Recap: CDAC Three Day Workshop on OpenPOWER for HPC and Big Data Analytics

By Dr. VCV Rao, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing

Recently, the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) in India held a three-day workshop where presenters from various industries examined the progress and opportunity to leverage OpenPOWER technology. The objective of the workshop was to understand performance and scalability of high performance computing (HPC) application kernels and Big Data processing, and data science applications on RISC-based IBM POWER8 systems with GPUs as a part of the OpenPOWER Foundation.

Representatives from IBM, Mellanoax and CDAC discussed the POWER8 architecture, application performance compared to x86 systems, and how easily we can port the applications running on x86 to POWER8. They also discussed the Power architecture’s roadmap, looking ahead to updates and enhancements. Finally, we discussed accelerator technology like GPUs and FPGAs. With technology like NVIDIA NVLink and CAPI, the Foundation is very well positioned to harness the power of acceleration.

In the three-day agenda workshop, we learned a lot about high performance computing, in particular how to make use of NVIDIA GPUs in parallel programming to improve the performance of the HPC applications. We also discussed how we can achieve greater bandwidth by using Mellanox Interconnect and expand our capabilities in FPGA programming.

A lot of time was spent discussing how Big Data applications can scale with POWER8 and GPUs. To answer that question, this workshop provided us with lots of different compiler toolkits, various kinds of libraries, like CUDA for GPUs, and writing and testing parallel code like MPI and OpenMP.

CDAC is dedicated to advancing Supercomputing research and workshops like these help us to bring together discussion around many important topics. To learn more about CDAC and our work in the OpenPOWER Foundation, join us at future workshops by registering on our Events Page.  We look forward to the next workshop. Let us know what you would like to see on the agenda in the comments.