insideHPC » Exascale

Breaking Amdahl’s Law with the DEEP Project

Rich Brueckner — Fri, 24 May 2013 15:32:23 +0000

Over at the ISC Blog, Thomas Lippert from the Jülich Supercomputing Centre writes that the DEEP project is about to demonstrate that the pitfalls of Amdahl’s law can be avoided in specific situations.

The applications adapted to DEEP are selected in order to investigate and demonstrate the usefulness of the combination of hardware, system software and the programming model to leave ground and leap beyond the limits of Amdahl’s law of parallel computing. We are eager to show our first results at the ISC’13 in Leipzig.

For more information on this experiment, Lippert invites you to join the the ISC’13 BoF session entitled: Exascale Research: The European Approach on Tuesday, June 18, 2013, 9 am – 10 am in the Leipzig Congress Centre Hall 4. Read the Full Story.

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Video: House Hearing on the Exascale Challenge

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 23 May 2013 00:06:57 +0000

In this video, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology’s Subcommittee on Energy holds a May 22 hearing to examine HPC research and development challenges and opportunities, specifically as they relate to exascale computing.

Testifying before the Subcommittee were Dr. Roscoe Giles, Chairman of the Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee; Dr. Rick Stevens, Associate Laboratory Director for Computing, Environment and Life Sciences at Argonne National Laboratory; Ms. Dona Crawford, Associate Director for Computation at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; and Dr. Daniel Reed, Vice President for Research and Economic Development at the University of Iowa.

Exascale computing will be an important part of a larger effort to improve the U.S.’s overall high-end computing capability to address a broad range of academic, industrial, and national security needs. While research in next generation computing architecture and software continues to require strategic government investments, Members also explored the significant economic benefits that can arise from full utilization of existing high performance computing capabilities in ongoing scientific research.

Read the Full Story or check out the hearing charter.

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Wagering Against Exascale

Ralph — Mon, 20 May 2013 14:38:32 +0000

Over at ExtremeTech, Joel Hruska writes that the daunting challenges of achieving exascale compute levels by the end of the decade were brought home recently in a presentation by Horst Simon, the Deputy Director at NERSC. In fact, Simon has wagered $2000 of his own money that we wont get there by 2020.

But here’s the thing: What if the focus on “exascale” is actually the wrong way to look at the problem?

FLOPS has persisted as a metric in supercomputing even as core counts and system density has risen, but the peak performance of a supercomputer may be a poor measure of its usefulness. The ability to efficiently utilize a subset of the system’s total performance capability is extremely important. In the long term, FLOPS are easier than moving data across nodes. Taking advantage of parallelism becomes even more important. Keeping data local is a better way to save power than spreading the workload across nodes, because as node counts rise, concurrency consumes an increasing percentage of total system power.

Read the Full Story or Download the slides

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Japan to Enter the Race to Exascale

Ralph — Thu, 09 May 2013 15:20:06 +0000

Japan News reports that the country’s science ministry is considering development of an exascale supercomputer that would be 100 times faster than K computer, which is currently the nation’s fastest machine. With a goal of completing the machine by about 2020, the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry is preparing to request funding for conceptual designs and other areas in next fiscal year’s budget, the sources said.

Exascale computer projects are already under way in the United States, Europe and China, all aiming for completion around 2020. The working group decided to enter the fierce international race to develop an exascale supercomputer because “it would aid scientific and technological development, and help improve industrial competitiveness,” the sources said.

Read the Full Story.

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Intel Research Lab to Explore Exascale Technologies at Barcelona Supercomputing Center

Ralph — Mon, 06 May 2013 14:46:48 +0000

Electronics Weekly reports that the Barcelona Supercomputing Center is working with Intel to set up a research lab in Spain to develop technologies needed for future exascale supercomputers with up to 100 million processor cores

The BSC Exascale Laboratory will research scalable parallel run-time systems that are needed to support these very high levels of parallel computing.

BSC is one of Europe’s most renowned HPC labs and offers very interesting technology to scale run time systems, tools and applications up to exascale level,” said Stephen Pawlowski, Intel senior fellow.

Read the Full Story.

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Video: EIOW Exascale I/O Working Group

Rich Brueckner — Sun, 05 May 2013 15:06:29 +0000

In this video from the Lustre User Group 2013, Meghan McClelland from Xyratex presents: EIOW – Exascale I/O Working Group.

There is a fierce competition on the storage market to offer the best performing devices, with great management at a low price. The EIOW group, from the outset, decided that it would not attempt to offer an end-to-end solution, which would necessarily involve competing instead of working with storage providers. The focus of EIOW is on middleware to provide, for example, schemas describing data structure and layout, novel access methods to data for applications, a uniform data management infrastructure and a framework for the implementation of layered I/O software, similar in spirit to HDF5 as a specialized use of a parallel file system. We decided EIOW should be open, and have interfaces to layer on lower level storage infrastructure such as object stores, databases and file systems as provided by storage providers, to allow their expertise and leadership in this area to continue to benefit the HPC community.

Download the EIOW whitepaper and slides, or check out our LUG 2013 Video Gallery.

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Mark Seager Presents: Criteria for a Scalable Achitecture

Rich Brueckner — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 18:38:07 +0000

In this video from the 2013 Open Fabrics Developer Workshop, Mark Seager from Intel presents: Criteria for a Scalable Achitecture.

Download the Slides (PDF). You can check out more OFA videos at our Open Fabrics Workshop Video Gallery.

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Video: Lustre – Fast Forward to Exascale

Rich Brueckner — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 15:49:11 +0000

In this video from the Lustre User Group 2013 conference, Eric Barton from Intel presents: Lustre – Fast Forward to Exascale.

Back in July 2012, Whamcloud was awarded the Storage and I/O Research & Development subcontract for the Department of Energy’s FastForward program. Shortly afterward, the company was acquired by Intel. The two-year contract scope includes key R&D necessary for a new object storage paradigm for HPC exascale computing, and the developed technology will also address next-generation storage mechanisms required by the Big Data market.

The subcontract incorporates application I/O expertise from the HDF Group, system I/O and I/O aggregation expertise from EMC Corporation, object storage expertise from DDN, and scale testing facilities from Cray, teamed with file system, architecture, and project management skills from Whamcloud. All components developed in the project will be open sourced and benefit the entire Lustre community.

Download the slides (PDF). Check out more presentations at our LUG 2013 Video Gallery.

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Call for Papers: DOE Applied Mathematics Research for Exascale Computing

Rich Brueckner — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 14:22:03 +0000

The DOE Exascale Mathematics Working Group (EMWG) has issued a Call for Position Papers. Selected contributors may have the opportunity to participate in the Workshop on Applied Mathematics Research for Exascale Computing, currently planned for August 21-22, 2013 in Washington, D.C.

The ENWG was formed for the purpose of identifying mathematics and algorithms research opportunities that will enable scientific applications to harness the potential of exascale computing.

While opening up the possibility of conducting ground-breaking science, computing at the exascale will introduce difficult challenges such as extreme concurrency, memory and data motion limitations, energy control, and resilience. Substantial applied mathematics research is required to realize the full benefits of computing at the exascale.

Submissions are due April 30.

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Jack Dongarra on the Pending Disruptive Changes of the X-stack

Ralph — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 14:36:29 +0000

This week, Scientific Computing is featuring an interview with Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee. Dongarra discusses the origin of the LINPACK benchmark and why multidimensional barriers to Exascale computing will force a disruptive change in the form, function and interoperability of future software infrastructure components.

As a number of recent studies make clear, technology trends over the next decade — broadly speaking, increases of 1000X in capability over today’s most massive computing systems, in multiple dimensions, as well as increases of similar scale in data volumes — will force a disruptive change in the form, function and interoperability of future software infrastructure components (I’ll call this the X-stack) and the system architectures incorporating them.

Dongarra has several talks on Exascale topics coming up at the ISC’13 conference, which takes place June 16-20 in Leipzig, Germany. Read the Full Story.

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Obama Budget Plan Doesn’t Include Exascale

Ralph — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 15:32:22 +0000

Over at Computerworld, Patrick Thibodeau writes that President Barack Obama’s federal budget plan released this week calls for increases in federal R&D spending, but does not set a goal for building Exascale systems.

Every decade, compute power has double in alignment with Moore’s Law. The power of supercomputing has followed a similar path. Following that target, an exascale system might have been possible in the 2018 timeframe. The petaflop barrier was broken in 2008. Exascale development, however, poses unique challenges because of the enormous amount power such a system would likely need. That challenge is driving a re-thinking of all aspects of systems development. But because of funding uncertainty, federal officials have said that an exascale system may not be developed in the U.S. until 2022.

Read the Full Story.

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Video: Panel Discussion on Exascale Computing and HPC Energy Efficiency

Rich Brueckner — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 11:30:55 +0000

In this video, Intel’s Winston Saunders moderates a panel discussion on the power challenges of Exascale computing.

Panelists:

Wu Feng – Virginia Tech
Terri Quinn – LLNL
Alan Lee – AMD
George Chiu, IBM
Deva Bodas – Intel

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Thomas Sterling Presents: Towards the Exascale Target – the Arrow in Flight

Rich Brueckner — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 15:03:41 +0000

In this video from the 2013 National HPCC Conference, Dr. Thomas Sterling from Indiana University presents: Towards the Exascale Target – the Arrow in Flight.

The preceding year has witnessed a strong impetus towards the ultimate US achievement of practical exascale computing through the initiation of research and development programs. There are two trajectories in flight toward this ambitious target in the US, both guided principally by the DOE through an important partnership between the NNSA and the OS/ASCR. One, the incremental flight path through a series of successive petascale systems, is building on step-wise extensions of conventional practices for low risk and minimal disruption to ensure continued US capability growth in performing mission-critical applications throughout the remainder of this decade. The second, the advanced course of revolutionary research, has in its target cross hairs a truly general purpose and easily programmed class of exascale systems. This strategy is enabled by a set of principles that transform a once static methodology to a dynamic adaptive paradigm to advance efficiency and scalability while exhibiting a far more programmable user interface. This presentation will review the important strides made over the last year and describe the significant accomplishments that have been achieved under the guidance of the DOE leadership in establishing key programs that will maintain US competitiveness internationally and leadership at home.

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IDC Lists Top 10 HPC Market Predictions for 2013

Rich Brueckner — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 14:02:47 +0000

IDC has released its Top 10 HPC Market Predictions for 2013. The big takeaways? While the outlook is good for business, the industry goal of reaching Exascale by 2018 looks to be slipping by at least two years.

1. The Worldwide HPC Market Will Leave the Global Economic Recession Behind and Will Be in a Healthy Growth Mode. In 2009, the low point of the global economic downturn, worldwide HPC server revenue fell 13% year over year, from $9.8 billion to $8.6 billion — although the supercomputer segment for systems sold for $500,000 and above grew 35% and revenue for systems priced at $3 million and up jumped a whopping 65%. But 2010, 2011, and the first three quarters of 2012 have demonstrated sustained, record- setting growth in the global HPC market. Unlike many market segments, HPC has exited the recession.

Read the Full Story.

In related news, IDC’s HPC User Forum will take place in Tucson, Arizona on Apri 29 – May 1. Session topics include processors, coprocessors and accelerators, plus advanced visualization and potentially disruptive technologies as well as a set of talks on Big Data in HPC.

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More Noble Truths About Exascale

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 18:51:42 +0000

Over at The Exascale Report, Mike Bernhardt and Doug Black continue their series of features on the Noble Truths of Exascale. And while they aren’t very encouraging, we’ll just cut to the chase here and list them:

The U.S. is unsure about Exascale
Private industry alone can’t get us there.
The discussion of the computation barrier to exascale has been pushed to the back shelf.

The entire exascale discussion is unfortunately morphing into ‘where else could we put our money’ discussions and having a negative impact on the HPC community – slowing down our progress – and impacting competitiveness across the board. We are seeing a tension – a conflict – among the various groups who equate HPC and exascale with ‘big iron’ and those who argue that the exascale journey will produce numerous technology advances and drive both advanced computing and scientific discovery forward. The tension is most apparent among those who feel Big Data research (and funding) should take precedence over HPC.

Download the PDF or Subscribe to The Exascale Report today.

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Revolutionary Thinking, Evolutionary Technology – How Intel’s Bet on Fabric Integration will Enable Exaflops

Staff — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 21:52:59 +0000

In this special guest feature from The Exascale Report, Mike Bernhardt writes that Intel is placing a big bet on fabric integration on its journey to Exascale.

We already know exascale-class systems will be far too expensive to make them commercially available. And we’ve heard several years of discussion on the staggering power requirements an exaFLOPS system would require. So, is anyone doing anything creative to get past these barriers?

With a clever brand most of us marketing types can really appreciate, Intel’s True Scale Fabric represents an architectural change that can potentially benefit Cloud Computing, Big Data, HPC, and establish a path toward exascale.
The architectural change Intel is going for here is to bring the processor and the controller closer together. There’s more to it of course including some specialized hardware and software as one would expect, but the net effect according to Intel will be a reduction of power consumption and the density of the servers.

The move in this direction did not happen overnight. Intel has been working on this strategy for quite some time. Intel’s portfolio of assets to support this integration of storage and network controllers with Intel’s processors has been significantly enhanced with its acquisition of HPC interconnect technology from Cray, the acquisition of the Ethernet switching company, Fulcrum
Microsystems, and pulling in the InfiniBand assets of QLogic.

Joe Yaworski, Intel’s Fabric Product Marketing Manager, recently presented five key points to emphasize Intel’s wisdom in moving in this direction:

Datacenter (HPC & Cloud) growth requires new innovations to meet the growing demand and performance requirements
Fabrics are becoming the next bottleneck to an unrelenting need for data in cloud and HPC workloads
Fabric integration will be required to address the growing need for bandwidth, scalability, power and system density
Intel is uniquely positioned with its acquisitions of – Cray interconnect group, QLogic InfiniBand program and products and Fulcrum assets to meet the need with fabrics technology innovation and CPU platform integration in the future
One of the solutions for the future may be moving the fabric controller closer to the CPU. This will provide the potential for meeting high bandwidth and performance goals, while at the same time delivering the highest possible energy efficiency

For The Exascale Report, we do not consider this article in the category of a product announcement as any products based on such an integrated fabric are still in the future. We do see this as an important path to be explored, and we will continue to monitor and report on this topic.

Download the PDF or Subscribe to The Exascale Report.

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Video: Dell’s Modular HPC – Exascale Block by Block

Rich Brueckner — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 16:59:21 +0000

In this video from the HPC Advisory Council Switzerland Workshop, Kris Buggenhout from Dell presents: Modular HPC, Exascale Block by Block.

Download the Slides (PDF).

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The DEEP Project: Developing a Novel, Exascale-enabling Supercomputing Platform

Rich Brueckner — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 17:16:21 +0000

In this video from the HPC Advisory Council Switzerland Conference, Norbert Eicker from Jülich Supercomputing Centre presents: The DEEP Project.

The project DEEP will develop a novel, Exascale-enabling supercomputing platform along with the optimisation of a set of grand-challenge applications highly relevant for Europe’s science, industry and society. The DEEP System will realise a Cluster Booster Architecture that will serve as proof-of-concept for a next-generation 100 PFlop/s production system.”

Download the Slides (PDF).

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Grand Challenges Déjà Vu

Staff — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 19:21:26 +0000

In this special guest feature, Doug Black from The Exascale Report writes that, while the idea of Grand Challenges is not new, the need for powerful computational tools to solve these global issues remains unchanged.

Flash back to 1992. Do you remember the ‘Blue Book’ and the HPCC program? If this is your first exposure to the ‘Grand Challenges’ you may find this quite interesting. On November 7, 2012, senior representatives of the DOE labs sent a letter to Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu to report on a Grand Challenges Workshop on Advanced Computing for Energy Innovation held in late July – early August 2012.

While the workshop recommendations focused on what it called Technical, Structural and Incentive ‘Grand Challenges’, one of its final recommendations was to establish an Advanced Computing for Energy (ACE) program within the Department of Energy. When I read this letter, I had an intense sense of déjà vu – one of those ‘here we go again’ feelings. But in a good way.

For a moment, it felt like 1992 all over again, a year of unusually high energy and high promise in the HPC community. It’s the year we really sank our teeth into the teraFLOPS challenge. It seemed the entire community rallied in support of what the first President Bush’s science advisor, Alan Bromley, labeled the Grand Challenges – referring to high performance computing and communications. Those Grand Challenges were the challenges of science.

It was the beginning of a period of powerful government and private industry collaboration referred to as the HPCC program. I pulled this quote from the program’s overview documentation: The HPCC Program is driven by the recognition that unprecedented computational power and capability is needed to investigate and understand a wide range of scientific and engineering “grand challenge” problems.

The program’s famous “Blue Book” also made this point:

The HPCC Program is the result of several years of effort on the part of senior government, industry, and academic scientists and managers to design a research agenda to extend U.S. leadership in high performance computing and networking technologies.

So, in many ways, nothing has really changed. Again, I mean this in a good way. The 2012 appeal to address the world’s ‘Grand Challenges’ is eerily similar to what we addressed 20 years ago. HPC is an ever widening circle that keeps coming around. Twenty years ago, the Grand Challenges included climate prediction and genome mapping. Today, the great need is energy innovation and saving the environment. Tomorrow, it may be food. This is HPC and that’s how HPC works, tackling as ever the need for funding and the need for urgency to apply extreme computational resources on the greatest scientific challenges of our time.

Download the Story (PDF).

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Video: Programming Models and their Designs for Exascale Systems (Part II)

Rich Brueckner — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 11:37:13 +0000

In this video from the HPC Advisory Council Switzerland Conference, Professor D.K. Panda from Ohio State University presents: Programming Models and their Designs for Exascale Systems (Part II). Download the slides (PDF).

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