Parallel programs need new maths
TRIUMF Lab Tier-1 Tape Library
From the PRACEdays15 conference in Dublin, Tom Wilkie and Robert Roe report on the inadequacies of Open Source and commercial software, support for Irish industry,
and HPC policies in Europe and Japan T
he drive to create exascale computers may force researchers and engineers to reverse the way in which they approach the task of writing soſtware.
Tey will have to start from parallelism and only then think of the mathematics, Mark Parsons, director of the UK’s Edinburgh Parallel Computer Centre (EPCC), told the PRACEdays15 conference in Dublin at the end of May. He warned that two major Open Source
soſtware packages, OpenFoam and OpenIFS, would not scale to the massively parallel architectures of the future. ‘It will cost many man years to port the codes to exascale and massive parallelism by 2025,’ he said. Te EU-funded Cresta project, to review
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soſtware and encourage co-design for exascale, had revealed that OpenIFS ‘is in no way appropriate for exascale,’ he continued. Te situation for OpenFoam, which is one of the most widely used CFD codes, is worse, however. ‘It is not even a petascale code. It’s never going to get to exascale in its current form.’ In fact, Parsons said, the Cresta workers ‘gave up on’ OpenFoam. OpenIFS is, technically, not open source
despite the name, but perpetual licences for institutions, though not individuals, are avail free of charge. Te project is led by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) to provide an easy-to-use, exportable version of the IFS system in use at ECMWF for operational weather forecasting. Te community
supporting the code had taken Cresta’s point to heart and were starting to look at how they could restructure the soſtware. Eric Chaput from Airbus underlined the
importance of open-source soſtware by saying that in future Airbus would be using open source soſtware as the basis for its engineering simulation work. It would not be relying on commercial soſtware from the independent soſtware vendors (ISVs) because of the cost of licences. Commercial soſtware was too expensive, even for a company of the size of Airbus, he explained: because most licencing models were ‘per user’ Airbus would have to pay for more licences than the company was willing to do. In any case, according to Lee Margetts,
@scwmagazine l
www.scientific-computing.com
Jason Clarke Photography
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