HPC news
COMPUTING F
ollowing progress on the road to exascale is an interesting and entertaining exercise as more players get involved,
predictions get more aggressive and politics and national pride take charge. And of course, the hype meter is overworked as more and more companies claim to have the answers. Funds committed to reaching exascale seem to be growing by the week. But let’s not forget – funding commitments don’t always result in cheques being written.
The cultures and government infrastructures of China and Japan
represent incredibly powerful forces capable of aligning resources, financial and other, to hold a steady course over the next eight years (approximate time for the arrival of exascale). Neither the spirit of commitment attached to national pride, nor the capability of technological innovation from these countries should be taken lightly. They’re indeed the front runners for anyone betting on this race. Europe is also looking very strong
right now. The European Commission has recently decided to double its stake to 1.2 billion Euros and Intel and others have pooled resources under the
HPC comment
Manoj Nayee, managing director at Boston, discusses the revolutionary impact of GPUs on HPC
T
he need for greater performance in the high- performance computing (HPC) arena is on the rise
as more complex computational problems become the focus of research projects. However, it takes the addition of hundreds or thousands of individual nodes to significantly improve the performance of a traditional CPU-only HPC cluster. Although this method is effective, it takes up a lot of valuable space and consumes a great deal of power, making the running of CPU-only supercomputers extremely costly. An alternative, increasingly popular approach is the hybrid computing model which combines GPUs (graphics processing units) and CPUs working together to perform HPC tasks in a fraction of the space of a traditional CPU-only cluster. As highly parallel processors, GPUs have the ability to divide complex
www.scientific-computing.com
computing tasks into thousands of smaller tasks that can be run simultaneously, enabling researchers to address some of the world’s most challenging computational problems in record time. From climate modelling to advances in medical tomography, hybrid computing is enabling a wide variety of scientific and industrial research projects to progress in ways that were previously impractical, or even impossible, due to technological limitations. The introduction of hybrid processing
represents a dramatic shift. In addition to improvements in speed, GPUs also significantly increase overall system efficiency, as measured by performance per watt, versus conventional CPU-only clusters. Studies show that the hybrid supercomputers in the Top500 list (
top500.org) are, on average, almost three times more power efficient than CPU-only systems. In an effort to make it easier for
researchers to take advantage of the capabilities of hybrid supercomputers, the technology industry has recently announced a new parallel-programming standard known as OpenACC. This is an open parallel programming standard that enables scientific and technical researchers to more easily adapt their code to run on a hybrid cluster, without the need for in-depth parallel programming knowledge.
The OpenACC initiative is anticipated to benefit a broad range of researchers that use compute-intensive applications and demand immense processing power, such as chemistry, physics, data analytics and climate research. Existing compilers from partner companies such as Cray, PGI and CAPS are expected to provide support for the standard in the coming months.
To read the full article, please visit
www.hpcprojects.com
Exascale: raising the stakes HIGH-PERFORMANCE
The race is on, says The Exascale Report’s Mike Bernhardt
umbrella of exascale research centres in various European locations. And while details have not been disclosed from the Indian government, the information is generally out now that India is committing close to $1 billion to join the race. But don’t place your wages on this race just yet. Russia has been very quiet about its exascale plans, but the country has been very solid about moving up the food chain when it comes to HPC technology and Russian supercomputer developer T-Platforms has been developing an exascale strategy for the past several years.
Never to be counted out, the US is hoping the leadership of its Department of Energy, currently under Bill Harrod, will bring the country from the underdog position to serious contender. However, current funding commitments fall way short of others in this race. Even if you piece together various pockets of funding that could go toward exascale, it’s only in the range of $100 million. So, the race is on and this next year
will prove to be interesting as we see who is willing to write those cheques.
To read the full article, please visit
www.hpcprojects.com
For regular news updates, please visit
www.hpcprojects.com/news
Diary Dates
14-17 May GPU Technology Conference 2012 San Jose’s McEnery Convention Center, USA
17-20 June
10th International Meeting on High-Performance Computing for Computational Science Kobe, Japan
17-21 June
ISC’12 - The HPC Event Hamburg, Germany
24-28 June
PRACE EU-US Summer School Dublin, Ireland
25-29 June
Advanced Research Workshop on HPC, Grids and Clouds Cetraro, Italy
l To ensure your event is listed, please send details to
editor.scw@
europascience.com
APRIL/MAY 2012 27
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