In this video from PASC17 in Lugano, Michele De Lorenzi from CSCS discussed the recent advancement of Piz Daint supercomputer to the #3 position on the TOP500. After that, he describes the mission of the PASC conference and the location of PASC18 next year.
HPC Workflows Using Containers
April 21, 2017 by
“In this talk we will discuss a workflow for building and testing Docker containers and their deployment on an HPC system using Shifter. Docker is widely used by developers as a powerful tool for standardizing the packaging of applications across multiple environments, which greatly eases the porting efforts. On the other hand, Shifter provides a container runtime that has been specifically built to fit the needs of HPC. We will briefly introduce these tools while discussing the advantages of using these technologies to fulfill the needs of specific workflows for HPC, e.g., security, high-performance, portability and parallel scalability.”
A PCIe Congestion-Aware Performance Model for Densely Populated Accelerator Servers
April 14, 2017 by
“MeteoSwiss, the Swiss national weather forecast institute, has selected densely populated accelerator servers as their primary system to compute weather forecast simulation. Servers with multiple accelerator devices that are primarily connected by a PCI-Express (PCIe) network achieve a significantly higher energy efficiency. Memory transfers between accelerators in such a system are subjected to PCIe arbitration policies. In this paper, we study the impact of PCIe topology and develop a congestion-aware performance model for PCIe communication. We present an algorithm for computing congestion factors of every communication in a congestion graph that characterizes the dynamic usage of network resources by an application.”
Introduction to Data Science with Spark
March 11, 2017 by
The Data Science with Spark Workshop addresses high-level parallelization for data analytics workloads using the Apache Spark framework. Participants will learn how to prototype with Spark and how to exploit large HPC machines like the Piz Daint CSCS flagship system.
Introduction to GPUs in HPC
March 9, 2017 by
“This video is from the opening session of the “Introduction to Programming Pascal (P100) with CUDA 8″ workshop at CSCS in Lugano, Switzerland. The three-day course is intended to offer an introduction to Pascal computing using CUDA 8.”
Reflecting on the Goal and Baseline for Exascale Computing
January 6, 2017 by
Thomas Schulthess from CSCS gave this Invited Talk at SC16. “Experience with today’s platforms show that there can be an order of magnitude difference in performance within a given class of numerical methods – depending only on choice of architecture and implementation. This bears the questions on what our baseline is, over which the performance improvements of Exascale systems will be measured. Furthermore, how close will these Exascale systems bring us to deliver on application goals, such as kilometer scale global climate simulations or high-throughput quantum simulations for materials design? We will discuss specific examples from meteorology and materials science.”
Video: CSCS Celebrates its 25th Anniversary
December 16, 2016 by
In this video, CSCS celebrates its 25th anniversary of high performance computing in Switzerland.
Cray Collaborates with Microsoft & CSCS to Scale Deep Learning
December 7, 2016 by
Today Cray announced the results of a deep learning collaboration with Microsoft CSCS designed to expand the horizons of running deep learning algorithms at scale using the power of Cray supercomputers. “Cray’s proficiency in performance analysis and profiling, combined with the unique architecture of the XC systems, allowed us to bring deep learning problems to our Piz Daint system and scale them in a way that nobody else has,” said Prof. Dr. Thomas C. Schulthess, director of the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS). “What is most exciting is that our researchers and scientists will now be able to use our existing Cray XC supercomputer to take on a new class of deep learning problems that were previously infeasible.”
Thomas Schulthess to Present Goals and Baselines for Exascale at SC16
October 24, 2016 by
Next month at SC16, Dr. Thomas Schulthess from CSCS in Switzerland will present a talk entitled “Reflecting on the Goal and Baseline for Exascale Computing.” The presentation will take place on Wednesday, Nov. 15 at 11:15 am in Salt Palace Ballroom-EFGHIJ.
CSCS in Switzerland to Celebrate 25 Years of Supercomputing
October 18, 2016 by
Over at CSCS, Simone Ulmer writes that the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre is turning twenty-five. First opened in 1991, CSCS supports users from Swiss and international institutions in their top-flight research and runs computers as a service facility for research associations and MeteoSwiss.
