ISC 2015 keynotes focus on innovation and future challenges

In his Monday address on July 13, Dr. Kohler, who is also the Chair of the PRACE Industrial Advisory Committee, will introduce the integration of digital prototyping at the business unit, Mercedes-Benz Cars Development. Today each Mercedes vehicle is digitally predesigned and each component specifically optimized by computer to fulfil functional requirements, such as active and passive safety, as well as driving, acoustic and thermal comfort. Computer simulations are also performed to prevent manufacturing variations during vehicle production.

Kohler will explain how Mercedes-Benz Cars Development uses various computational models and simulation methods, depending on the type and complexity of the task. In some cases, multiple tools that interact with each other in co-simulation are used. To make sure that computing models do not impact the turnaround times in day-to-day development work, cost-optimized, high performance computers are employed. Their efficient and failsafe operation ensures a reliable vehicle development process.

In addition to the opening address on Monday, each subsequent day of the conference will feature an exciting keynote presentation.

On Tuesday, July 14, China’s rising star in HPC, Professor Dr. Yutong Lu, will deliver a keynote titled “Applications Leveraging Supercomputing Systems.” Dr. Lu is the Director for System Software Laboratory at the School of Computer Science at the National University of Defense Technology, China, and was the Director Designer for the Tianhe-1A and Tianhe-2 systems.

In her talk, she will analyze the key issues of application scalability for advanced HPC systems in the post-petascale era. She will highlight a co-design approach for the research and development activities to deliver a system capable of scalable computing and supporting the large-scale domain applications efficiently.

On Wednesday, July 15, Professor Dr. Thomas Sterling, a perennial favorite at ISC, will offer a vibrant summary of the past year in his keynote: “HPC Achievement and Impact – 2015.” Dr. Sterling is a Professor of Informatics & Computing, School of Informatics & Computing, Indiana University and Chief Scientist & Executive Associate Director, Center for Research in Extreme Scale Technologies (CREST).

Each year he looks at the achievements, trends, and challenges of the previous year to acknowledge the accomplishments, project their implications for future developments, and inform the broad range of conference attendees. On the topic of future extreme-scale computing, Sterling will also deliver an in-depth presentation of progress in the critical area of runtime system software, which will play an increasingly significant role in supercomputing of complex and highly-scaled heterogeneous computers. In his presentation, Sterling will examine application drivers stressing the boundaries of system performance and memory capacity.