1. General Panel Questions 1)What are the most critical issues and concerns that need to be addressed? What is working well (or is on a good path)? 2)What role should the HPC User Forum play in helping to get these issues addressed?

2. Petascale/Exascale Panel Questions 1)What are you most concerned about in the direction of the largest HPC system designs? 2)Will your organization likely acquire one (or a small version of one)? 3)Will your applications work well of these designs? If not, what are your plans? E.g. do you plan to redesign your applications, or use the system as a capability system? 4)What would you like to see in the exascale designs?  What should be the focus? –Power, speed, density, software, other areas?

3. Green IT In HPC Panel Questions 1)What are your concerns about Green IT?  Is it power COSTS or total power required limitations?  Is it regulations?  How would you define the issue? 2)What would you like to see from the vendors?  What don’t you like about their current products and plans in this area? 3)Are there any examples that you see are good success stories? 4)What would you like to see the HPC User Forum do in this area?

4. Visualization In HPC Panel Questions 1)How are you dealing with the data explosion problem? 2)What are your requirements for future visualization solutions? 3)What would you like to see from the vendors?  What don’t you like about their current products and plans in this area? 4)Are there any examples that you see are good success stories? 5)What would you like to see the HPC User Forum do in this area?

5. Large Distributed Storage Panel Questions 1)How are you dealing with the data explosion problem? 2)What are your requirements for future storage and data management needs for large-scale grids, and other emerging environments?  How would you describe the issues facing your organization today? 3)What would you like to see from the vendors?  What don’t you like about their current products and plans in this area? 4)Are there any examples that you see are good success stories? 5)What would you like to see the HPC User Forum do in this area?

6. Alternative Processors Panel Questions Panel Goal: Users to discuss their real-world experiences with FGPAs, GPGPUs, Cell and other non-traditional processors 1)What is an alternative processor? 2)How should/can they be used to increase analysis throughput? 3)What language environment, new and/or old, should be used to take advantage of these alternative processors? 4)Should the user be involved with the specific programming of these processors?

7. Alternative Processors Panel Timing 1)Singleterry: 2 minutes to explain questions 2)Singleterry: 10 minutes on NASA Langley's Experience with FPGA's and the VIVA Language and NASA's Space Radiation Analysis future needs 3)Feng: 10 minutes on Performance comparison and contrast of novel application-to-hardware mapping of biological codes onto alternative processors, specifically Cell and GPGPU 4)Walsh: 10 minutes on FPGA's with Mitrion-C, Larrabee and AMD's entry 5)Jones: 10 minutes on What alternative processor types support data-parallel or general purpose computing and what their programming environments might be 6)Gustafson: 10 minutes on his view of the alternatives with respect to the questions above 7)All: 38 minutes on Questions and answers  We hope for answers and not arguments

8. Welcome To The 29 th HPC User Forum Meeting September 2008