THE SEM10TIC STANDARD

R. Leigh Hennig. Horror author. Editor.

High Performance Computing and Collaboration with RIT

A brief look at what I’ve been up to lately

Fiction writing has taken the backseat these past few months as stress about the election and house construction has largely taken the wheel. Fortunately both are resolved, and we’re in our new home, slowly but steadily unpacking. I have an office again! And more than one restroom for five people! Accordingly, I’ve started writing.

While fiction work has been on hold, a modest return to research and academia has progressed. I’ve joined the management team for High Performance Computing Next Generation (HPCng), an open, community driven group of individuals, research institutions, and enterprise that seeks to overhaul approaches to HPC that have been somewhat stagnant over the past ten or more years. Our board of directors include:

  • Andrew Younge, PhD: Computer Scientist, Sandia National Laboratories, DOE

  • Brent Gorda: Senior Director of HPC at ARM, Inc.

  • Brock Taylor: Director of HPC Solutions at Intel, Inc.
    Glen Otero, PhD: Vice President of Scientific Computing, TGen

  • Gregory M. Kurtzer as Chairman of the Board. Greg founded Singularity, Warewulf, and Centos.

This is legit. I’m excited about what this could lead to. Public launch is soon, but for now I think it’s okay to share our website and community charter draft.

Meanwhile, my alma mater (RIT) recently had published a new IEEE standard (IEEE Std 1910.1-2020 Standard for Meshed Tree Bridging with Loop-Free Forwarding). All the professors that worked on this are friends whom I had studied under. I reached out to them to get the actual standard and other technical details.

As someone with a passing familiarity with networking at scale for hyperscalers (AWS) and service providers (Markley), I had some feedback they were interested in.

As it happens, the authors are keen on working together on a proposed extension to the standard, “Multi Rooted Meshed Trees for High Performance DCNs (Data Center Networks).” The standard author and their PhD students working on the draft would like to collaborate! The next semester classes begin on January 25, so we have ample time to figure out details on how we can share toys. In addition, I told them about my involvement with HPCng, and there’s some interest there from the university as well. Very exciting!

Otherwise, check out HPCng and our community charter (draft). Interested tech folks in research, industry, or academia can reach out to me regarding HPCng at rlh(at)hpcng.org.

And now I present to you, my brand new office! Dope.