OpenPOWER Academic Discussion Group Workshop Promotes Collaboration

The OpenPOWER Foundation’s Academic Discussion Group hosted its 5th annual workshop on November 6, 2020.

The annual event is intended to facilitate interaction and engagement between Academic institutions, with a focus on supporting developers from different application areas of scientific computing, data analytics and artificial intelligence.

The 2020 workshop was hosted by Dirk Pleiter of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Ganesan Narayanasamy of IBM, Sameer Shende of the University of Oregon and Fabrizio Magugliani of E4 Computer Engineering.

A summary of the content shared at the event is included below.

Extreme-scale Scientific Software Stack

• The DOE Exascale Computing Project Software Technology focus area is developing an HPC software ecosystem that will enable the efficient and performant execution of exascale applications.
• Professor Sameer Shende, University of Oregon
• View the presentation here

Open OnDemand platform for POWER systems

• IBM Power plus PowerAI systems are arguably the most advanced and highly architected systems for machine learning / deep learning on the market. Here, we introduce Open OnDemand as a platform to enable to new users on Power-based HPC clusters.
• Professor Robert Settlage, Virginia Tech
• View the presentation here

LBM performance in Exascale era

• In the next two years, the first Exascale class supercomputers will be delivered. In this talk, starting from the results obtained using Marconi100, we try to extrapolate a reasonable performance scenario that a Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) based code can achieve using these high-end HPC machines.
• Giorgio Amati, CINECA
• View the presentation here

Parallel Comparison of Huge DNA Sequences in Multiple GPUs with Pruning

• Sequence comparison is a task performed in several Bioinformatics applications daily all over the world. This talk presents a variant of the block pruning approach that runs in multiple GPUs, in homogeneous or heterogeneous environments.
• Professor Alba Cristina Magalhaes Alves de Melo, University of Brasilia and Mr. Marco Figueiredo, University of Brasilia
• View the presentation here

Middleware for Message Passing Interface (MPI) and Deep Learning on OpenPOWER platforms

• This talk focuses on high-performance and scalable middleware for Message Passing Interface (MPI) and Deep Learning on OpenPOWER platforms with NVIDIA GPGPUs and RDMA-enabled interconnects (InfiniBand and RoCE).
• Professor DK Panda, Ohio State University
• View the presentation here

Parallelware Analyzer: Data race detection for GPUs using OpenMP

• This talk presents a new innovative approach to parallel programming based on two pillars: first, an open catalog of rules and recommendations that leverage parallel programming best practices; and second, the automation of quality assurance for parallel programming through new static code analysis tools specializing in parallelism that integrate seamlessly into professional software development tools.
• Manuel Arenaz, Appentra and University of A Coruña
• View the presentation here

The Marconi100 high-frequency power monitoring system

• The availability of high-resolution, real-time power measurements of high-performance computing systems (HPC) opens the door to new applications, especially in the fields of security, malware detection and anomaly detection. This presentation describes the initial work done on the Marconi100 system where, using the OpenBMC framework, it is possible to obtain high resolution power measurements of a server without the need for additional hardware.
• Francesco Beneventi, University of Bologna
• View the presentation here

Exploring the Power of Containerization to Improve Data - and HPC-Education

• Hands-on learning over big data sets is complicated by several factors including data movement, bandwidth consumption. To understand the analytics at scale, students need a uniform learning environment to fulfill their learning needs on top of multiple different infrastructures starting from their personal laptop to different types of high-performance computing cluster. This presentation demonstrates how ‘Onstitute’ addresses this issue utilizing the power of containerization on top of cutting edge HPC-technologies such as, POWER-based hardware.
• Professor Arghya Das, University of Wisconsin Platteville

Memory is everywhere and… is often the bottleneck

• The POWER9 processor brought the OpenCapi interface which provides a huge bandwidth and very low latency to systems, but also keeps the data coherency. This standard is used by hardware accelerators to off-load applications bringing dedicated optimized processing to servers, but also to manage all new technology host memory types. This presentation includes real use cases to show its amazing capabilities through huge data acquisition chain used in synchrotron.
• Alexandre Castellane, IBM France and Mr. Bruno Mesnet, IBM France
• View the presentation here

FPGA acceleration of Spark SQL queries using Apache Arrow and OpenCAPI

• Apache Spark is one of the most widely used big data analytics frameworks due to its user-friendly API. However, the high level of abstraction in Spark introduces large overheads to access modern high-performance heterogeneous hardware accelerators such as FPGAs. This talk discusses solutions to accelerate Spark SQL queries using FPGAs and to offload these computations transparently with little user configuration.
• Akos Hadnagy, Delft University of Technology
• View the presentation here

Power 10 features

• POWER10 is IBM’s next generation POWER micro-processor that includes superior attributes for enterprise, cognitive and high-performance computing. This talk will describe many of the innovations and capabilities of POWER10 that provide a strong foundation for high-performance computing workloads.
• Brain Thompto, IBM and Mr. Bill Starke, IBM
• View the presentation here

Disaggregated memory technologies and future opportunities in the HPC world

• Traditional server trays encapsulate memory, computational units and accelerators creating physical constraints that limit clusters design flexibility. But, for what concerns memory, this is not the only option anymore. This talk explores how disaggregated memory technologies bring future opportunities in HPC scenarios.
• Michele Gazzetti, IBM Research Europe