Purdue University

“Intel Tech Talk,” a series of six presentations for Purdue faculty and staff who use information technology in teaching, research or administration, will feature discussions by representatives of Intel Corp. on the firm’s latest innovations in information technology and expectations for the future.

The event, sponsored by the School of Industrial Engineering, will run from 8 a.m. through 2:45 p.m. on Tuesday, March 31, on the third floor of Stewart Center. Complimentary breakfast and lunch will be served. Registration is limited to the first 75 people. To register online for the free event, follow the instructions at www.conf.purdue.edu/techtalk.

Those with questions about the event may contact Stefano Gutierrez of Intel Corp. at stefano.j.gutierrez@intel.com, or (312) 608-1516.

The event presentations are as follows:

Session Abstracts

Intel Tech Talk Stewart Center, Tuesday, March 31, 2009

8-9:00 a.m.

Kickoff breakfast, welcome, and introductions: Rick Echevarria, vice president, Sales and Marketing Group, and general manager, Worldwide, Intel® Enterprise Solution Sales. Room 314.

9-10:15 a.m.

Breakout sessions in Rooms 318 and 320:

“Sustainable IT in a Predictive Enterprise,” Robert Deutsche, principal architect, Predictive Enterprise.

Intel has long lead the silicon industry in innovation and performance. Intel has directed its innovative capacity to the challenges of energy and environment to not only improve its processes and products, but also to give the industry an example of how great these changes are that can be achieved. Our commitment to a sustainable future is a core element of the company’s overall corporate social responsibility strategy.

Bob Deutsche, Principal Architect, will be presenting Sustainable IT in a Predictive Enterprise. Sustainable IT is viewed as three components; Data Center, Client & Mobile Computing, regulatory compliance and industry self-regulation. Intel's Energy: Efficiency, Environment & Performance technology pillar, is the means by which we link these three components to our products/platforms and to resolution of business issues.

“HPC Nehalem (Intel i7): The New Brain for HPC,” Wesley Shimanek, strategic marketing manager, Technical Computing for Intel Digital Enterprise Group.

Nehalem – A new generation of intelligent processors from Intel that delivers more performance, density and energy efficiency than ever before. Tackling large scale problems just got faster. With more balance than ever before, the soon to be announced Nehalem processor exceeds the performance of a multi-million dollar supercomputer a mere decade ago and dramatically decreases total time to solution. Behind the performance is a new microarchitecture that delivers extra bandwidth, smarter caches and more instructions per cycle than ever before – the difference more performance, smaller footprint and less power.

10:30-11:45 a.m.

Breakout sessions in Rooms 318 and 320:

“Collaboration and Visual Analytics Research and Development at Intel,” Cynthia Pickering, senior principal engineer for IT Strategy Architecture and Innovation.

Based on research conducted within Intel IT, we have identified several unique requirements for global team collaboration. Our findings included that two-thirds of Intel employees work on distributed teams and the same percentage also work on multiple teams that may or may not have overlapping interests. These and other data led us to seek a solution that would seamlessly support the complexities discovered while enhancing team and personal productivity.

To adequately represent the complexities, we needed an object-oriented information workspace where the use of a 3D user interface allows users to retain multiple contexts and share across them. Currently we are in early adopter exploration with a 3D virtual world environment for enterprise virtual teams. We see this as a natural extension to our current web 2.0 Social Computing roadmap that IT is currently deploying to Intel employees.

We are collecting usability data and looking at the impacts of avatar representation, spatial audio and persistent dedicated 3D workspace on team and personal productivity. Early adopter virtual world examples include: a simulation-based environment for training factory technicians to repair machines in equipment bays or “Bay Watch”, Enterprise Operations Monitoring and Management Center, dedicated Project Rooms for teams of Knowledge Workers, and My Personal Office.

Next we plan to extend the virtual world capability to include a visual analytics toolkit for richer content creation, information visualization, and interactivity to improve the speed of making the right decisions. To achieve the desired level of realism, new compute architectures and increasing compute power will be required. Thus, our work creates opportunities to expand market size for our products and platforms and impacts Intel internally by improving productivity while enriching the research community with leading edge concepts that synthesize consumer and workplace models of human activity.

“High-Performance Cluster Applications: Scalable Software Solutions,” Henry Gabb, principal engineer, Intel Software and Services Group.

The Intel Software and Services Group has a collection of innovative tools to facilitate application development on HPC clusters. This talk will discuss the individual components of the Intel Cluster Toolkit. Case studies of actual customer projects will demonstrate how the tools make MPI debugging and tuning easier.

The Intel Cluster Checker, an important component of the Intel Cluster Ready Program, will also be covered. This tool makes cluster validation, debugging, and tuning easier. (Intel Compilers, Performance Libraries, Threading analysis tools, Cluster Tools, Thread Profilers, vTune Performance Analysis Tools. Open MPI, TBB) Cluster Toolkit, Cluster Checker, Intel MPI, vTune).

The discussion will present the process Intel applies to developing and maintaining high performance computing software for clusters. This includes gaining the insight where parallelism can exist; presenting standards based methods to introduce parallelisms into your software; acquiring the confidence that your parallel applications are yielding correct results and finally optimizing the performance for multi and many-core solutions.

Noon-1:15 p.m.

Intel Partner Luncheon, sponsored by Dell, Hewlett Packard and Matrix Integration. Luis Rodriguez, technology specialist, Enterprise Solution Sales for Intel, will speak.

1:30-2:45 p.m.

Breakout sessions in Rooms 318 and 320:

“Capability Maturity Framework,” Robert Deutsche, principal architect, Predictive Enterprise.

Many executives are struggling to optimize the way they manage and measure the business value of IT investments. Too often these executives report that they lack adequate knowledge and the tools which will allow them to manage IT in a sustainable coherent fashion while optimizing the value contribution to the business. There is a gaping hole waiting to be filled by a unifying, value-based management approach—an approach which focuses on both process and outcome and acts as a unifying lens for existing IT frameworks and improving management practices where current knowledge or practices are often poor or non-existent.

In response to this, Intel and the National University of Ireland Maynooth Co-founded the Innovation Value Institute (IVI). IVI is Multi-disciplinary research and education establishment that is amalgamating leading academic theory with the best of corporate and public-sector experience to foster innovation in the management and usage of IT to optimize business value.

The IT-Capability Maturity Framework (CMF) is at the heart of IVI’s research agenda and is an emerging blueprint of the key processes encapsulated in the IT capability of an organization. A core function of the IT-CMF is to act as an assessment tool and a management system with associated improvement roadmaps to help continuously improve, develop and manage the IT capability in support of optimized value delivery.

Bob Deutsche, Principal Architect, will provide a detailed overview of IT-CMF, explain how it is being used @ Intel as well as explain how it is being integrated with our Predictive Enterprise program.

“Intel i7 Overview and Roadmap,” Luis Rodriguez, technology specialist, Enterprise Solution Sales.

Nehalem and its technologies – topics will include QPI, turbo mode and hyper-threading.