How GPU Hackathons Bring HPC to More Users

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Fernanda Foertter, HPC User Support Specialist, ORNL

In this video, Fernanda Foertter from ORNL describes how GPU Hackathons are helping scientists bring HPC to their applications.

General-purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs) potentially offer exceptionally high memory bandwidth and performance for a wide range of applications. The challenge in utilizing such accelerators has been the difficulty in programming them. Enter GPU Hackathons; Our mentors come from national laboratories, universities and vendors, and besides having extensive experience in programming GPUs, many of them develop the GPU-capable compilers and help define standards such as OpenACC and OpenMP.

The goal of each hackathon is for current or prospective user groups of large hybrid CPU-GPU systems to send teams of at least 3 developers along with either a (potentially) scalable application that could benefit from GPU accelerators, or an application running on accelerators that need optimization. There will be intensive mentoring during this 5-day hands-on workshop, with the goal that the teams leave with applications running on GPUs, or at least with a clear roadmap of how to get there.

“OpenACC gives scientists and researchers a simple and powerful way to accelerate scientific computing without significant programming effort. The toolkit includes the PGI OpenACC Compiler, the NVIDIA Visual Profiler with CPU and GPU profiling, and the new OpenACC Programming and Best Practices Guide. Academics can get a free renewable license to the PGI C,C++ and Fortran compilers with support for OpenACC.”

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