Easier Access to the CSCS Video Productions

July 27th, 2010

The videos produced by CSCS can now easily be accessed over the multimedia portal of ETH Zurich. A special flash interface allows to easily browse through the videos to search for relevant content. The videos can also be downloaded in different file format and with different quality and file sizes. So they can used for display on large screens but also downloaded on mobile devices.

The opening of the CSCS channel is a good chance to have a view to some previous talks at CSCS.

For example “The Physics and Experiments at the LHC” (see previous blog posting):

Or the talk of Kathleen Kobe on “Concurrent Collections (CnC): A new approach to parallel programming” (see previous blog posting).

Or the CRAY XT5 code porting workshop of 2009.

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Monte Rosa: One Year Later

July 23rd, 2010

In June of 2009 Monte Rosa was inaugurated at CSCS (see the article on this blog). During the last year Rosa has been working day and night providing cycles to the Swiss researcher community. In this year the number of cores used by the jobs increased rapidly: 57% of the jobs use now more than 512 cores and 33% of the jobs use even more than 2048 cores (status first quarter 2010). 24% of the users are from fluid dynamics and 23% are from physics, followed by nanoscience (12%), earth and environmental sciences (11%) and chemistry (8%).

In the TOP500 ranking Rosa started at rank 23 (June 2009), moved after an upgrade to position 21 (November 2009) and is now at position 27 (June 2010).

We created a movie showing the assembly of Monte Rosa, if you want to have a look click on the image here below or follow this link »

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39th SPEEDUP Workshop on High Performance Computing

July 22nd, 2010

39th SPEEDUP Workshop on High Performance Computing,
September 6/7, 2010, at ETH Zurich


The intention of this workshop is to present and discuss the state-of-the-art in high-performance and parallel scientific computing. Presentations will focus on algorithms, applications, and software issues related to high-performance parallel computing.  The focus of the workshop on Monday Sept 6 will be on software environments for large scale simulations and on the issues of fault tolerance in massively parallel systems.

The scientific program of Sept 6 consists of seven 45-minute talks and a poster session.  Please encourage your collaborators to uploaded an abstract.  The deadline is August 28, 2010.

On Sept 7 we will organize a tutorial on hybrid MPI/OpenMP computing. It will be taught by Timothy Stitt and Neil Stringfellow (both CSCS, Manno, Switzerland).

There is a small fee of CHF 50 payable at the workshop.  For students the workshop is free of charge.

Details and the registration form can be found at http://www.speedup.ch/.

The fee for the tutorial are CHF150 payable at the workshop or tutorial.  For students the price is CHF50.

Organizing Committee:Andreas Adelmann (PSI Villigen), Peter Arbenz (ETH Zurich), Olaf Schenk (University of Basel), Vittoria Rezzonico (EPF Lausanne), Ales Janka (University of Fribourg).

Scientific program

September 6, 2010: (7 talks of 45 minutes each + poster session)

Invited Speakers:

  • Omar Gattas (University of Texas, Austin)
    Petascale AMR, with Applications to Solid Earth Geophysics Problems
  • Matthew Knepley (Argonne National Laboratory):
    PETSc: the Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation
  • Michael Heroux (Sandia National Laboratories):
    Trilinos for Emerging Parallel Computing Systems
  • Rolf Krause (USI Lugano):
    UG (Unstructured Grids): Development of PDE Solvers for Biomechanics
  • Romain Teyssier (University of Zurich):
    Fault Tolerance Issues in Large Scale Applications
  • Christian Engelmann (Oak Ridge National Laboratory):
  • Beyond Application-Level Checkpoint/Restart – Advanced Software Approaches for Fault Resilience
  • Georg Hager (University of Erlangen-Nuernberg):
    Hybrid MPI/OpenMP Computing

September 7, 2010:  Tutorial

Tutorial on hybrid MPI/OpenMP computing.  It will be taught by Timothy Stitt and Neil Stringfellow (both CSCS, Manno, Switzerland).

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HP2C – Call for Focused Projects on Risk Analysis for Global Challenges

July 16th, 2010

The High Performance and High Productivity Computing Platform (HP2C) invites the submission of proposals focused on applications of high performance computing to risk analysis for global challenges.

These projects should focus on advances in mathematical methods, algorithms and computational techniques to better exploit next generation supercomputing platforms for the analysis and forecast of global challenges, including climate change, regional weather prediction, natural hazards, but also social challenges like major disruptions in financial markets. Given the short duration and the limitation of budget, projects are expected to focus on methodological development and testing to prove the feasibility and impact of the new methods proposed. Projects focused merely on methods and algorithms for current low-end computer platforms will not be supported.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Video: Concurrent Collections (CnC) by Kathleen Knobe

July 8th, 2010

Last May Kathleen Knobe of Intel visited CSCS giving a talk on Concurrent Collections (CnC). We are happy to share with you the video of her very interesting talk (click on the picture here below to start the movie).

A common approach in designing parallel languages is to provide some high level handles to manipulate the use of the parallel platform. This exposes some aspects of the target platform, for example, shared vs. distributed memory. It may expose some but not all types of parallelism, for example, data parallelism but not task parallelism. This approach must find a balance between the desire to provide a simple view for the domain expert and provide sufficient power for tuning. This is hard for any given architecture and harder if the language is to apply to a range of architectures. Either simplicity or power is lost.

Instead of viewing the language design problem as one of providing the programmer with high level handles, we view the problem as one of designing an interface. On one side of this interface is the programmer (domain expert) who knows the application but needs no knowledge of any aspects of the platform. On the other side of the interface is the performance expert (programmer or program) who demands maximal flexibility for optimizing the mapping to a wide range of target platforms (parallel / serial, shared / distributed,
homogeneous / heterogeneous, etc.) but needs no knowledge of the domain.

Concurrent Collections (CnC) is based on this separation of concerns. The talk will present CnC and its benefits.

Additional video formats »

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