HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING
Tech Focus: Software tools
A ROUNDUP OF SOFTWARE TOOLS AVAILABLE TO SCIENTISTS USING HPC AND AI SOFTWARE
There are a wide range of software tools available to HPC
users. This article focuses on freely available or open- source tools that scientists can use to improve their software performance or increase software portability. While there are a huge number of different categories of tools available to the HPC community, the exascale projects in the US and Europe are focused on the development of open source software, or software that can facilitate the use of a wide range of resources. The trend towards
open source – or at least collaboratively produced, freely available HPC tools – helps to harness the expertise of a fragmented software ecosystem to accelerate exascale development. This is particularly relevant for the development of the first applications for exascale, as these science codes will be the first applications to run at this kind of scale. Hardware diversity is the
driving trend for portability and the development of tools can make it easier for scientists to make use of the wide variety of different potential exascale HPC architectures. LLVM, Raja, Kokkos and SYCL
12 Scientific Computing World Summer 2022
are all examples of software tools currently being used by the US Department of Energy National Labs in the development of the Exascale Computing Project (ECP). While these tools support different aspects of the HPC software stack, they share a common goal in promoting access to a wide range of resources and help scientists increase the portability of their applications. LEGaTO is an example of
a European-funded software framework for exascale computing. The software toolset has recently been released to the public and was designed to accelerate the use of heterogeneous resources, as well as specific application areas, such as machine learning, healthcare and IoT applications for smart cities. The current iteration of the
EU-funded DEEP projects, ‘DEEP-SEA’, started on 1 April 2021 and will help to underpin the European Processor Initiative (EPI), which is developing hardware
for exascale systems. DEEP-SEA will deliver the
programming environment for future European exascale systems, adapting all levels of the software stack to support highly heterogeneous compute and memory configurations. While this project is only just starting development, the goals are to allow code optimisation across existing and future architectures and systems. The software stack includes low-level drivers, computation and communication libraries, resource management and programming abstractions with associated run-time systems and tools.
Software tools Arm Developer1
provides
a suite of software tools to help port and optimise applications, including porting and optimising HPC applications for Arm and the Arm SVE. These tools are split into groups based on their application area: biosciences, chemistry and
materials, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), high-energy physics, weather and climate, benchmarks and mini-apps and visualisation. Intel2
provides several
software tools aimed at helping developers optimise HPC applications and software, including frameworks for AI and data analytics running on Intel architecture. This includes open-source HPC platform software through OpenHPC, Intel Parallel Studio XE, Intel Distribution for Python and Intel oneAPI Toolkits. LEGaTO3
(Low Energy
Toolset for Heterogeneous Computing) is a programming framework designed to support heterogeneous systems. The toolset enables scientists to make use of CPU, GPU and FPGA resources that can offload specific tasks to different acceleration technologies through its own run-time system. After three years of
research, the various elements of the European-funded
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