Visiting lecture by Professor Martin Berzins: High Performance Computing in the Exascale Era

Guest Lecturer: Professor Martin  Berzins, SCI Institute and School of Computing University of Utah

Time and place: 11th October 2022 at 2:15 PM, lecture hall R1, Aalto University, School of Engineering, Department of Civil Engineering

Title: High Performance Computing in the Exascale Era

The era of Exascale Computing (10 to the power of 18 floating point operations per second) has arrived. This talk will explain what this means for high performance computing and consider the challenges posed by the new computing paradigms being introduced. These challenges will be illustrated through the asynchronous task-based Uintah Computational Framework which is being prepared to make portable use of Exascale systems.

This talk describes the evolution of Uintah to be ready for such architectures.

A key part of this preparation has been the adoption of the Kokkos performance portability layer in Uintah. The sheer size of the Uintah code base has made it imperative to have a representative benchmark. The design of this benchmark and the use of Kokkos within it is discussed.

Results are shown for two benchmarks executing workloads representative of typical Uintah applications. These results demonstrate single-source portability across the DOE Summit and NSF Frontera systems with good strong-scaling characteristics. The challenge of forthcoming runs on exascale systems is considered.

Lessons are drawn from this for portable use of HPC machines in the Exascale era.

Acknowledgement: Parts of this talk are based on the paper J.K. Holmen, D. Sahasrabudhe, M.Berzins  “Porting Uintah to Heterogeneous Systems,” In Proceedings of the Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing Conference (PASC22) Best Paper Award, ACM, 2022.

http://www.sci.utah.edu/publications/Hol2022b/pasc22.pdf

Visiting lecture of professor Martin Berzins is hosted by Associate Professor Wojciech Sołowski,  (Geotechnical Engineering) | Geoengineering MSc Programme Director

Civil Engineering Department | Aalto University| https://people.aalto.fi/wojciech.solowski | https://solowski.info |