HPC 2017-18 | High-performance computing


The Best HPC Applications of 2017


Gemma Church explores applications at the forefront of HPC research


Te term ‘best’ could be used to describe the biggest HPC application, the boldest, or the most innovative. Tis article will highlight those HPC applications where real progress has been made in the past 12 months and where challenges in this sector have been addressed. Tese challenges are not necessarily


application specific, according to Pak Lui, co-chair of the HPC|Works Special Interest Group at the HPC Advisory Council and Principal Architect at Huawei Technologies, who said: ‘In my opinion, the HPC community faces generic challenges that are shared by different applications. Te performance of the typical groups of HPC applications are all bounded by the compute,


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network communication, and storage I/O infrastructure or hardware. Te performance of the HPC applications depends on the hardware development cycles. But the HPC community is always coming up with tools and libraries to make such systems accessible for all applications to use.’ In other words, cross-application collaboration


is vital for the HPC sector to progress. Such collaboration is prevalent at the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing, which combines three major German supercomputing centres, the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), Jülich Supercomputing Centre, and Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ). All three centres work with researchers across


the science and engineering spectrum, however each one does have some specialisations. Jülich is


renowned for its fundamental research, physics work, and neuroscience work, and environmental sciences; LRZ strongly supports projects in geoscience, life sciences, and astrophysics; and the HLRS has a very strong focus on scientific engineering and industrial applications. Eric Gedenk, a science writer for the GCS,


said: ‘Currently, we have about 300 research projects that use over 100 different applications. Many of them use community codes, but many of our research projects have in-house codes to suit their particular research needs.’ One of LRZ’s highlights this year is the


earthquake/tsunami research done by Dr Michael Bader and his team, which is a finalist for a best paper award at SC17. It presents a high-resolution simulation of the 2004 Sumatra-Andaman


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