Welcome to HPCS 2008

The scientific program of this year’s conference strikes a fair balance between HPC Systems and Applications. Applications to the physical sciences remain dominant (Sessions 1, 4, 6 and 7). In particular, Session 4 (Computational Physics) is shared with the Canadian Association of Physicists Congress, held concurrently on the Laval campus. It will feature a sample of applications to several fields of Physics: elementary particles, astrophysics, condensed matter and biophysics.

Of special note this year is the visibility of the ATLAS project (in Sessions 4 and 7), a giant international particle physics project that involves massive flow and treatment of data worldwide, with an important Canadian contribution described here.

Grid computing is essential not only to the ATLAS project (session 7), but its impact on HPC as a whole is growing (Session 3). The central role now played by distributed memory systems in HPC and the importance of parallelization is reflected in Sessions 2 (OSCAR) and 5 (Systems and parallelization).

Invited speakers include Greg Wilson (U. of Toronto), author of the Software Carpentry course and "Beautiful Code", Dr Mark Potse (Université de Montréal), whose description of HPC can help us understand the workings of the human heart, and Prof. Tom Woo (University of Ottawa), who will review the HPC technology behind quantum chemistry.

The program also includes a show floor with 15 HPC software and hardware vendors, two tracks of presentations from exhibitors, and 5 high level industry keynote speakers who will contribute their vision on various challenges or progress in the HPC technology world.

Enjoy the conference!

Marc Parizeau

General Chair

Université Laval

Jorge Vinals

General Co-Chair

McGill University

David Sénéchal

Program Chair

Université de Sherbrooke