The Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing (ZIH) in Dresden has been established as an Intel Parallel Computing Center (IPCC). The collaboration between ZIH and Intel focuses on increasing the parallelism of existing scientific applications on future supercomputers consisting of many-core processors.
Led by ZIH scientists, the new IPCC carries out two projects that target an important common goal: the automatic generation of optimized parallel code for Intel’s many-core architectures and their multiple parallelization levels.
To actually exploit the full power of many-core processors and advance the scientific discovery of users on next generation high performance computing systems, we must support their applications to run on such architectures. Without software support for code optimization, they will not be able to take advantage of the improved computing performance promised by future processors.” said Prof. Wolfgang E. Nagel, ZIH director.
Code Modernization
ZIH, T-Systems SfR, and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) will join forces to bring TAU and TRACE, two leading CFD solvers from the European aerospace industry, to the Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor and subsequent coprocessors. Both solver codes will be tuned for optimal performance by leveraging all levels of parallelism provided by Xeon Phi, thereby making aerospace and CFD research codes ready for next-generation hardware accelerators. In addition, compiler techniques will be examined, to demonstrate a minimally invasive approach to transform a program into a data layout appropriate for the Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor architecture.
A second direction of research for this IPCC comes from a very different community. Modelica is a language that has become a widely used standard to describe and simulate physical and technical models in science and engineering. Along with the industrial partners Bosch-Rexroth and ITI GmbH, ZIH will enhance the OpenModelica compiler to efficiently use the new hardware, complementing ongoing research cooperation between these partners. As a result, more complex simulations may be launched on the engineer’s commodity hardware and allow shortening of the product development cycle.
Modernizing today’s technical computing applications is key to unlocking the potential of current and future hardware. We are delighted ZIH will apply their expertise to this endeavor, and look forward to the discoveries that will be enabled by this collaboration.” said Bob Burroughs, Director Technical Computing System Enabling, Intel Corporation.
ZIH is a central scientific unit of the Technische Universität Dresden with a broad spectrum of services and research activities. With its interdisciplinary orientation, ZIH supports other departments and institutions in their research and education for all matters related to information technology and computer science. In its mission to be a competence center for scientific computing, parallel programming, and performance optimization, ZIH offers HPC resources to academic users as well as support for HPC application development.
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