Perth’s GPU Hackathon looks to speed research computing

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The second annual GPU Hackathon kicked off in Perth this week, a collaboration between Oak Ridge National LaboratoryNVIDIA and the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre. Attended by five teams from across Australia, the five-day hack event centers around adapting scientific code for accelerated computing.

We’re excited to continue our collaboration with international research facilities”, said Mark Stickells, Executive Director at Pawsey. “Pawsey accelerates scientific discovery through technology, expertise and collaboration; and this is demonstrated by the GPU Hackathon. The Hackathon is a great example of collaboration and engagement with industry, academia and government.”

Some experienced programmers from the inaugural Hackathon in 2018 are back, while some are new faces in the game. Teams include Let’s Get Physical from Curtin University, HiPSTAR EXPRESS from the University of Melbourne, Team ASKAP from the CSIRO, Perth IT company Manufacturing Intelligence, and Multi Party Time! from Data61.

The Hackathon is a mentored workshop, with teams collaborating to highlight the importance and benefits of Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) technology. The GPU experts mentoring the teams draw together experience spanning six countries and organisations including the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, National Supercomputing Centre Singapore, Pawsey Supercomputing Centre, NVIDIA, the University of Melbourne, and Swinburne University of Technology.

Contrary to popular belief, GPUs aren’t just for gaming – they offer an exceptionally high memory bandwidth which accelerate or increase efficiencies of data processing using parallel codes. GPU acceleration paired with thousands of cores is enabling scientists and researchers to achieve performance increases of up to ten times in their computations.

Combining advanced computing technologies with world-leading mentors and researchers who want to learn and accelerate their code will deliver exciting results and raise awareness of the power of GPUs and supercomputing.”

This Hackathon is one of many that ORNL is hosting this year. KISTI in South Korea hosted the first Hackathon for 2019, and additional events are coming up in Germany, USA, the UK, and Switzerland.

Check out our insideHPC Events Calendar