SC18.tex

\documentclass[a4paper]{jpconf}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\begin{document}
\title{ The annual international conference of high performance computing: SC18 from INFN point of view}

%\address{Production Editor, \jpcs, \iopp, Dirac House, Temple Back, Bristol BS1~6BE, UK}
\author{A. Costantini$^1$, D. Salomoni$^1$, S. Zani$^1$, S. Longo$^1$, L.Chiarelli$^2$, G. Grandi$^3$
        % etc.
}

\address{$^1$ INFN-CNAF, Bologna, IT}
\address{$^2$ GARR, Bologna, IT}
\address{$^3$ INFN Sezione di Bologna, Bologna, IT}


\ead{alessandro.costantini@cnaf.infn.it}

\begin{abstract}
Since 2012  INFN, together with INAF, GARR, ENEA and CINECA is participating as exhibitor in the annual international conference of high performance
 computing, networking, storage and analysis. In 2018 SC took place in Dallas (US) between 12 and 16 November 2018. SC18 was particular enriched 
by many events where the major software and hardware vendors presented their innovative products, strategies and next investments plans and actions. 
\end{abstract}


\section{Introduction}
SC18 \cite{sc18} marks the 30th anniversary of the annual international conference of high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis.
 It celebrates the contributions of researchers and scientists – from those just starting their careers to those whose contributions have made lasting impacts.
INFN \cite{infn} is participating to this international conference since 2012 with the support and the collaboration of 
\begin{itemize}
\item CINECA \cite{cineca}, a not-for-profit Consortium, made up of 67 Italian universities, 9 Italian Research Institutions, 1 Polyclinic and the Italian Ministry of Education.
 Today it is the largest Italian computing center, one of the most important worldwide.
\item INAF \cite{inaf}, is the most important Italian institution conducting scientific research in astronomy and astrophysics. Research ranges from the study of the
 planets and minor bodies of the Solar system up to the large-scale structure of the Universe and groups and clusters of galaxies on cosmological scales.
\item GARR\cite{garr}, the ultra-broadband network dedicated to the Italian research and education community.  Its main objective is to provide high-performance 
connectivity and to develop innovative services for the daily activities of researchers, professors and students as well as for international collaboration.
\item ENEA \cite{enea}, the National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development, a public body aimed at research, technological
 innovation and the provision of advanced services to enterprises, public administration and citizens in the sectors of energy, the environment and sustainable economic development.
\end{itemize}

\section{SC18 in brief}
The conference drew a record-breaking 13,071 (as of 11/15/18) attendees and featured a technical program spanning six days – making it the largest SC conference of all time. 
In all, the conference and exhibition infused the local economy with more than \$40 million in revenue according to the local Dallas Convention Bureau.
\subsection{Conference Themes}
 Inspiring the Next Generation \& Diversity. A conference highlight related to this theme was the Student Cluster Competition, which features 15 international student 
teams competing in a non-stop “Iron-Chef’' style challenge to complete a real-world scientific workload, while impressing conference attendees and judges with their HPC knowledge.
A shrinking labor force is one of the major shortfalls in the STEM industry. The SC Conference brought together all nationalities, ethnicities, genders, and technical capabilities
 with the goal of sparking new ideas on how to attract more women, minorities, and young people to HPC.
Inspiring the World. HPC has the power and promise to solve world’s most difficult challenges. From hurricane and earthquake predictions to solving global hunger 
challenges, a main focus of the conference was to demonstrate how the HPC industry is using supercomputing to help make the world a better place.
Inspiring the Future of Technology. HPC is powering the advancement of artificial intelligence. In technical sessions and on the exhibit floor, the conference explored 
how HPC is helping AI bring improvements in societies, economies, and organizations.
\subsection{World’s Fastest Network}
SCinet gave SC18 attendees the chance to experience the world’s fastest temporary network, delivering 4.02 terabits per second of network capacity to the Kay Bailey
 Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas (US).
In preparation, volunteers installed more than 67 miles of fiber optic cable, including two miles of new underground fiber that now connects the convention center to a
 downtown Dallas data center. After this year’s conference concludes, that underground fiber will remain in place for the benefit of the city of Dallas.
To deliver WiFi for all attendees across one million square feet of exhibit space, volunteers also installed 300 wireless access points in just one week.
SCinet is made possible by the contributions of 40 industry-leading vendors, who in total donated \$52 million in hardware, software, and services.
\subsection{Exhibit Records}
According to Christy Adkinson, SC18 Exhibits Chair from Cray Inc, the SC18 Exhibition broke several records including largest research booth space at 65,000 sq. ft. and 
more industry exhibitors than ever. Plus, it exceeded the most total number of exhibitors at 364 and was the largest Exhibits ever with over 150,000 sq. ft. occupied. It also
 featured the first ever “Start-Up” Pavilion allowing small companies just entering the field an economic way to have a presence at the conference. Finally, SC18 featured more 1st time exhibitors than ever.

\section{Innovations and new products at SC18}
The consolidated role of SC as the reference point  high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis push the major vendors and companies to present their new products and activities.
Some of them have been briefly reported and described in the following subsections.

\subsection{INTEL}
Intel \cite{intel} presented the improved family of processors:
\begin{itemize}
\item Cascade Lake: Intel Deep Learning Boost with the support to “Speed Select Technology" VNNI (vector neural network instruction) for inference acceleration
\item Cooper Lake: the successor of Cascade Lake (expected to be released on 1st half of 2020). Supports Bfloat16 for Deep Learning training,which provides the same level of precision as double-precision (32­bit) floating points, but in a smaller (16­bit) data size.
\item Ice Lake: the 10nm Ultrabook-class processors planned to ne released in late 2020. Will introduce PCIe Gen 4, with up to 64 lanes per CPU.
\item Intel Nervana Neural Netwrok Processor for Training pltted for early.
\item PCI express card for inference available of the first quarter 2019.
\end{itemize}

\subsection{Dell EMC}
Dell EMC \cite{dellemc} presented at their Community Meeting event the Frontera supercomputer. The Dell EMC PowerEdge system plans to combine several technical
 innovations such as CoolIT Systems high-density Direct Contact Liquid Cooling, high performance Mellanox HDR 200Gb/s InfiniBand interconnect and next generation 
Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors. Frontera’s early projects are expecting to include analysis of particle collisions from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, global climate 
modeling, hurricane forecasting and multi-messenger astronomy.

\subsection{NVIDIA}
NVIDIA \cite{nvidia}presented the new NVIDIA® T4 GPU accelerates diverse cloud workloads, including high-performance computing, deep learning training and inference, 
machine learning, data analytics, and graphics. Based on the new NVIDIA Turing architecture and packaged in an energy-efficient 70-watt, small PCIe form factor, T4 is 
optimized for mainstream computing environments and features multi-precision Turing Tensor Cores and new RT Cores. Combined with accelerated containerized software 
stacks from NGC, T4 delivers revolutionary performance at scale.

\subsection{ARISTA}
ARISTA \cite{ARISTA} presented two high density 400 Gigabit Ethernet datacenter switches based on the Broadcom 12.8 Tbps Tomahawk 3 silicon 
consisting on 32 400 GbEthernet ports in 1 Rack Unit.
The two models are supporting different type of transceivers: The 7060PX4-32 supports 32 OSFP Interfaces and the 7060DX4-32 has 32 ports of QSFP-DD. 
The adapter from OSFP to DD standard were also available. The devices were available to touch and test.   

\section{INFN at SC18}
As mentioned above, INFN actively participated to SC18 by handling a booth where the advances in research of INFN and its partners (CINECA, INAF. ENEA and GARR)
 have been shown through the support of posters, video, leaflets and brochures (See Figures \ref{fig-1}, \ref{fig-2}, \ref{fig-3} and \ref{fig-4} for detais).
In particular, the following list of posters, and related contributors, have been shown:
\begin{itemize}
\item Federated Cloud For Research (GARR)
\item COmputing on SoC Architecture: the INFN COSA Project
\item INAF - HPC New challenges and perspectives CINECA and EU-H2020 Programs
\item CRESCO6: tech specs \& benchmarks (ENEA)
\item ENEA partnership in the European Energy oriented Center of Excellence (ENEA)
\item INFN Collaboration and Opportunities
\item DataCloud HYBRID SERVICES From Integrated Solutions to Exascale and beyond
\item INFN Service Portfolio
\item The INDIGO Identity and Access Management Service
\item HTC, HPC, CLOUD, no matter what your flavors are. New users are welcome at ReCaS-Bari DataCenter
\item HPC for Theoretical Physics at INFN
\item INFN CNAF “The Italian LHC TIER 1"

\end{itemize}
 
\subsection{Statistics at the INFN booth}
Thanks to the support of INFN National Services, a web survey \cite{limesurvey} has been deployed an used to collect information from the SC18 visitors interested in the
 scientific activities presented at the booth.
Among all the SC18 participants who visited the INFN booth, 54 of them decided to fill-in the survey by replying to the following multiple-choise questions related to
\begin{itemize}
\item Education 
\item Current occupation 
\item Interest for INFN projects or services
\subitem -Software services for Research and Data Centers
\subitem -Industrial Collaboration (Consultancy, Design and Planning)
\subitem -Training courses, Programming and DevOps methodologies
\subitem -Distributed computing paradigm (Grid Middleware)
\subitem -INDIGO-DataCloud
\subitem -eXtreme-DataCloud (XDC)
\subitem -DEEP-Hybrid DataCloud (DEEP)
\item Interest in possible collaboration with INFN
\subitem -Submission of new ideas for possible co-development / evaluation
\subitem -Work via existing institutional channels (e.g. Horizon2020, WLCG, etc)
\subitem -Explore some Technology Transfer opportunities toward industry
\subitem -Use of INFN storage or compute facilities
\item Job opportunities at INFN
\subitem -Temporary Research Fellow
\subitem -Temporary Contract (Software developer, Technologist)
\subitem -Visiting Scientist
\end{itemize}

From the statistical analysis it appears clear the high education level of the participants (see Figure \ref{survey1}) and the distributed background due 
to the different occupational levels (see Figure \ref{survey2}) of the visitors.
Most of the INFN services, in particular Software services for Research and Data Centers  (see Figure \ref{survey3}), actracted the attention of the 
visitors and, as a direct consequence, their interest on the INFN activities expressed both in the form of collaborations (see Figure \ref{survey4}) or job opportunities (see Figure \ref{survey5}).


\section{Conclusions}                
Supercomputing 2018 (SC18) is the annual international conference of high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis.
 The major vendors and companies presented in such event their new products and activities of which some of them have been discussed in the 
session “Innovations and new products at SC18". INFN, in collaboration with  INAF, GARR, ENEA and CINECA participated as exhibitor at SC18 by 
presenting their activities and related collaborations. Furthermore, a survey among the booth visitors have been proposed by INFN and the related information have been collected and analysed.

\section{References} 
\begin{thebibliography}{}
\bibitem{sc18}
Web site: https://sc18.supercomputing.org
\bibitem{infn}
Web site: https://www.infn.it
\bibitem{cineca}
Web site: https://www.cineca.it
\bibitem{inaf}
Web site: www.inaf.it
\bibitem{garr}
Web site: https://www.garr.it
\bibitem{enea}
Web site: www.enea.it
\bibitem{intel}
Web site: https://www.intel.com
\bibitem{dellemc}
Web site: https://www.dellemc.com
\bibitem{nvidia}
Web site: https://www.nvidia.com
\bibitem{ARISTA}
Web site: https://www.arista.com
\bibitem{limesurvey}
Web site: https://surveys.infn.it
\end{thebibliography}

\begin{figure}[h]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=6cm,clip]{20181112_173827-min.png}
\caption{\small First view of the INFN booth at SC18, Dallas (US)}
\label{fig-1}
\end{figure}

\vspace*{-.5cm}
\begin{figure}[h]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=6cm,clip]{20181112_173843-min.png}
\caption{\small Second view of the INFN booth at SC18, Dallas (US)}
\label{fig-2}
\end{figure}

\vspace*{-.5cm}
\begin{figure}[h]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=6cm,clip]{20181112_181720-min.png}
\caption{\small INFN employee is presenting the INDIGO-DataCloud products and the new running Cloud-oriented projects: DEEP-HybridDatacloud, eXtreme-DataCloud and EOSC-hub.}
\label{fig-3}
\end{figure}

\vspace*{-.5cm}
\begin{figure}[!h]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=10cm,clip]{20181112_190135-min.png}
\caption{\small Panoramic view (partial) of the SC18 exibitor area.}
\label{fig-4}
\end{figure}

\begin{figure}[tbp]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=6cm,clip]{2.png}
\caption{\small Distribution of the participants in terms of education.}
\label{survey1}
\end{figure}

\begin{figure}[tbp]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=6cm,clip]{3.png}
\caption{\small Distribution of the participants in terms of occupation.}
\label{survey2}
\end{figure}

\begin{figure}[tbp]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=6cm,clip]{4.png}
\caption{\small Distribution in terms of interest for INFN services.}
\label{survey3}
\end{figure}

\begin{figure}[tbp]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=6cm,clip]{5.png}
\caption{\small Distribution of interest in therms of collaboration opportunities.}
\label{survey4}
\end{figure}

\begin{figure}[tbp]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=6cm,clip]{6.png}
\caption{\small Distribution of interest in therms of job opportunities.}
\label{survey5}
\end{figure}





\end{document}