From Singapore to Warsaw- the history of SUPERCOMPUTING FRONTIERS

SCFE is a platform for the thought leaders from both academia and industry to interact and discuss visionary ideas, the most important global trends and substantial innovations in supercomputing. Each year we focus on somewhat different topics, but we always focus on ideas that are most innovative, most ingenious and have potential to change the course of supercomputing. We also highlight research domains that might present the greatest potential of becoming the leading applications of supercomputers in the future.

The previous conferences showcased a successful scientific program with outstanding speakers including James K. Gimzewski (University of California), Rob Knight (University of California), Ziogas Aleksandros Nikolaos (ETH Zurich), Leon Chua (Memristor), Rupak Biswas (NASA), Paul Messina (Exascale), Whitfield Diffie (Cryptography), Dimitri Kusnezov (Personalised medicine and exascale computing), Karlhienz Meier (Neuromorphic computing), Gordon Bell (History of G. Bell Prizes), Alessandro Curioni (Cognitive Computing), Thom H. Dunning (Supercomputing), Haohuan Fu (TaihuLight), John Gustafson (Unums and Posits), Baroness Susan Greenfield (Consciousness and Computers), Thomas Sterling (Simultac Fonton), Srinivas Aluru, Horst Simon, Bronis de Supinski, Jack Dongarra, Satoshi Matsuoka, Al Gara, Rick Stevens, Robert Harrison and Scott A. Klasky.

Selected papers from earlier editions of the conference were published in special issues of Supercomputing Frontiers and Innovations
• Vol 2, No 3 (2015),
• Vol 3, No 2 (2016),
• Vol 4, No 2 (2017),
• Vol 5, No 2 and 3 (2018),
• Vol.6 No 2 (2019)
• Vol. 7 No 2 (2020).

Some of the topic points during Supercomputing Frontiers 2020 were:
• Supercomputing applications in domains of critical impact in economic and human terms, and especially those requiring computing resources approaching Exascale;
• Computing at the Edge with an emphasis on high bandwidth networking, distributed workflows, and streaming data;
• Convergence of HPC, AI, Big Data, Semantic and Graph methods ;
• Hybrid HPC – Quantum Computing;
• HPC cloud and contenerisation;
• Heterogeneous computer fabrics for processors, memory systems, and interconnection networks and their associated programming environments (languages, compilers, libraries, and runtime systems)
• New processor architectures, optical interconnects, associative memories, interconnect topologies and routing, and interplay of interconnect topologies with algorithmic communication patterns;
• Connectomics, Genomics, – omics of all kinds and Systems Biology;
• Brain simulations, Neuromorphic computing, Connectome;
• Knowledge Graphs, graph computations, topology, space filling curves; and
• Any other topic that pushes the boundaries of computational science and supercomputing to exascale and beyond.

Please follow the links below if you wish to explore the programme of previous Supercomputing Frontiers conferences:
• Supercomputing Frontiers Europe 2020
• Supercomputing Frontiers Europe 2019
• Supercomputing Frontiers Europe 2018
• Supercomputing Frontiers Singapore 2017
• Supercomputing Frontiers Singapore 2016
• Supercomputing Frontiers Singapore 2015

ABOUT ICM UNIVERSITY OF WARSAW

Established by a resolution of the Senate of the University of Warsaw dated 29 June 1993, the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling (ICM), University of Warsaw, is one of the top HPC centers in Poland.

ICM is engaged in serving the needs of a large community of computational researchers in Poland through provision of HPC and grid resources, storage, networking and expertise. ICM is involved in interdisciplinary scientific research based on mathematical modeling, computer simulations and modeling, multi-scale and large-scale calculations, and teaching in the above areas.

ICM researchers study problems related to civil aviation (collaboration with ICAO), modeling of social processes and most currently researching zoonoses diseases like SARS-CoV-2 and working on ICM Epidemiological Model for the COVID-19 epidemic in Poland – all based on exclusive access to specific Big Data resources. ICM is involved in securing access for Polish scientists to the entire body of scientific literature, including over 8,000 journal titles and hundreds of thousands scientific books, by maintaining the Virtual Library of Science, including the entire content and the rights to text mining.

Since 1997, numerical weather prediction is the one of main activities of ICM. The numerical weather forecast for Central Europe has over 200 million visitors every year, making it one of the most popular weather services in Poland.

ICM’s Laboratory of Visual Analysis has been successfully developing and using in-house visualisation software (VisNow) for over 20 years. Their expertise covers scientific visualisation, visual analysis, computer assisted medical diagnosis and other competence areas.

ICM manages two data centers in Warsaw. The ICM Technology Center (CTICM) in Białołęka commissioned in 2016 has approx. 10,000 m2 of technical space with two world-class supercomputers: Petaflop Cray XC-40 (Okeanos) for traditional intensive numerical calculations, and the Huawei cluster (Enigma) for large data analytics (Hadoop, Spark) and cloud computing. The CT-ICM server room also has data storage equipment for more than 20 PetaBytes of data in a variety of file systems: high performance Lustre to object storage. The newly refurbished lecture hall for an audience of 70 participants has unique visualization equipment with 16 monitors and software that allows for displaying of huge datasets, remote collaboration and transmission of lectures or images from around the world.

In the domain of Big Data, High Performance Computing (HPC) and cloud services, ICM supports approximately 1,000 users from all over Poland using our supercomputers and computing, network and storage infrastructure. ICM currently employs 110 staff.

ICM networking team has participated in a number of cutting edge networking solutions, both for high throughput and low latency requirements. Recently, ICM engineers have established a production 100Gbps connection over 12,375 4 miles CAE-1 (Collaboration Asia Europe-1) line between Warsaw and Singapore.