      Tools and Environments for Parallel Computing

Seminar Fee 90.00, free to club members.

For further details please contact:-

Sheila Bilton, Institute of Advanced Scientific Computation, The University of
Liverpool, P.O. Box 147, Liverpool, L69 3BX.
Telephone:  +44 51 794 4552, Fax: +44 51 794 4754. E-mail  iasc@liv.ac.uk

WWW Reference:
http://supr.scm.liv.ac.uk/iasc/courses/comm-sci.html


