Interactive High-Performance Computing Workshop at ISC 2018

June 28, 2018, Marriott Frankfurt Hotel, Frankfurt, Germany

Alabaster 2 (Marriott Hotel, 2nd floor)

in conjunction with ISC High Performance 2018

Presentations and Slides

Thursday, June 28, 2 - 6pm, Alabaster 2

2:00–2:10 Introduction, Peter Messmer (NVIDIA)

2:10–2:35 Interactive HPC Requirements, Challenges, and Solutions for Cutting Edge Molecular Simulation Science Campaigns, John Stone (UIUC) [.pdf]

2:35–3:00 Interactive Distributed Deep Learning with Jupyter Notebooks Wahid Bhimji (NERSC) [.pdf]

3:00–3:25 Emerging interactive workflows for life sciences, Fernanda Foeretter (NVIDIA) [.pdf]

3:25-3:50 HPC in the Human Brain Project, Thomas Vierjahn (RWTHA) [.pdf]

3:50–4:10 Break

4:10–4:35 Opportunities and Challenges for Interactive Supercomputing, Mike Ringenburg (CRAY) [.pdf]

4:35–5:00 Lessons learned from a Decade of Providing Interactive, on-Demand High Performance to Scientists an Engineers, Albert Reuther (MIT Lincoln) [.pdf]

5:00–5:25 Lessons Learned - Enabling Interactive Supercomputing at JSC, Jens Henrik Goebbert (Julich) [.pdf]

5:25–6:00 Discussion & Summary, Peter Messmer (NVIDIA)

Program Committee

Dr. Peter Messmer, NVIDIA

Dr. Sadaf Alam, CSCS

Dr. Albert Reuther, MIT Lincoln Laboratory

Dr. Michael Ringenburg, Cray Inc.

Mr. John Stone, U. Illinois at Urbana-Champaign


BOF@SC17 (November 2017)


After the successful BOF at SC15, we hosted again a Birds-of-a-Feather session on Interactivity in Supercomputing.

The session consisted of talks from John Stone (UIUC), Thomas Schulthess (CSCS) and Mike Ringenburg (Cray) and demonstrated the breath of activities at all the levels of the HPC ecosystem.

One of the outcomes of the lively discussion was that there exists a range of solutions, but most of them are accessible only to a small group of users at a specific site. This fragmentation of the toolsets makes adoption even harder, but at the same time illustrates the importance of the problem.

The group agreed that there is a need for a workshop collecting the current state of the art in interactive HPC and to orchestrate future activities.

BOF@SC15 (November 2015)


At SC15 in Denver we hosted the first Birds-of-a-Feather session on Interactivity in Supercomputing. The goal of that session was to evaluate the interest in the HPC communities to utilize HPC resources in an interactive fashion.

The session consisted of talks from Stephen Jones (SpaceX), Paul Woodward (UMN), Thomas Schulthess (CSCS), and John Shalf (LBNL) presenting their views of the benefits and use-cases of interactivity of HPC systems, covering the perspectives of HPC center managers and domain scientists.

The subsequent discussion showed a tremendous interest from the user community. Not only were the potential uses highlighted, but also new use-cases emerged.