A Physarum machine is a programmable amorphous biological computer experimentally implemented in a plasmodium of Physarum polycephalum. 
Physarum machines are programmed by configurations of repelling and attracting gradients, and localized reflectors. Physarum is a biological prototype of all storage modification machines and modern computer architectures.

In this talk it will be shown how a plasmodium of Physarum polycephlum can solve geometrical and graph-theoretic problems, implement logical computations and intelligence actuation.

Title: The Fresh Breeze Project

Abstract:

The development of multicore chips is producing a sea change in the world of computer system architecture. One result is the conventional program execution model (PXM), that has been the mainstay of commercial software development for more than thirty years, has been rendered obsolete. The Fresh Breeze PXM is proposed as a new basis for the design of massively parallel computer systems that can achieve high performance with sound support for program development including composability of parallel programs. The presentation will review the history of Program Execution Models (PXMs) and how their evolution has led to the Fresh Breeze project.

This talk will highlight the pan-European relevance high-performance computing has gained. It will outline the setup of an HPC eco-system and the challenges associated with this. Furthermore a strategic agenda for high-performance computing will be presented including the underlying fundamental data and the envisaged actions.

Abstract:

Parallel computing is primarily about achieving greater performance than is possible without using parallelism.  Especially for the high-end, where systems cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, making the best use of these valuable and scarce systems is important. Yet few applications really understand how well they are performing with respect to the achievable performance on the system. 

The Blue Waters system, currently being installed at the University of Illinois, will offer sustained performance in excess of 1 PetaFLOPS for many applications. However, achieving this level of performance requires careful attention to many details, as this system has many features that must be used to get the best performance. To address this problem, the Blue Waters project is exploring the use of performance models that provide enough information to guide the  development and tuning of applications, ranging from improving the performance of small loops to identifying the need for new algorithms.

Using Blue Waters as an example of an extreme scale system, this talk will describe some of the challenges faced by
applications at this scale, the role that performance modeling can play in preparing applications for extreme scale, and some ways in which performance modeling has guided performance enhancements for those applications.

Presently PRACE is further developing its infrastructure in the first implementation project soon to be followed by the second implementation project, both again funded by the European Commission. As important steps forward, PRACE's Tier-0 supercomputing infrastructure will be complemented by national centres (Tier-1) of the PRACE partners. In the tradition of DEISA, the Tier-1 centres will provide limited access to national systems for European groups - granted through national peer review - under the synchronization and governance of PRACE. Furthermore, PRACE aims at establishing an industrial user-vendor platform with the goal to create a European Technology Platform for HPC.