HPC/GPU Meetup on May 2nd a Success, Let's Keep Up the Momentum!

On Monday 5/2 I co-hosted the May meetup for the HPC/GPU computing group of Silicon Valley, and we had our biggest turnout yet (43!).

People who attended include industry pioneer practitioners of parallel computing, as well as CEOs and team leads who are evaluating the merits of HPC and GPU Supercomputing technologies for their organizations.

Here’s a run down of what took place: Jike Chong, the group organizer, began with an introduction of news in the area of HPC and GPU Supercomputing technologies. The attending members then had an opportunity to each gave a short self-intro. Participating members' backgrounds range from software consultants, to technology company engineers, to NASA scientists.

Talks in three areas were planned for this meeting:
- parallel computing infrastructure
- programming patterns
- programming techniques

First Andrew Sheppard, the initiator of the HPC and GPU Supercomputing Meetup groups in the US and Asia gave a talk on Programming with Thrust. The audience participated enthusiastically, with questions ranging from infrastructure overhead to coarse-grained parallelization of the STL-type abstractions.

Two short presentations by Minesh B. Amin and Morgan Conrad followed after a brief break where members mingled (the intros at the beginning helped them to orient and target the networking). Minesh presented a set of Parallel Management Patterns with a Python-based instantiation. Morgan presented a review of a set of programming techniques from the book "GPU Computing Gems".

Enthusiastic participants stayed well past 9:30pm, where a couple of members volunteered to speak in future meetings.

In a quest to develop and refine the meeting format to cater to a growing and increasingly diverse audience, we will continue to experiment with long and short talks. While the core of the format will remain similar, the variety of topics are definitely growing. Looking forward to the next one!