A PCIe Congestion-Aware Performance Model for Densely Populated Accelerator Servers

“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.”

Panel Discussion: The Exascale Era

In this video from Switzerland HPC Conference, Rich Brueckner from insideHPC moderates a panel discussion on Exascale Computing. “The Exascale Computing Project in the USA is tasked with developing a set of advanced supercomputers with 50x better performance than today’s fastest machines on real applications. This panel discussion will look at the challenges, gaps, and probable pathways forward in this monumental endeavor.”

Panelists:

Gilad Shainer, HPC Advisory Council
Jeffrey Stuecheli, IBM
DK Panda, Ohio State University
Torsten Hoefler, ETH Zurich
Rich Graham, Mellanox

Application Profiling at the HPCAC High Performance Center

“To achieve good scalability performance on the HPC scientific applications typically involves good understanding of the workload though performing profile analysis, and comparing behaviors of using different hardware which pinpoint bottlenecks in different areas of the HPC cluster. In this session, a selection of HPC applications will be shown to demonstrate various methods of profiling and analysis to determine the bottleneck, and the effectiveness of the tuning to improve on the application performance from tests conducted at the HPC Advisory Council High Performance Center.”

HPC Advisory Council Announces Global Conference Series for 2017

Today the HPC Advisory Council announced key dates for its 2017 international conference series in the USA and Switzerland. The conferences are designed to attract community-wide participation, industry leading sponsors and subject matter experts. “HPC is constantly evolving and reflects the driving force behind many medical, industrial and scientific breakthroughs using research that harnesses the power of HPC and yet, we’ve only scratched the surface with respect to exploiting the endless opportunities that HPC, modeling, and simulation present,” said Gilad Shainer, chairman of the HPC Advisory Council. “The HPCAC conference series presents a unique opportunity for the global HPC community to come together in an unprecedented fashion to share, collaborate, and innovate our way into the future.”

Call for Participation: HPC Advisory Council Stanford Conference in February

The HPC Advisory Council Stanford Conference has issued its Call for Papers and Presentations. The event takes place Feb. 7-8 in Palo Alto, CA. “We invite submissions introducing a wide range of topics, levels and considerations in HPC architectures, applications and usage – from fundamentals to the latest advances and hot topic areas. Submissions can be proposed as papers or presentation only (without papers).”

12 Teams to Compete in ISC 2017 Student Cluster Competition

“The competition is an opportunity to showcase the world’s brightest computer science students’ expertise in a friendly, yet spirited competition,” said Martin Meuer, managing director of the ISC Group. “We are very pleased to host these 12 compelling university teams from around the world. We look forward to this very engaging competition and wish the teams good luck.”

CHPC Takes Top Honors Once Again at ISC-HPCAC Student Cluster Competition

Today the HPC Advisory Council announced the final results of the ISC 2016 Student Cluster Competition and the opening of 2017 team submissions. For the third time, South Africa’s Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) student team came away as the SCC Grand Champions, the first ‘three-peat’ in the history of the competition. The overall winners […]

Video: Student Cluster Competition Awards Ceremony at ISC 2016

In this video from ISC 2016 in Frankfurt, Gilad Shainer from the HPC Advisory Council hosts the Student Cluster Awards Ceremony. “The overall winning team this year was from CHPC in South Africa. As repeat winners, CHPC is establishing a bit of dynasty in this competition that is really fun to watch.”

ISC to Livestream Student Cluster Awards Ceremony

ISC 2016 is only a week away, and the conference expects to host over 3000 supercomputing professionals from around the world. To bring some of the highlights home, the conference is planning to livestream video from the HPCAC-ISC Student Cluster Competition Awards Session.

HPC Advisory Council Announces 4th Annual RDMA Programming Competition

Today the HPC Advisory Council announced its Fourth Annual RDMA Programming Competition in China. Designed to support undergraduate curriculum and talent development, this unique hands-on competition furthers students study, experience and mastery.