Attendees of this HP2C training event will learn about the Cray XK6 hybrid multi-core and GPU architecture and its programming environment.
They will learn about the OpenACC directives, which were designed to help users develop and port applications to run on heterogeneous systems. They will have an understanding on how to use the Cray Performance tools to identify “hot areas” in the code to focus the use of OpenACC directives. They will have the opportunity to experiment the OpenACC directives with the Cray Compilation Environment (CCE). In addition, they will learn about the Cray scientific libraries for accelerators and will learn and experiment Allinea’s DDT and Cray’s Performance Tools for debugging and performance tuning of heterogeneous applications on the Cray XK6 systems.
Attendees are encouraged to bring in their own applications and codes for the hands-on sessions. Experts from Cray PE, OpenACC and libsci development and performance tools and Allinea DDT debugger will be present at the meeting for discussions and feedback. We also invite current users who have their applications running successfully on the Cray XK6 system to present brief user experience talks.
Agenda
- Welcome
- Overview of the Cray XK6 system
- Introduction to Cray XK6 Programming Environment
- Support for GPU application development and execution
GPU development environments (CUDA C & Fortran, OpenCL & OpenACC from Cray & PGI)
GPU accelerated libraries
Message passing communication (MPI)
- Introduction to OpenACC
- Development cycle of application porting
Static analysis of the application
Find hot loops
Scoping Analysis
Add OpenMP
Create OpenACC regions from OpenMP regions
- Using libsci_acc
- Debugging
- Performance tuning
The HPC Advisory Council and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre will host again the HPC Advisory Council Switzerland Conference 2012 in the
Lugano Convention Centre, Lugano, Switzerland, March 13-15, 2012
The conference will focus on High-Performance Computing education, training (including hands-on) and overview of new developments. The conference will include the following sections per day:
High Speed Networks
High Performance and Parallel I/O
Communication libraries: MPI, SHMEM, PGAS
GPU computing, CUDA, OpenCL
Big Data
Advanced topics / Technologies / development / the road to Exascale
It will bring together system managers, researchers, developers, computational scientists, students and industry affiliates for cross-training and to discuss recent HPC developments and future advancements.
At the hpc-ch booth at SC11 you could have read on a signboard that CSCS is a proud member of the HPC Advisory Board. Brian Sparks, a representative of the of the HPC Advisory Board at SC11, visited us at the booth. We asked Brian to present the board and some of his activities.
Brian tells us that the HPC Advisory Board is an open community that was started in 2008. Now, just three years later there are 270 members worldwide, a variety of ISV, OEM, independent Hardware vendors, as well as all the different end users both in academia and in research. All members come together for a common goal: being able to take advantage of HPC technologies and make them very easy to use.
According to Brian, CSCS is an important partner for the HPC Advisory Board for a number of reasons. CSCS has been the first center of excellence outside the USA, followed by China. These centers are basically providing tools and outbound activities to be able to promote HPC to users of all kinds. In the last two years the HPC Advisory Board together with CSCS have organized together three days hands-on workshops in Lugano.
The third annual workshop will be organized again with CSCS and will take place on March 13-15, 2012 in Lugano. The same place has been already booked for the fourth workshop in 2013. This is a great workshop not only for people in Switzerland but also in the surrounding countries to get in and have nice three days of heavy information in terms of MPI, parallel programming languages, GPU, storage technology, network topologies, and some hand-on clustering. At the end there will also be a little competition and some great prizes.
Brian also recognizes the importance of hpc-ch as media partner for the HPC Advisory Council. hpc-ch covers not only the workshop in Lugano but also the workshop in the ISC time frame.
We look forward to meeting Brian and the HPC Advisory Board in March 2012 in Lugano.
Torsten Hoefler, currently Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, USA, has been appointed as Assistant Professor (Tenure Track) of Computational Science at ETH Zurich.
Torsten Hoefler is internationally regarded as one of the leading young scientists in the field of high-performance computing. At the University of Illinois, he is currently involved in the development of one of the world´s most efficient supercomputers. His research interests focus on system design, programming and efficiency analysis. Torsten Hoefler will provide the Department of Computer Science, the research focus “Scientific Computing and Simulation” and the CSCS (Swiss National Supercomputing Centre) with important stimuli.
According to Torsten’s blog he had the choice between “Juelich [as] *the* top supercomputing center in Europe and ETH [as] *the* top research university in (mainland) Europe (with people like Einstein as alumni)”. Torsten also adds “It was a very hard choice and I took some time to make it final”. Finally he concludes that “Zurich is probably one of the most beautiful cities in Europe and definitely one of (if not the) most expensive city . Public transit is just a dream, I believe one really doesn´t need a car around the city”.
We are happy to welcome Torsten to HPC in Switzerland!
Nicola Bianchi (CSCS) presents the last supercomputer arrival at CSCS: The Cray XK6 supercomputer which is a trifecta of scalar, network and many-core innovation. It combines Cray´s proven Gemini interconnect, AMD’s leading multi-core scalar processors and NVIDIA´s powerful many-core GPU processors to create a true, productive hybrid supercomputer.
. Public transit is just a dream, I believe one really doesn´t need a car around the city”.