Integrating High-Performance Computing with Electron Microscopy for Scientific Insights
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Scientific communities have benefitted from a significant increase of available computing and storage resources in the last few decades. For science projects that have access to leadership scale computing resources, the capacity to produce data has been growing exponentially. Teams working on such projects must now include, in addition to the traditional application scientists, experts in various disciplines including applied mathematicians for development of algorithms, visualization specialists for large data, and I/O specialists. Sharing of knowledge and data is becoming a requirement for scientific discovery, providing useful mechanisms to facilitate this sharing is a key challenge for e-Science. Our hypothesis is that in order to decrease the time to solution for application scientists we need to lower the barrier of entry into related computing fields. We aim at improving users' experience when interacting with a vast software ecosystem and/or huge amount of data, while maintaining focus on their primary research field. In this context we present our approach to bridge the gap between the application scientists and the visualization experts through a visualization schema as a first step and proof of concept for a new way to look at interdisciplinary collaboration among scientists dealing with big data. The key to our approach is recognizing that our users are scientists who mostly work as islands. They tend to work in very specialized environment but occasionally have to collaborate with other researchers in order to take full advantage of computing innovations and get insight from big data. We present an example of identifying the connecting elements between one of such relationships and offer a liaison schema to facilitate their collaboration.
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Energy efficiency and resilience are two crucial challenges for HPC systems to reach exascale. While energy efficiency and resilience issues have been extensively studied individually, little has been done to understand the interplay between energy efficiency and resilience for HPC systems. Decreasing the supply voltage associated with a given operating frequency for processors and other CMOS-based components can significantly reduce power consumption. However, this often raises system failure rates and consequently increases application execution time. In this work, we present an energy saving undervolting approach that leverages the mainstream resilience techniques to tolerate the increased failures caused by undervolting.
Abstract not provided.
The TOP500 list has enjoyed incredible success as a metric for supercomputing performance and as a source of data for identifying technological trends, for more than two decades. Here, the project's editors reflect on its usefulness and limitations for guiding large-scale scientific computing into the exascale era.
Here we provide an overview of the past, present, and a diverse collection of future computer architecture alternatives for HPC. The end of Moore’s Law influenced the current HPC architecture focus on accelerated compute nodes composed of CPU and GPU computing components integrated into massively parallel processor architecture systems. There are many alternatives for future HPC directions, with different technologies, computing ecosystems, opportunities for lead user application-driven customization, and the role of open innovation business models. This paper provides an overview of these different new horizons for HPC, an organizing principle to focus future computing research, different public-private partnership models, and the critical role of workforce development.
A scalable approach computes in operationally-compatible time the energy dispatch under uncertainty for electrical power grid systems of realistic size with thousands of scenarios. The authors propose several algorithmic and implementation advances in their parallel solver PIPS-IPM for stochastic optimization problems. New developments include a novel, incomplete, augmented, multicore, sparse factorization implemented within the PARDISO linear solver and new multicore- and GPU-based dense matrix implementations. They show improvement on the interprocess communication on Cray XK7 and XC30 systems. PIPS-IPM is used to solve 24-hour horizon power grid problems with up to 1.95 billion decision variables and 1.94 billion constraints on Cray XK7 and Cray XC30, with observed parallel efficiencies and solution times within an operationally defined time interval. To the authors' knowledge, "real-time"-compatible performance on a broad range of architectures for this class of problems hasn't been possible prior to this work
U.S. computing leaders, including Department of Energy National Laboratories, have partnered with universities, government agencies, and the private sector to research responses to COVID-19, providing an unprecedented collection of resources that include some of the fastest computers in the world. For HPC users, these leadership machines will drive the AI to accelerate the discovery of promising treatments, enable at-scale simulations to understand the virus’s protein structure and attack mechanisms, and help inform policymakers to deploy resources effectively.
The integrity of science and engineering research is grounded in assumptions of rigor and transparency on the part of those engaging in such research. HPC community effort to strengthen rigor and transparency take the form of reproducibility efforts. In a recent survey of the SC conference community, we collected information about the SC Reproducibility Initiative activities. Here, we present the survey results in this paper. Results show that the reproducibility initiative activities have contributed to higher levels of awareness on the part of SC conference technical program participants, and hint at contributing to greater scientific impact for the published papers of the SC conference series. Stringent point-of-manuscript-submission verification is problematic for reasons we point out, as are inherent difficulties of computational reproducibility in HPC. Future efforts should better decouple the community educational goals from goals that specifically strengthen a research work's potential for long-term impact through reuse 5-10 years down the road.
State of the art Engineering and Science codes have grown in complexity dramatically over the last two decades. As a consequence application teams have adopted more sophisticated development strategies, leveraging third party libraries, deploying comprehensive testing and using advanced debugging and profiling tools. In todays environment of diverse hardware platforms, these applications also desire performance portability - avoiding the need to duplicate work for various platforms - which makes it necessary that these tools and libraries also work across the various systems. The Kokkos EcoSystem provides that portable software stack. Based on the Kokkos Core Programming Model, the EcoSystem provides math libraries, interoperability capabilities with Python and Fortran, and Tools for analysing, debugging, and optimizing applications. In this paper we will provide an overview of the components, discuss some specific use cases, and highlight how co-designing these components enables a more developer friendly experience.
Abstract not provided.
We have simulated, for the first time, the long term evolution of the Milky Way Galaxy using 51 billion particles on the Swiss Piz Daint supercomputer with our N-body gravitational tree-code Bonsai. Herein, we describe the scientific motivation and numerical algorithms. The Milky Way model was simulated for 6 billion years, during which the bar structure and spiral arms were fully formed. This improves upon previous simulations by using 1000 times more particles, and provides a wealth of new data that can be directly compared with observations. We also report the scalability on both the Swiss Piz Daint and the US ORNL Titan. On Piz Daint the parallel efficiency of Bonsai was above 95%. The highest performance was achieved with a 242 billion particle Milky Way model using 18600 GPUs on Titan, thereby reaching a sustained GPU and application performance of 33.49 Pflops and 24.77 Pflops respectively.
Currently deployed petascale supercomputers typically use toroidal network topologies in three or more dimensions. While these networks perform well for topology-agnostic codes on a few thousand nodes, leadership machines with 20,000 nodes require topology awareness to avoid network contention for communication-intensive codes. Topology adaptation is complicated by irregular node allocation shapes and holes due to dedicated input/output nodes or hardware failure. In the context of the popular molecular dynamics program NAMD, we present methods for mapping a periodic 3-D grid of fixed-size spatial decomposition domains to 3-D Cray Gemini and 5-D IBM Blue Gene/Q toroidal networks to enable hundred-million atom full machine simulations, and to similarly partition node allocations into compact domains for smaller simulations using multiple copy algorithms. Additional enabling techniques are discussed and performance is reported for NCSA Blue Waters, ORNL Titan, ANL Mira, TACC Stampede, and NERSC Edison.
The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) has deployed multiple large-scale parallel file systems (PFS) to support its operations. During this process, OLCF acquired significant expertise in large-scale storage system design, file system software development, technology evaluation, benchmarking, procurement, deployment, and operational practices. Based on the lessons learned from each new PFS deployment, OLCF improved its operating procedures, and strategies. This paper provides an account of our experience and lessons learned in acquiring, deploying, and operating large-scale parallel file systems. We believe that these lessons will be useful to the wider HPC community.
Applications on modern supercomputers are increasingly limited by the cost of data movement, but mainstream programming systems have few abstractions for describing the structure of a program's data. Consequently, the burden of managing data movement, placement, and layout currently falls primarily upon the programmer. To address this problem we previously proposed a data model based on logical regions and described Legion, a programming system incorporating logical regions. In this paper, we present structure slicing, which incorporates fields into the logical region data model. We show that structure slicing enables Legion to automatically infer task parallelism from field non-interference, decouple the specification of data usage from layout, and reduce the overall amount of data moved. We demonstrate that structure slicing enables both strong and weak scaling of three Legion applications including S3D, a production combustion simulation that uses logical regions with thousands of fields, with speedups of up to 3.68X over a vectorized CPU-only Fortran implementation and 1.88X over an independently hand-tuned OpenACC code.