13 December - 19 December
Section outline
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Monday, December 13, 4:15 p.m.:
Maximilian Gaul: MD-Bench CUDA port (first seminar talk)
All students are also warmly invited to a "Christmas Lecture" on Monday, December 13, at 11:00 a.m.:
Title: Thirteen modern ways to fool the masses with performance results on parallel computers
Speaker: Georg Hager, NHR@FAU
Abstract: In 1991, David H. Bailey published his insightful paper "Twelve Ways to Fool the Masses When Giving Performance Results on Parallel Computers." In that humorous article, Bailey pinpointed typical "evade and disguise" techniques that were used in many papers for presenting mediocre performance results in the best possible light. At that time, the supercomputing landscape was governed by the "chicken vs. oxen" debate: The famous question "If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?" is attributed to Seymour Cray, who couldn't have said it better. Cray's machines were certainly dominating in the oxen department, but competition from massively parallel systems like the Connection Machine was building up. In the past two decades, hybrid, hierarchical systems, multi-core processors, accelerator technology, and the dominating presence of commodity hardware have reshaped the landscape of High Performance Computing. It's also not so much oxen vs. chickens anymore; ants have received more than their share of hype. However, some things never change, including the tendency to sugarcoat performance results that would never stand to scientific scrutiny if presented in a sound way. My points (which I prefer to call "stunts") are derived from Bailey's original collection; some are identical or merely reformulated. Others are new, reflecting today's boundary conditions.