Navigating The Transition to Heterogeneous Architectures

In this video from the Nvidia booth at SC13, James Hack from ORNL presents: Navigating The Transition to Heterogeneous Architectures.

The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) was selected as the Leadership Computing Facility (LCF) by the U.S. Department of Energy in 2004. In 2011 ORNL began a physical upgrade to Jaguar to convert it from a Cray XT5 into a Cray XK6 system to be named Titan, which was placed in the number one position on the November 2012 TOP500 list demonstrating 17.59 PF on the HPL benchmark, a 10-fold increase over the 2009 Jaguar performance. The migration to a heterogeneous architecture has presented new challenges to the application community, most notably the development of a programming strategy that allows applications to run efficiently on the hybrid architecture, while maintaining portability with other more conventional computer architectures. This talk will review the deployment of petascale capabilities at ORNL that has led to the current architectural direction and will discuss the preparations aimed at ensuring a successful transition to heterogeneous architectures for some key simulation problems, including global atmospheric modeling.

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