The objective of this contest is to award the boldest industrial HPC application – we want to see how far one can take this technology in changing the present paradigms of European industry. This competition is open to all fields of HPC.

The conditions are as follows:

• It is not necessary to take part in the seminar in order to participate in the Competition
• The solution must pertain to industry, i.e. it must be possible to apply it in an industrial context with clear benefits – there must be a market potential for that kind of solution
• The solutions must represent some level of implementation maturity – we are not looking just for ideas but rather for working solutions, although we will also accept those in early implementation stages

Application deadline: March 16, 2012

Additional information about the competition »

Senior HPC Specialist

This position is based in Basel, Switzerland, and is a long-term contract starting asap

You will be the responsible person for managing the operation and support as well as maintenance and application optimization. Liaising with the system owners, taking care of all service management processes, being in charge of incident and change management as well as supervising the support activities are part of your daily job.

Your skills:

• 4+ years of experience in High Performance Computing (Cluster environment)
• Strong work experience with cluster system management
• Experience in Linux administration (RHEL 4/5), as well as Apache, mySQL and PHP
• Know-how of Linux application and software installation
• Solid understanding of Java web applications (Tomcat, JBOSS)
• Expertise in Job Scheduling/Queuing systems (e.g. SGE, LSF, PBS)
• Scripting experience is a plus
• Previous working experience in an international environment required
• Awareness of regulated environment processes is an advantage
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills in English

Move your career forward and work in a dynamic and multinational environment. Become part of an international crowd and use this opportunity to get to know a globe spanning and renowned company.

The personnal consulting service in charge of this opening is Elan Computing Schweiz AG (http://www.elanit.ch). For more information you may contact Alexandra Dudczak +41 (0)61 282 22 13.

Send your CV to alexandra.dudczak@elanit.ch (you may like to tell having read about the opening on hpc-ch).

“Fortran for Scientific Computing”
March 5-9, 2012, in Stuttgart

For more details visit the web page of the course »

Registration deadline is Feb. 5, 2012.

Abstract

This course is dedicated for scientists and students to learn (sequential) programming with Fortran for scientific applications. The course teaches newest Fortran standards. Hands-on sessions will allow users to immediately test and understand the language constructs.

Content

• Fortran syntax overview: Basics – Program units – Dynamic data – IO
• Obsolete features of Fortran
• Fortran intrinsics
• Multiple source files
• Optimisation of single processor performance
• Features of Fortran 2003 and 2008
• Coarray Fortran
• Fortran Development Live Environment (FonDLE)

Registration

Via online registration form »

Fee

• Students of German universities: none
• Members of German universities and public research institutes: none
• Members of other universities and public research institutes: 120 EUR
• Others: 400 EUR (will be collected on the first day of the course, cash only)

Prerequisites

• Familiarity with Linux and Linux editors is recommended
• Basics/principles of programming (in any language)
• Basic mathematics (integration and differentiation)

Programming GPU Devices using OpenACC Directives on the Cray XK6
March, 6-7  2012
CSCS in Manno

The registration fee is of CHF 150 including the coffee breaks.

Registration and agenda »

Contents

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

• Profile application
• Using the accelerator hardware counters
• Analysis of data transfers
• Add data regions

40th SPEEDUP Workshop on High Performance Computing,
taking place on February 6/7, 2012, at University of Basel, Switzerland

The workshop is open for researchers, students and scientific and industrial partners. The intention  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 February 6 will be “Scalable Heterogeneous Computing and Programming Models for Computational Science”.

More information and a registration page for the Colloquium or Colloquium+Tutorial are available here »

The fees are:

• Colloquium: CHF 50, free for students
• Tutorial  : CHF 150, CHF 50 for students

The Colloquium Day, February 6, 2012

The following invited speakers will present and discuss the state-of-the-art in high-performance and parallel scientific computing (6 talks of 45 minutes each + poster session):

• Prof. Jeff Vetter (Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
• Dr.   Peter Tang (Intel)
• Dr.   Brad Chamberlain (Cray)
• Prof. Paolo Bientinesi (RWTH Aachen)
• Prof. Dimitri Komatitsch (CNRS)
• Prof. Bastien Chopard (University of Geneva)

To promote fast exchange of information in our community, a poster session with contributed posters will take place also on Feb 6. Please, encourage your collaborators to register with a poster title and upload an abstract for their posters, the deadline is January 28, 2012.

The Tutorial Day, Feb 7, 2012

On February 7 Speedup will organize a tutorial on Intel Threading Building Blocks taught by Hans Pabst (Intel).

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
• Hands-on: clustering, network, troubleshooting, tuning, optimizations

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.

Additional information »

Register now »

Photograph of the superconducting 3-qubit-processor mounted on and connected to a high frequency printed circuit board. (Image: Quantum Device Lab, ETH Zurich)

In a classical computer there happens one error in about ten quadrillion (10¹⁶) operations. The goal in quantum computing is to have less than one error in 10.000 (10⁴) operations. Lars Steffen, PhD student in Wallraff’s group and co-author of the publication says that this is a reasonable goal, since errors in quantum computation can never be avoided. «If you want to do complicated quantum information processing, these errors need to be corrected», Andreas Wallraff said.

ETH-professor Andreas Wallraff and his team could now realize a Toffoli gate using a chip with superconducting circuits and could verify its functionality with the newest methods. The results of the study were now published in «Nature».

Read the full article on the CSCS web pages »

Have a look at the movie (in German)

Home page of the conference with additional information »

The increasing complexity, performance, cost and energy efficiency needs of current and future applications require novel and innovative approaches for the design of computing systems. Boundaries between state of the art and revolutionary innovation constitute the computing frontiers that must be pushed forward to provide the support required for the advancement of science, engineering and information technology. The Computing Frontiers conference focuses on a wide spectrum of advanced technologies and radically new solutions relevant to the development of the whole spectrum of computer systems, from embedded to high-performance computing.

Authors are invited to submit full papers to the main conference and Ph.D. students are invited to submit an extended abstract for a special Ph.D. forum and poster session.

Papers are solicited in, but not limited to, the following areas:

• Applications, programming and performance analysis of advanced architectures
• Next-generation high performance computing and systems
• Accelerators: many-core, GPU, custom, reconfigurable, embedded, and hybrid
• Defect- and variability-tolerant designs, dependable computing
• Power and energy efficiency: architectures, compilers and algorithms
• Virtualization and virtual machines
• Cloud-, internet-scale, service-oriented and smart infrastructure computing
• Compilers and operating systems: adaptive, run-time, and auto-tuning
• System management and security
• Quantum and nano-scale computing
• Impact of novel technology (e.g. NV memory, silicon photonics) on computing
• Computational neuroscience, neuromorphic and biologically-inspired architectures
• Computational aspects of intelligent systems and robotics
• Reconfigurable, autonomic, organic, and self-organizing computation and systems
• Interfaces and visualization for emerging applications and systems
• Novel frontiers in computational science and scientific data repositories
• Storing, managing, analyzing, and searching  large data sets (” big data “)
• Sensors and sensor networks

In fact the infrastructure is not located only in Geneva but is scattered all around the world. A very powerful grid of supercomputers allows to analyze the huge amount of data being produced.

CSCS is also contributing to the experiment by running a Tier-2 cluster used by Swiss particle physicists. Last October we have been invited by our physicists colleagues to visit where the data we are analyzing is coming from. We visited CERN and in particular the control room for the ATLAS experiment and the facility used to test the magnets used to accelerate the particles.

In addition we have also visited the CMS monitoring/shifters room, the LHC monitoring room, the (formerly) Heavy Ions initial accelerator that is now the first circular accelerator after the linear one in the beginning, and the beginning of everything, where the small bottle of hydrogen is.

CERN Accelerator Complex

Since this is Christmas time, we decided to put almost the full length of our visit at CERN. The movies are only recommended to people really liking physics and technology and that do not get bored too quickly…

In the movies you will have the chance to see what is happening behind the scenes at CERN:

• The plenary room where all the important announcement are made
• The “couloir des pas perdus”
• The ATLAS building from outside
• The ATLAS control room with scientists and technicians working in front of their control monitors
• The CMS satellite control room
• The data canter of CERN with thousands of servers
• The first node of the modern WWW infrastructure used by Tim Berners Lee (a NeXT workstation with a small hand written label “This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER DOWN!!”)

We would like Marc Goulette (ATLAS visit) and Szymon Gadomski (magnet testing facility visit) for their availability as all our colleagues at CHIPP supporting our work.

Enjoy and meet again next year on this blog.

ATLAS Experiment

Magnet Testing Facility