HiPC 2005 Industry Panel Discussion -- December 18^th, 17:30-19:00  (PDF)  (DOC)

Processors, Instruction Sets, Operating Systems - Challengers and Survivors

The Panel will discuss the effects of the trend towards standardization in terms of processor architectures, instruction sets and operating systems.

It will cover the chances of standard processors (Itanium© and X86-64©) vs. the main remaining proprietary instruction sets (POWER© and SPARC©).

AMD and Intel will defend and position their standard architectures in short statements to be followed by positioning statements from Fujitsu and IBM focusing on Sparc64 and Power respectively. The role of the CELL will also be covered.

A well-known Linux protagonist will address the question of what ISAs (Instruction Set Architectures) will be considered de-facto standards for the Linux community in future. He will be challenged by a representative from Microsoft who will address the future of Windows© Clusters in HPC.

Introducing and closing remarks will be provided by the panel chairs representing industry and research institutions.