New Frontiers in High Performance Computing and Big Data

At the International Research Workshop on Advanced High Performance Computing Systems held in Cetraro in July 2016 a wide spectrum of topics on new developments related to the solution of compute intensive and large scale problems were discussed. A selection of contributions presented at the workshop are included in this volume.

During the last four decades parallel compute platforms increasingly formed the basis for the development of High Performance Systems primarily aimed at the solution of compute intensive problems. Such systems, however, also offer the possibility to solve large scale problems encountered, for example, in the processing of large scientific data sets, as well as in the analysis of so-called Big Data analyses of, for example, medical, social media, marketing, economics and geo data.

The papers collected for publication in this book cover aspects of the development of parallel systems, highlighting some of the problems encountered with the development of ever more powerful compute systems. On the one hand the energy consumption of millions of processing elements places a limit on the future expansion of parallel systems, and on the other the scheduling of parallel processes to utilise the processing power of a large number of processors becomes a serious obstacle.

The application of parallel compute systems for the processing and analysis of large data sets has become a major factor in furthering scientific research. Data Science aspects are discussed by a number of authors. In addition a number of case studies underlines the importance of future large scale data science applications.

The editors hope that readers can benefit from the contributions on theoretical and practical views and experiences included in this book. The editors are especially indebted to Dr Claudia Rotella and Dr Maria Teresa Guaglianone for their valuable assistance, as well as to Microsoft for making their CMT system available.