Open Parallel activities relevant to SKA show how the company is building global capabilities and strategic partnerships

Key actions-

 

– Multicore World 2012 conference (Wellington, organised by OP) had strong SKA focus with a keynote from Tim Cornwell (SKA computing lead) and presentations from John Houlker (NZTE) and Mahmoud Mahmoud (AUT)

 

– Open Parallel is Intel’s software partner:

  • James Reinders (Director of Software of INTEL) came 3 times to NZ invited by OP between 2010 and 2012, participating in SKA related actions. In 2011 he spoke at the Rutherford Showcase.
  • Tim Mattson (Principal Engineer and Researcher of INTEL in Parallelism) was keynote in MW2012 and back for Multicore World 2013, with a workshop in OpenMP
  • John Michalakes, expert in high-performance computing applications with NREL’s Computational Science Center, is a PC member for MW2013. He has developed tools and techniques for parallelizing large community models and systems of coupled models and is working in the “world greenest datacentre”

 

– ARM (UK) was main sponsor at MW2012.

  • John Goodacre, Director Processor Division (UK) was keynote and also spent a day at NZTE discussing about low power processors applied to SKA
  • Andrew N. Sloss is Senior Principal Engineer – Strategic Software Alliances, ARM/Seattle and works on understanding the software technology challenges that a project such as SKA bring to programming, in particular the challenges of the complexity of communication/coordination scaling to a large number of nodes.

 

Presentations-

  • NZ eResearch Symposium 2012 (Wellington) “Developing a Centre of Excellence for Multicore and Parallel Computing in New Zealand”
  • LCA2012 (Ballarat, Australia) “Welcome to a Multicore World” highlighting the opportunities for joint developments in software for SKA between NZ and Australia
  • SKA Rutherford Innovation Showcase 2011 (Wellington) Presentation “Multicore computing and Open Innovation developments in NZ” and Workshop “Software Development, Open Innovation, Investment”
  • NZ eResearch Symposium 2011 (Dunedin) – “An introduction to X10 language and its applications”. We explored collaboration with IBM Watson researchers on how to use X10 language for SKA
  • LCA2011 (Brisbane, Australia) – “Which industries / applications need parallelization TODAY?” SKA as an example.
  •  LCA2010 (Wellington) – “Open Source Software, Multicore and Parallelism: THE Software?” Launched the community.

 

Strategy-

– MulticoreNZ (2008) – 200+ pages report on how Multicore Technology will lay the foundation of a new industry in NZ. Commissioned by NZTE and Otago University

 

Other partnerships that Open Parallel is building towards an ecosystem in New Zealand around SKA

Fronde – working together towards Big Data capabilities

Compucon – exploring GPGPU capabilities

Otago University – power efficiency, scalability, languages parallelisation

Australian National University – computer vision

Universidad de la Republica (Uruguay) – parallel metaheuristics and evolutionary algorithms