Dr. Ernesto Bonomi of CRS4 and Oskar Mencer, CEO of Maxeler Technologies, will present a computing seminar titled “Dataflow Computing for Data-Intensive Applications” at CERN on March 29 2012.
Maxeler Technologies provides Maximum Performance Computing (MPC) based on a dataflow model of computation. Combined with a multi-disciplinary approach, these dataflow solutions are in production, reducing power consumption and data center space for a wide range of applications. Typically, our dataflow solutions utilize thousands of arithmetic units on a chip to outperform top end microprocessors by 20x-40x in computations per cubic foot and computations per Watt, and our analysis suggests that there is strong potential to do a lot better in future. Dataflow is particularly suitable for highly demanding applications such as: finite element and finite difference PDE solvers on structured and unstructured grids, Monte Carlo methods, multi-dimensional optimization problems, real-time data processing, and even sparse matrix solvers. At the core of the approach, we are building computers to match the problem, rather than optimizing algorithms to standard microprocessors.
Given the success in Earth Sciences, Quantitative Finance and Electronic Trading and the availability of a user-friendly dataflow programming environment, we believe that this novel approach to computing could potentially lead to scientific breakthroughs in data-intensive branches of science.
In spite of their spectacular speed, novel processing architectures obey a restrictive computation paradigm that makes less attractive the numerical solution of many algebraic problems. Hence the real challenge for the developer is the reduction of a mathematical model to a sequence of computational tasks that perfectly fit the paradigm supported by these extreme architectures. In a second part, we illustrate this concept for time imaging algorithms of general use in oil industry.
The seminar takes place on Thursday, March 29, 2012 from 11:00 to 12:15 (Europe/Zurich) at CERN ( 503-1-001 – Council Chamber ). See the CERN website for more details.