This event is a part of the "Best Practices for HPC Software Developers" webinar series, produced by the IDEAS Productivity Project. The HPC Best Practices webinars address issues faced by developers of computational science and engineering (CSE) software on high-performance computers (HPC) and occur approximately monthly.
| Resource Information | Details |
|---|---|
| Webinar Title | When 100 FLOPS/Watt was a Giant Leap: The Apollo Guidance Computer Hardware, Software And Application In Moon Missions |
| Date and Time | 2019-07-17 01:00 pm EDT |
| Presenter | Mark C. Miller (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) |
| Registration, Information, and Archives | https://ideas-productivity.org/resources/series/hpc-best-practices-webinars/#webinar031 |
Webinars are free and open to the public, but advance registration is required through the Event website. Archives (recording, slides, Q&A) will be posted at the same link soon after the event.
Abstract
Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo Moon landings, this webinar will describe the revolutionary computer, the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC). The AGC made autonomous travel to the Moon and back not only possible but added profoundly to crew safety, flight profile accuracy and even optimized propellant use to such an extent that final missions plans traded fuel for added weight in equipment and lunar samples. The webinar will give an overview of the AGC hardware architecture, the guidance software it executed as well as the pioneering efforts in developing both. HPC/CSE code teams will discover many familiar themes such as flops/watt power constraints and performance portability challenges. The webinar will conclude with several user stories about the actual operation of the AGC in various Apollo missions.
Presenter Bio
Mark C. Miller is a computer scientist supporting the WSC program at LLNL since 1995. Among other things, he contributes to VisIt, Silo, HDF5 and IDEAS-ECP. Mark has a passion for technology through history.
