critically missing pieces in heterogeneous accelerator...

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Critically Missing Pieces in Heterogeneous Accelerator Computing

SESSION: Critically Missing Pieces in Heterogeneous Accelerator Computing

EVENT TYPE: Birds of a Feather

TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Satoshi Matsuoka, Pavan Balaji

ROOM:TCC LL5

ABSTRACT: As we look forward to the exascale era, heterogeneous architectures will play a massive role in architecting the largest systems in the world. However, much of the interest in these architectures is an artifact of the hype associated with them. For such architectures to truly be a successful HPC platform, it is important that we look beyond this hype and learn what these architectures provide and what is critically missing in these architectures. This BoF will bring together researchers working on and interested in these aspects, that would require fundamental research from the community to address in the exascale time-frame. The organizers have invited several researchers working in these areas to describe their point-of-view on this topic and provide updates on the status of software maturity for heterogeneous accelerators. Invited presenters include Wu-chun Feng, John Shalf, David Bader, Kei Hiraki and Jesus Labarta.

Session Leader Details:

Satoshi Matsuoka (Primary Session Leader) - Tokyo Institute of Technology

Pavan Balaji (Secondary Session Leader) - Argonne National Laboratory

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Energy Efficient High Performance Computing

SESSION: Energy Efficient High Performance Computing


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Simon McIntosh-Smith

ROOM:TCC 303

ABSTRACT: Energy efficiency has become a principal driving factor in HPC. With processors developed for smartphones and tablets now capable of delivering GFLOPS of performance and higher performance per Watt than even the densest servers, an emerging trend is the adoption of these embedded computing technologies for HPC. Many challenges remain before the HPC community can fully exploit processors from the embedded space. In particular, much of the HPC software stack on which the community relies, such as Fortran compilers and optimised math libraries, do not exist yet for embedded processors. This BOF will feature talks from major proponents in this area, including Krisztian Flautner (ARM), Jack Dongarra, Thomas Ludwig (Energy-Aware HPC conference) and one of the server companies starting to build products based on embedded processors. A new, open community website for Energy Efficient HPC based on embedded processors will be officially launched at the BOF.


Simon McIntosh-Smith (Primary Session Leader) - University of Bristol

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MPICH: A High-Performance Open-Source MPI Implementation

SESSION: MPICH: A High-Performance Open-Source MPI Implementation


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Darius Buntinas, Rajeev Thakur, Rusty Lusk

ROOM:TCC 205

ABSTRACT: MPICH is a popular, open-source implementation of the MPI message passing standard. It has been ported to many platforms and used by several vendors and research groups as the basis for their own MPI implementations. This BoF session will provide a forum for users of MPICH as well as developers of MPI implementations derived from MPICH to discuss experiences and issues in using and porting MPICH. Future plans for MPI-3 support and beyond will be discussed. Representatives from MPICH-derived implementations will provide brief updates on the status of their efforts. MPICH developers will also be present for an open forum discussion. All those interested in MPICH usage, development, and future directions are encouraged to attend.


Darius Buntinas (Primary Session Leader) - Argonne National Laboratory

Rajeev Thakur (Secondary Session Leader) - Argonne National Laboratory

Rusty Lusk (Secondary Session Leader) - Argonne National Laboratory

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Open Science Data Cloud Collaborative Opportunities

SESSION: Open Science Data Cloud Collaborative Opportunities


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Robert Grossman, Heidi Alvarez

ROOM:TCC 102

ABSTRACT: We are entering the era of data driven science. Moore’s law has not only increased the power and decreased the cost of computers but also of the instruments that produce experimental data. Scientists in a wide variety of disciplines are producing unprecedented volumes of data that is transforming science. Although collaborations that collect very large datasets can build their own cyber infrastructure, there is currently no cyber infrastructure that can provide a long term home for medium to large size scientific datasets. The Open Science Data Cloud (OSDC) was developed to fill this gap. It is a cloud-based infrastructure that allows scientists to manage, analyze, integrate and share medium to large size scientific datasets. It is operated and managed by the not-for-profit Open Cloud Consortium. Come to this Session to learn more about the OSDC and how to collaborate with the OSDC on research projects involving data intensive computing.


Robert Grossman (Primary Session Leader) - University of Chicago

Heidi Alvarez (Secondary Session Leader) - Florida International University

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Open source file systems – transitioning from Petascale to Exascale

SESSION: Open source file systems – transitioning from Petascale to Exascale


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Galen Shipman, Stephane Thiell

ROOM:TCC 301/302

ABSTRACT: As the high-performance computing community makes the transition from Petascale to Exascale systems parallel file systems will be required to provide unprecedented levels of performance and capacity. The community developed Exascale roadmap points towards an I/O system capable of supporting 60 Terabytes/sec of aggregate bandwidth and up to an Exabyte of capacity. Dramatic increases in total concurrency, up to one billion in a future Exascale system, will require revolutionary advances in parallel file system software to effectively exploit the underlying I/O system capabilities while supporting this level of concurrency. In this birds of a feather session Open Scalable File Systems and the European Open File Systems Cooperative will organize a panel of experts to discuss the challenges and potential solutions to Exascale I/O. Our panel includes: Eric Barton – Whamcloud (Lustre), Paul Nowoczynski – PSC (ZEST, SLASH2), Rob Ross – ANL (PVFS-2), and Sage Weil - DreamHost (Ceph).


Galen Shipman (Primary Session Leader) - OpenSFS and ORNL

Stephane Thiell (Secondary Session Leader) - EOFS and CEA

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Scalable Heterogeneous Computing Forum

SESSION: Scalable Heterogeneous Computing Forum


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Jeffrey Vetter, Sadaf Alam

ROOM:TCC 304

ABSTRACT: As scalable heterogeneous computing (SHC) architectures are emerging as solutions for HPC, data-intensive and engineering applications, there is an imminent need for a forum that focuses on operational, procurement, and deployment requirements as well as R&D priorities for the SHC ecosystem. This BOF launches an international, open, customer-driven community effort for developing SHC ecosystems solutions and provides attendees an opportunity to join the forum. Speakers from academic, government, and vendor institutions will introduce preliminary working groups, and the organizing committee will present both a draft version of a ‘Best Practices’ guide on SHC clusters and preliminary survey results identifying the communities’ priorities. This forum will collaborate and coordinate with ongoing operational, R&D, and standardization efforts across government, industry, and academia. These efforts include programming environments, system administration, and runtime systems. Furthermore, the forum will identify technical gaps across these communities, and encourage investments in these gaps from member portfolios.


Jeffrey Vetter (Primary Session Leader) - Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Georgia Tech

Sadaf Alam (Secondary Session Leader) - Swiss National Supercomputing Centre

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Semantic Graph Database Processing

SESSION: Semantic Graph Database Processing


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):David J. Haglin, David Mizell, Eric Goodman

ROOM:TCC LL4

ABSTRACT: As the size of data and complexity of the relationships increases, relational databases and SQL queries are failing to fulfill query requirements. The more general representation of data in RDF triples (semantic graphs), as opposed to relational tables, is a natural evolution for data/information storage. In the midst of this migration of data storage and retrieval strategies, the exploding size of data is hindering existing SPARQL query engines from performing the types of queries that this semantic graph technology promises. This BOF aims to cultivate a community of HPC-based Semantic Database (SDB) stakeholders. Attendees will find out what others are working on in this nascent area that blends HPC with SDBs. They will have an opportunity to participate in the formation of a new direction with the potential for high impact for many years. Potential researchers, developers, and users are all welcome.


David J. Haglin (Primary Session Leader) - Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

David Mizell (Secondary Session Leader) - Cray Inc.

Eric Goodman (Secondary Session Leader) - Sandia National Laboratories

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Setting Trends for Energy Efficiency

SESSION: Setting Trends for Energy Efficiency


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Erich Strohmaier, Wu Feng, Nicolas Dube

ROOM:TCC 101

ABSTRACT: This BoF reviews an effort to drive a commonly adopted set of methodologies, workloads and metrics for measuring energy efficiency of supercomputer architectures. This is a collaborative effort between the Green500, the Top500, The Green Grid and the Energy Efficient HPC Working Group. It is intended for those involved in the supercomputer system architecture design and procurement decision-making process including users, data center and facilities designers/managers. This community effort seeks to characterize the energy efficiency of supercomputer architectures rather than the operational efficiency of supercomputers or data-centers. A pragmatic decision was taken to select readily available, broadly adopted and well defined workloads that exercise the HPC system or subsystem to the fullest capability possible. An immediate focus of this community is to improve the methodology for measuring the energy and/or power consumed while running workloads, such as HPL. Please attend this BoF, learn more and provide your feedback.


Erich Strohmaier (Primary Session Leader) - Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Wu Feng (Secondary Session Leader) - Virginia Tech

Nicolas Dube (Secondary Session Leader) - Hewlett-Packard

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The 2011 HPC Challenge Awards

SESSION: The 2011 HPC Challenge Awards


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Piotr Luszczek, Jeremy Kepner

ROOM:TCC LL2

ABSTRACT: The 2011 HPC Challenge Awards is a competition with awards in two classes: Class 1: Best Performance awards the best run submitted to the HPC Challenge website. The winners in four categories are announced: HPL, Global-RandomAccess, EP-STREAM-Triad per system, and Global-FFT. Class 2: Most Elegant awards an implementation of three or more of the HPC Challenge benchmarks with special emphasis put on: HPL, Global-RandomAccess, STREAM-Triad and Global-FFT. This award would be weighted 50% on performance and 50% on code elegance/clarity/size. In addition, we allow presentation of additional codes that are critical to scientific applications. Competition in Class 1 offers a rich view of contemporary supercomputers as they compete for supremacy not just in one category but in four. Class 2, on the other hand, offers a glimpse into high end programming technologies and the effectiveness of their implementation. The audience will have a chance to look at new programming environments.


Piotr Luszczek (Primary Session Leader) - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Jeremy Kepner (Secondary Session Leader) - MIT Lincoln Laboratory

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Third Graph500 List

SESSION: Third Graph500 List


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Richard Murphy, David Bader, Marc Snir

ROOM:TCC 202

ABSTRACT: The Graph500 list has seen significant growth since it’s creation at SC10, and it is emerging as a critical kernel for the data intensive computing community. These workloads are ill suited for platforms designed for 3D physics simulations. The Graph500 community is interested in driving the creation machines capable of executing large-scale graph problems by establishing and enhancing this new benchmark. Graphs are a core part of most of analytics workloads. Backed by a steering committee of over 30 international HPC experts from academia, industry, and national laboratories, This BOF will unveil the third Graph 500 list, and discuss both today’s benchmark and the evolution of that benchmark going forward. The Graph500 addresses five key business areas: Cybersecurity, Medical Informatics, Data Enrichment, Social Networks, and Symbolic Networks. The BOF offers a forum for the community and a rallying point for data intensive supercomputing problems.


Richard Murphy (Primary Session Leader) - Sandia National Laboratories

David Bader (Secondary Session Leader) - Georgia Institute of Technology

Marc Snir (Secondary Session Leader) - University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Vendor Updates on CoArray Fortran Compilers

SESSION: Vendor Updates on CoArray Fortran Compilers


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Robert W. Numrich

ROOM:TCC 305

ABSTRACT: Fortran 2008 is the new standard for the Fortran language. The most important new feature of the language is the coarray parallel programming model. Interest in using coarrays has increased greatly now that it is standardized in the language and portable across platforms. The question is, "When and where can I get a compiler that I can try?" The purpose of this BoF is to give the major vendors, Cray, IBM and Intel, the opportunity to present their plans for implementing the coarray model. They will each be given 10-15 minutes to present their plans followed by questions from the audience.


Robert W. Numrich (Primary Session Leader) - City University of New York

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XDMoD, XSEDE Metrics on Demand

SESSION: XDMoD, XSEDE Metrics on Demand


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Thomas Furlani, Matthew D. Jones, Steven Gallo

ROOM:TCC LL1

ABSTRACT: XDMoD (XSEDE Metrics on Demand) is an open-source tool designed to audit and facilitate the utilization of the TeraGrid/XSEDE cyberinfrastructure, providing a wide range of metrics on TG/XSEDE resources and services. Currently supported metrics include allocations and computing utilization, allowing a comprehensive view of both current and historical utilization and compute job throughput. In addition to viewing historical job information, scientific application profiling (via application kernels) are a major component to provide metrics on both quality of service as well as a meaningful comparison between the various TG/XSEDE resources. XDMoD uses a role-based scheme to tailor the presentation of information to the public, individual users, principal investigators, resource and service providers, and program managers. At this BOF the current state of XDMoD and recent progress will be demonstrated and discussed to increase awareness among and gather feedback from XSEDE stakeholders.


Thomas Furlani (Primary Session Leader) - University at Buffalo

Matthew D. Jones (Secondary Session Leader) - University at Buffalo

Steven Gallo (Secondary Session Leader) - University at Buffalo

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A Department of Energy (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Discussion About a Path From Petascale to Exascale: R&D Challenges for HPC Simulation Environments

SESSION: A Department of Energy (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Discussion About a Path From Petascale to Exascale: R&D Challenges for HPC Simulation Environments


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Thuc Hoang

ROOM:TCC 305

ABSTRACT: This BOF provides an opportunity to discuss key technical challenges and possible solutions that face the Department of Energy and the community as we drive towards exascale. Over the past year, NNSA and the Office of Science have held a series of meetings to start planning for exascale. White papers that resulted from these meetings can be found at http://asc.llnl.gov/exascale. A critical component of this effort involves getting community feedback and participation. The first half of our BOF will be an introduction from the NNSA program manager and a short discussion of challenges and plans from each of leads of our eight focus areas (applications, solvers, programming models, architecture, system software, tools, I/O and visualization). The second half of the BOF will open the discussion to the community to provide feedback on our plans and make suggestions about the path forward to exascale.


Thuc Hoang (Primary Session Leader) - National Nuclear Security Administration

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“Hot” for Warm-Water Cooling

SESSION: “Hot” for Warm-Water Cooling


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):William Tschudi, David Martinez, Farhad Banisadr

ROOM:WSCC 613/614

ABSTRACT: About half of an air-cooled data-center's energy consumption is wasted on powering the cooling systems that keep the computer system from overheating. Furthermore, the amount of heat dissipated by future supercomputers limits the practicality of air-cooling. Liquid-cooling is key to reducing cooling energy consumption for future supercomputers because the heat capacity and transfer efficiency of liquids is orders of magnitude greater than that of air. The transition from air to liquid-cooling is a technology inflection point providing an opportunity to set guidelines for energy efficiency of liquid-cooled facilities and systems. Substituting vapor-compression refrigeration systems with cooling towers or dry coolers that provide warmer water to supercomputers is the natural progression towards energy conservation. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Supercomputing Laboratories are working collaboratively with industry representatives to develop guidelines for warmer liquid-cooling temperatures to guide future supercomputer procurements, and to facilitate the design of warmer temperature cooling systems.


William Tschudi (Primary Session Leader) - Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

David Martinez (Secondary Session Leader) - Sandia National Laboratories

Farhad Banisadr (Secondary Session Leader) - Los Alamos National Laboratory

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Blue Gene Forum: From P to Q

SESSION: Blue Gene Forum: From P to Q


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Raymond Loy, W. Scott Futral

ROOM:TCC LL2

ABSTRACT: The IBM Blue Gene series is poised for the debut of the next-generation BG/Q, expected to reach at least 20 petaflops in 2012. This forum is hosted by the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) which have large BG/P installations and have been involved in a design collaboration on BG/Q as well as experimental work on pre-release systems. We will update application developers and the user community on the new platform. Representatives from IBM will give an overview on BG/Q, along with ALCF and LLNL discussing their deployment plans already in progress. Other large Blue Gene sites, the Juelich Supercomputing Centre and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, will present updates on their status and plans. Members of the Blue Gene community are encouraged to join us for open discussion on the transition from BG/P to BG/Q including application development strategies.


Raymond Loy (Primary Session Leader) - Argonne Leadership Computing Facility

W. Scott Futral (Secondary Session Leader) - Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

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Broad-based Efforts to Expand Parallelism Preparedness in the Computing Workforce

SESSION: Broad-based Efforts to Expand Parallelism Preparedness in the Computing Workforce


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Michael Wrinn, Richard A. Brown, Benedict Gaster

ROOM:WSCC 611/612

ABSTRACT: The industry and research communities face increasing workforce preparedness challenges in parallel (and distributed) computing, due to today’s ubiquitous multicore and cloud computing. What new, broad-based initiatives are addressing those challenges? What will come next? This BoF, co-hosted by leaders of several of those initiatives, features an interactive dialog among session attendees for community feedback, input, and participation, toward a goal of accelerating the development of a parallelism-savvy computing workforce, motivated by forward-looking efforts to encourage parallelism education and training. The session is convened by the Educational Alliance for a Parallel Future (EAPF), an organization with wide-ranging industry/academia/research membership, including Intel, AMD, and other prominent technology corporations. It also features leaders from the ACM Tech Pack on Parallel Computing authoring group and two NSF-funded projects for integrating parallelism throughout the undergraduate computing curriculum. Focus: industry/research needs; ecosystem-wide dissemination of concepts and practices of parallel computing.


Michael Wrinn (Primary Session Leader) - Intel Corporation

Richard A. Brown (Secondary Session Leader) - St. Olaf College

Benedict Gaster (Secondary Session Leader) - AMD

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Community-Oriented Scientific Support Structures for HPC

SESSION: Community-Oriented Scientific Support Structures for HPC


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Paul Gibbon, Norbert Attig

ROOM:TCC 102

ABSTRACT: Today, simulation scientists recognize the current prevalence of architectures based on massively parallel and multi-core processor topologies. They are now compelled to concentrate much more on scalability when developing new models, or when re-engineering established codes to new machines. To address the obstacles posed by Petascale (and in future Exascale) computing, a number of community-oriented, high-level support initiatives have been started in Europe and the US. These initiatives differ in their structural details, but all aim to provide a level of numerical expertise and specialist competence which goes significantly beyond the traditional help desk functionality. The goals of this BoF are to: a) compare the various user support structures currently in operation b) examine sustainability issues of scientific software in HPC c) provide support teams at leading SC centers with an opportunity to exchange experiences and ideas d) motivate other centers to establish or to strengthen their own community-oriented support.


Paul Gibbon (Primary Session Leader) - Forschungzentrum Juelich

Norbert Attig (Secondary Session Leader) - Forschungzentrum Juelich

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Computer Architecture Simulation Framework

SESSION: Computer Architecture Simulation Framework


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Almadena Y. Chtchelkanova, Stephen W. Poole

ROOM:TCC 205

ABSTRACT: The goal of this BOF is to engage the academic community, government and industry to make sure that there is a community framework allowing interoperability of simulation tools for Computer Architecture. The framework of interoperable simulators for computer architecture is long overdue. It is important to bring together and build a community of researchers and implementers of architecture simulation, emulation, and modeling tools for memory, CPU/cache, storage and the network on a chip.


Almadena Y. Chtchelkanova (Primary Session Leader) - National Science Foundation

Stephen W. Poole (Secondary Session Leader) - ORNL/DoD

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Next Generation I/O and visualization requirements for in situ processing

SESSION: Next Generation I/O and visualization requirements for in situ processing


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Scott Klasky, Hasan Abbasi, Manish Parashar

ROOM:TCC LL1

ABSTRACT: Next generation exascale systems will require HPC to revolutionize the concept of I/O, data analysis, and visualization. HPC is ready for this revolution, where we can build tools, which are easy-to-use, sustainable, scalable, and portable. This BOF will focus on generating new ideas to design new algorithms and middleware to aid scientist in high performance, data intensive computing. Leadership class computing has allowed application scientists to solve problems that would have been impossible 5 years ago. Much of the focus of the community has gone into creating scalable science to work efficiently on these petascale platforms. One consequence has been that the data generated from these simulations has ballooned to unprecedented volumes, opening up new challenges and opportunities. Simulations of this scale need to incorporate new techniques to meet these challenges which requires tools that can help experts to make real-time decisions of what to do with the data.


Scott Klasky (Primary Session Leader) - Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Hasan Abbasi (Secondary Session Leader) - Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Manish Parashar (Secondary Session Leader) - Rutgers University

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OpenMP in the Petascale Era

SESSION: OpenMP in the Petascale Era


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Barbara Chapman, Bronis de Supinski, Matthias Mueller

ROOM:TCC 303

ABSTRACT: Since its inception in 1997, OpenMP has proven to be a simple, yet powerful model for developing multi-threaded applications. OpenMP continues to evolve, adapt to new requirements, and push at the frontiers of parallelization. A new Specification version 3.1, with enhancements and clarifications to the existing specification, has been released this year. Also, many new features are being discussed by the OpenMP language committee for inclusion in Specification version 4.0 that will follow. In this BOF session, you will have the opportunity to learn about the work of the OpenMP language committee and new features planned or explored. You will also have the chance to participate in a lively panel discussion about where OpenMP needs to evolve in order to best serve its growing user community. Ample time will be allowed for attendee participation and questions.


Barbara Chapman (Primary Session Leader) - University of Houston

Bronis de Supinski (Secondary Session Leader) - Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Matthias Mueller (Secondary Session Leader) - Technical University Dresden

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OrangeFS/PVFS: Developments, Direction, and Discussion

SESSION: OrangeFS/PVFS: Developments, Direction, and Discussion


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Walter Ligon, Boyd Wilson, Mike Cannon

ROOM:TCC 202

ABSTRACT: OrangeFS is the next generation of PVFS, an open source, distributed, parallel file system for high performance computing. This BoF will serve two goals, the first being to have a community discussion on the current state of OrangeFS and development that is under way. The second goal is to solicit input from the community on all aspects of OrangeFS development, including features, characteristics and target workloads, to help set the direction of OrangeFS. PVFS was developed primarily for systems running highly parallel scientific workloads. It focused on maximizing throughput for large transfers between disk and memory. OrangeFS is also targeting medium scale HPC, cloud, and enterprise level computing. While sustaining high performance, the OrangeFS project is also focused on diverse clients, smaller file support, security, and metadata performance.


Walter Ligon (Primary Session Leader) - Clemson University

Boyd Wilson (Secondary Session Leader) - Omnibond

Mike Cannon (Secondary Session Leader) - Clemson University

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Parallel Communication and I/O Interfaces for Accelerators: HPC Advisory Council Special Interest Group

SESSION: Parallel Communication and I/O Interfaces for Accelerators: HPC Advisory Council Special Interest Group


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Gilad Shainer, Sadaf Alam

ROOM:TCC 101

ABSTRACT: The session will be the base for the official launch of a special interest group (SIG) as part of the HPC Advisory Council for identifying communication and I/O requirements and proposing standard interfaces for accelerators based HPC. A further aim is to establish an educational and dissemination portal. The speakers from vendor institutions will provide roadmaps for existing technologies e.g. GPUDirect, which is a significant step for lowering overheads for GPU to GPU internode communication. The related research and development efforts at the academic institutions will also be presented at the session including MVAPICH2 extensions for GPUs and the rCUDA effort for virtualizing GPU devices over the interconnect. The expected deliverables of the session include: launching of the SIG through the HPC advisory council, agenda items for upcoming HPC Advisory council training workshops, and a draft proposal on standard interfaces for facilitating message-passing and remote memory communication from accelerator devices.


Gilad Shainer (Primary Session Leader) - Mellanox Technologies

Sadaf Alam (Secondary Session Leader) - Swiss National Supercomputing Centre

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Personalized Healthcare Challenges for High Performance Computing

SESSION: Personalized Healthcare Challenges for High Performance Computing


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):David Galas, Eric Stahlberg

ROOM:TCC 304

ABSTRACT: To achieve the goal of personalized healthcare, the amount of information to analyze is overwhelming and the task of turning this raw data into biological knowledge to inform healthcare decisions is computationally daunting, presenting new challenges to the high performance computing industry. The need for data aggregation and analytics across many data sources will require collaboration among providers of electronic medical record systems, genomic reference databases, next generation sequencing, proteomics, and diagnostic imaging, potentially resulting in terabytes of data uniquely characterizing each individual. Systems biology simulations and bioinformatics applications are being developed, yet the ability to translate these research applications to reliable clinical use presents several important challenges. Such issues include data transmission and storage, upward and downward application scalability, reliability, security, interoperability, compliance, validation and affordability. This session brings together individuals to clarify requirements for future systems and applications while fostering exchange of solutions and ideas.


David Galas (Primary Session Leader) - Institute for Systems Biology

Eric Stahlberg (Secondary Session Leader) - SAIC-Frederick, Advanced Biomedical Computing Center / NCI Center for Cancer Research

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The eXtreme Scientific and Engineering Discovery Environment: Evolving from TeraGrid to XSEDE

SESSION: The eXtreme Scientific and Engineering Discovery Environment: Evolving from TeraGrid to XSEDE


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):John Towns, R. Glenn Brook

ROOM:TCC LL4

ABSTRACT: The eXtreme Scientific and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), the follow-on to the TeraGrid open scientific infrastructure, provides users with seamless integration to NSF's high-performance computing and data resources. XSEDE's comprehensive suite of advanced digital services combines with other high-end facilities and with campus-based resources across the country to form a federated system that serves as the foundation for a national cyberinfrastructure ecosystem. This BOF brings together users, potential users, and developers of XSEDE services for an open, candid discussion about the present state and future plans of XSEDE. The BOF opens with a brief introduction to existing XSEDE services followed by a status update on the deployment plans for additional services. Following the introduction, a guided discussion explores user opinions of XSEDE activities and solicits feedback on the XSEDE user experience. The session concludes with an open discussion of topics raised by participants in a town-hall format.


John Towns (Primary Session Leader) - NCSA/Univ of Illinois

R. Glenn Brook (Secondary Session Leader) - National Institute for Computational Sciences

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TOP500 Supercomputers

SESSION: Top500


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Erich Strohmaier

ROOM:TCC 301/302

ABSTRACT: Now in its 19th year, the TOP500 list of supercomputers serves as a “Who’s Who” in the field of High Performance Computing (HPC). The TOP500 list was started in 1993 as a project to compile a list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. It has evolved from a simple ranking system to a major source of information to analyze trends in HPC. The 38th TOP500 list will be published in November 2011 just in time for SC11. This BoF will present detailed analyses of the TOP500 and discuss the changes in the HPC marketplace during the past years. The BoF is meant as an open forum for discussion and feedback between the TOP500 authors and the user community.


Erich Strohmaier (Primary Session Leader) - Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

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Towards a Unified Cyberinfrastructure

SESSION: Towards a Unified Cyberinfrastructure


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Jarek Nabrzyski, Daniel S. Katz, Ian Foster

ROOM:TCC LL5

ABSTRACT: What should the global cyberinfrastructure ecosystem look like in 10 years, and how will we get there? This BOF is a forum for the global eResearch community. It will bring together thinkers and practitioners of cyberinfrastructure, and brainstorm how to create a truly integrated global cyberinfrastructure. We intend to discuss the process by which a national, continental, or global cyberinfrastructure vision could be established. Who are the key stakeholders who need to be involved? How do we move towards truly integrating cyberinfrastructure elements at all levels, including those of individual investigators, campuses, countries, and regions? How do we move towards integrating networks, clusters, supercomputers, grids, and clouds? How do we integrate software and middleware across these systems? Our goal is to bring communities together and identify synergies and a future vision. We will follow up with a series of workshops that will include major players on all continents.


Jarek Nabrzyski (Primary Session Leader) - University of Notre Dame

Daniel S. Katz (Secondary Session Leader) - Computation Institute

Ian Foster (Secondary Session Leader) - Argonne National Laboratory

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Alliance for High Performance Digital Manufacturing – HPC for the “Missing Middle”

SESSION: Alliance for High Performance Digital Manufacturing – HPC for the “Missing Middle”


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Jon Riley, Kathryn Kelley, William Feiereisen

ROOM:TCC LL2

ABSTRACT: Of growing importance nationally and internationally is the focus on the “missing middle,” representing around 95% of all manufacturing in the United States. Historically, the cost of HPC has been an impossible barrier to entry for smaller organizations that need help accessing and mastering the tools of tomorrow’s innovative manufacturers and product designers. In particular, HPC, or advanced modeling, simulation, and analysis, will drive the digital smart manufacturing of the 21st century. The barriers to greater deployment of HPC in small- and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (SME) are well known; the three documented in the research literature are the lack of affordable software solutions tailored to SMEs; lack of trained talent to make use of HPC technologies; and lack of educational tools to elevate awareness of the value associated with transitioning to HPC-driven manufacturing. The Alliance for High Performance Digital Manufacturing (AHPDM) is a collaborative group of HPC industries, economic development organizations, and supercomputing centers dedicated to changing the way America manufactures by bringing the power of high performance computing (HPC) to the value chain. AHPDM’s major objective is the elimination of barriers by identifying and providing hardware, software, and expertise as a service, accessible to missing middle manufacturers through secure web-based portals. The Alliance also supports the development of a national innovation network, a knowledge infrastructure that leverages the wealth of talent, ideas and facilities within our nation’s universities, national labs and industrial research centers so that we can innovate smarter, faster and more predictably, called Predictive Innovation Centers (PIC). The proposed network comprised of facilitating regional centers will be the bridge driving sustained economic growth and creating quality jobs. Ultimately, AHPDM’s goal is collaboration, innovation, commercialization and education among government and public/private partnerships.


Jon Riley (Primary Session Leader) - National Center for Manufacturing Sciences

Kathryn Kelley (Secondary Session Leader) - Ohio Supercomputer Center

William Feiereisen (Secondary Session Leader) - Intel Corporation

of 94

Chapel Lightning Talks

SESSION: Chapel Lightning Talks


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Sung-Eun Choi, Bradford L. Chamberlain

ROOM:TCC 205

ABSTRACT: Are you a scientist wondering what it might be like to use a high-level language for your research programming? Are you an educator looking for better ways to teach parallel programming? Are you a language enthusiast who wants to stay on top of new developments? Have you ever wondered about the buzz surrounding Chapel? Then this is the BOF for you! In this BOF, we will hear "lightning talks" on community activities involving Chapel, a new programming language being developed under the DARPA HPCS Program. We will begin the BOF with a brief overview of the Chapel project. Following this, we will turn the stage over to our users and collaborators. There will be a series of curated five minute talks from the broad Chapel community--HPC programmers, educators, Chapel tinkerers, developers, etc. We will wrap up the BOF with Q&A and discussion involving all participants and audience members.


Sung-Eun Choi (Primary Session Leader) - Cray Inc.

Bradford L. Chamberlain (Secondary Session Leader) - Cray Inc.

of 94

Cray XMT User Community

SESSION: Cray XMT User Community


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):John T. Feo

ROOM:WSCC 211

ABSTRACT: The Cray XMT is a shared-memory, multithreaded computer platform well suited for applications with little or no spatial and temporal locality. The system’s large shared-memory, latency tolerant processors, and fine-grained hardware synchronization enable highly irregular memory access patterns and algorithms to scale. Researchers at national laboratories, universities, and industry are using the machine to develop large-scale applications in bioinformatics, network analysis, semantic analysis, natural language understanding, and knowledge discovery. Moreover, numerous semantic technologies are being developed for the system. This year Cray has delivered the first Cray XMT/2 systems. This Birds-of-a-Feature will bring together the massive multithreading community to discuss results, current status, and future machine designs driven by application requirements. The meeting will feature talks on use cases, applications, performance, programming tools, and expectations of next-generation multithreaded systems.


John T. Feo (Primary Session Leader) - Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

of 94

HPC Advisory Council University Awards

SESSION: HPC Advisory Council University Awards


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Gilad Shainer, Brian Sparks, Cydney Stevens

ROOM:TCC 101

ABSTRACT: The HPC Advisory Council is a leading worldwide organization for high-performance computing research, development, outreach and education activities. With more than 210 member organizations and five working groups the council support various best practices activities and advanced research activities. One of the HPC Advisory Council’s main activities is community and education outreach, in particular to enhance students’ computing knowledge-base as early as possible. As such, the HPC Advisory Council has established a university award program in which universities are encouraged to submit proposals for advanced research around high-performance computing. During the session we will describe the council recent activities, review the proposals for the University award program and announce the winning proposals.


Gilad Shainer (Primary Session Leader) - HPC Advisory Council

Brian Sparks (Secondary Session Leader) - HPC Advisory Council

Cydney Stevens (Secondary Session Leader) - HPC Advisory Council

of 94

Lustre community update

SESSION: Lustre community update


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Brent Gorda, Norman Morse, Hugo Falter

ROOM:TCC 301/302

ABSTRACT: The Lustre file system has recently gone through a transition and its development has become more community-centric. The activities of the past year and a half have resulted in Lustre emerging stronger and more relevant to HPC than in the past. The Lustre Community update BOF will present the current state of Lustre, the roadmap for future releases and introduce the community groups recently formed in the US and Europe. Attendees will be given information on how to participate in the community groups and be able to speak with representatives from each.


Brent Gorda (Primary Session Leader) - Whamcloud, inc.

Norman Morse (Secondary Session Leader) - OpenSFS

Hugo Falter (Secondary Session Leader) - EOFS

of 94

Managing High-Performance Computing Centers: Issues & Challenges

SESSION: Managing High-Performance Computing Centers: Issues & Challenges


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Nicholas Berente, Stanley Ahalt, Jay Boisseau

ROOM:WSCC 204

ABSTRACT: Some might argue that the contemporary landscape for high-performance computing (HPC) center managers is different than what it was in the past. HPC centers are under increasing pressure to collaborate, to find alternative sources of funding, to innovate in novel ways, and to maintain performance over time. Some centers are reaching unprecedented scale in size and scope. In many ways, these centers are looking like more traditional organizations. But, of course, in many ways they are completely different. The goal of this "birds of a feather" session will be to discuss the following: - What are the contemporary challenges in managing contemporary HPC centers? Are these challenges different than the past? if so, in what way? - Can managers of HPC centers learn from other domains in areas such as strategic planning, operations, software development, etc.? What best practices apply and do not apply to such centers?


Nicholas Berente (Primary Session Leader) - University of Georgia

Stanley Ahalt (Secondary Session Leader) - Renaissance Computing Institute

Jay Boisseau (Secondary Session Leader) - University of Texas at Austin

of 94

Network Measurement

SESSION: Network Measurement


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Jon Dugan, Aaron Brown

ROOM:TCC LL1

ABSTRACT: Networks are critical to high performance computing, they play a crucial role inside compute systems, within the data center, in providing access to remote resources and for communication with collaborators and remote sites. As a result it is imperative that these networks perform optimally. In order to understand the behavior and performance of these networks, they need to be measured. This is a forum for scientists who need better performance, network engineers who support HPC sites and anyone who is interested in network measurement, particularly as it relates to high performance networking. This BoF will include presentations from various experts in network performance measurement and analysis as well as time for questions, discussion and impromputu presentations. Potential topics to include (but not limited to) measurement tools (Iperf, nuttcp, OWAMP, etc), measurement frameworks (perfSONAR, BWCTL, etc), emerging standards (NWMG, OGF standards, etc), and current research.


Jon Dugan (Primary Session Leader) - ESnet

Aaron Brown (Secondary Session Leader) - Internet2

of 94

Open MPI State of the Union

SESSION: Open MPI State of the Union


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Jeff Squyres, George Bosilca

ROOM:TCC 303

ABSTRACT: MPI continues to evolve, both as a standard and as software implementations. The members of the Open MPI project are both driving the evolution of MPI as well as pushing the boundaries of what is possible in extreme computing environments. The K supercomputer validates this approach: a Fujitsu team made local modifications to Open MPI and achieved over 8 petaflops. But at the same time, much effort is put enabling newcomers to HPC to have an MPI that "just works" and is featurized to support both a wide variety of environments. Open MPI community's unique blend of academics, researchers, system administrators, and vendors provide many different viewpoints for what make an MPI implementation successful. Work is ongoing in many areas that are directly applicable to real-world HPC applications and users. Join us at the BOF to hear a state of the Union for Open MPI. New contributors are welcome!


Jeff Squyres (Primary Session Leader) - Cisco

George Bosilca (Secondary Session Leader) - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

of 94

PBS -- Celebrating 20 Years of HPC History

SESSION: PBS -- Celebrating 20 Years of HPC History


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Bill Nitzberg

ROOM:TCC 202

ABSTRACT: PBS began in 1991 when pioneers at NASA Ames Research Center launched a project to both standardize batch queuing and develop a truly portable workload management system capable of handling the world's largest parallel supercomputers. The project was wildly successful, giving us both the POSIX 1002.3d batch standard as well as the PBS software. Today, PBS is the most widely deployed workload and resource management software used anywhere in the world. As a community, we need to steer PBS to make HPC smarter, and address the future challenges in HPC: Clouds, GPUs, Big Data, Green Computing, Exascale, and beyond. This Birds of a Feather session will bring together PBS users, administrators and developers to celebrate the 20-year history of PBS and openly discuss the future direction of PBS. Bring your anecdotes, bring your curiosity, bring your ideas, bring yourself!


Bill Nitzberg (Primary Session Leader) - Altair Engineering, Inc.

of 94

PGAS: The Partitioned Global Address Space Programming Model

SESSION: PGAS: The Partitioned Global Address Space Programming Model


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Tarek El-Ghazawi, Lauren Smith

ROOM:TCC 304

ABSTRACT: PGAS, the Partitioned Global Address Space, programming model provides ease-of-use through a global shared address space while emphasizing performance through locality awareness. Over the past several years, the PGAS model has been gaining rising attention. A number of PGAS languages such as UPC and CAF are widely available on high-performance computers. Many of the recent and future high-performance computing systems are providing native hardware support at the network level for PGAS. The DARPA HPCS program has also resulted in new promising PGAS languages, such as X10 and Chapel. This BoF will bring together developers from the various aforementioned PGAS language groups and the research and development community for exchange of ideas and information. PGAS languages are also a primary candiate for achieving performance on manycore chips, as accesses to shared cache and memory become non-uniform in chips with large core counts. This BoF will be conducted in a panel format with one expert from each PGAS language community as a panelist. The panelists will share the most recent developments in each of those language paradigms (from specifications to tools and applications) and will respond to questions of prospective as well as seasoned users. In addition to the paradigm-by-paradigm treatment, myths, successes, and large application development efforts will also be highlighted.


Tarek El-Ghazawi (Primary Session Leader) - George Washington University

Lauren Smith (Secondary Session Leader) - US Government

of 94

Research Challenges and Funding Opportunities in HPC Clouds for Federal Agencies

SESSION: Research Challenges and Funding Opportunities in HPC Clouds for Federal Agencies


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Bryan Biegel, Almadena Chtchelkanova

ROOM:TCC LL5

ABSTRACT: High performance computing (HPC) clouds are being explored by several Federal agencies to assess their potential to complement the strengths and application sets of existing HPC environments. These investigations have found that novel challenges must be overcome for the full potential of HPC clouds to be realized. The research challenges in HPC clouds span many disciplines: programming and runtime environments that go beyond MapReduce/Hadoop and Pig, system configuration and management, data movement and storage, resource authorization and management, security, interoperability, resource availability, fault tolerance and resilience, and more. In this BOF, representatives from several federal agencies will give brief presentations on their efforts to understand and address these research challenges, including funding and participation opportunities.


Bryan Biegel (Primary Session Leader) - NASA

Almadena Chtchelkanova (Secondary Session Leader) - National Science Foundation

of 94

Semantic Resource Descriptions in Advanced Cyberinfrastructures

SESSION: Semantic Resource Descriptions in Advanced Cyberinfrastructures


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Jeroen van der Ham, Yufeng Xin

ROOM:TCC 102

ABSTRACT: Upcoming cyber-infrastructure systems must be capable of dynamically provisioning many kinds of cyber resources to meet demands of future science applications. Such systems must be self-managing, capable of federation to assemble the necessary resources to meet application needs. Such autonomy can be achieved by enabling the systems to reason about the available resources. The critical problem is identifying proper resource description mechanisms. Armed with such mechanisms, applications can request specific resources they need to complete their tasks, or create ‘fuzzy’ requests to an automated provisioning system based on application Service Level Objectives. Semantic resource descriptions based on modeling approaches and W3C standards provide a new approach. They allow for easy sharing of ‘vocabularies’ of concepts and relationships between them, as well as documents based on these vocabularies. This BoF session aims to provide a platform for exchanging experiences and ideas in the semantic resource description area and its possible applications.


Jeroen van der Ham (Primary Session Leader) - University of Amsterdam

Yufeng Xin (Secondary Session Leader) - Renaissance Computing Institute

of 94

Solution for the Missing Middle

SESSION: Solution for the Missing Middle


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):John Hengeveld, Elana Lian

ROOM:TCC LL4

ABSTRACT: As we look at today’s competitive global environment we recognize the untapped potential for enhanced technical computing usages across a variety of industry segments. How can we provide scientists, engineers, analysts and digital creators seamless access to efficient compute services on demand? Intel has shared a vision of an industry-standard architecture to enable a hybrid HPC computing environment that spans from workstations to clusters to private and public clouds. Through this initiative, visualizing, modeling, and testing ideas becomes more accessible. Users get faster time to results even if they couldn’t afford the upfront infrastructure costs. Faster time to results means more time for productive analysis and answers that affect reaction to decisions that is pervasive in every aspect of daily life (business, healthcare, education, etc.). More customers can get access to simulation technology to optimize the aesthetics, performance and economic benefits of the technical merits of products/services/technologies. We would like to invite audience discussion and participation within the HPC community to make seamless computing a reality.


John Hengeveld (Primary Session Leader) - Intel Corporation

Elana Lian (Secondary Session Leader) - Intel Corporation

of 94

Technologies for managing biodata

SESSION: Technologies for managing biodata


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Todd Smith

ROOM:TCC 305

ABSTRACT: DNA sequencing and related technologies are producing tremendous volumes of data. The raw data from these instruments needs to be reduced through alignment or assembly into forms that can be further processed to yield scientifically or clinically actionable information. The entire data workflow process requires multiple programs and information resources. Standard formats and software tools that meet high performance computing requirements are lacking, but technical approaches are emerging. In this BOF, options such as BAM, BioHDF, VCF and other formats, and corresponding tools, will be reviewed for their utility in meeting a broad set of requirements. The goal of the BOF is look beyond DNA sequencing and discuss the requirements for data management technologies that can integrate sequence data with data collected from other platforms such as quantitative PCR, mass spectrometry, and imaging systems. We will also explore the technical requirements for working with data from large numbers of samples.


Todd Smith (Primary Session Leader) - PerkinElmer/Geospiza

of 94

True Stories from High Performance Computing: Enabling the Improbable

SESSION: True Stories from High Performance Computing: Enabling the Improbable


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):William R. Scullin, Adam Yates, Jeff Hammond

ROOM:WSCC 206

ABSTRACT: Our experiences with High Performance Computing are highly varied and often exhibit great examples of achievement, technical and scientific ability, unmitigated disaster, unlikely achievement, and of course - humor. This BOF is a story slam in which individuals will have the opportunity to share their own true High Performance and Scientific Computing themed story. All stories will be limited to no more than five minutes, and while we permit names to be changed, all stories should be based on real life experiences. Session leaders will provide an introduction, guide speakers, and lead audience members in voting for their favorite stories at the close of the session. Those participants who shared favorite stories will be awarded Seattle themed gag-prizes.


William R. Scullin (Primary Session Leader) - Argonne National Laboratory

Adam Yates (Secondary Session Leader) - Louisiana State University

Jeff Hammond (Secondary Session Leader) - Argonne National Laboratory

of 94

A Discussion on the Practicality of Archiving Data in the Cloud

SESSION: A Discussion on the Practicality of Archiving Data in the Cloud


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Molly Rector, Brandon Canaday, Jerry Shoopman

ROOM:WSCC 206

ABSTRACT: HPC environments may be skeptical about utilizing public cloud services for archive data. However, as organizations continue to hold on to ever-increasing amounts of data for future use and analysis, they need storage solutions that are both reliable and cost-effective - and many are wondering if the cloud might be the answer. Cloud storage provides organizations a means to expand their data capacity without the large capital investment otherwise required to build additional infrastructure. The cloud storage consumption model is built around ease of use, flexibility, and perhaps most importantly, cost savings. However, organizations need to be vigilant and conduct the appropriate up-front research when considering a cloud service provider to ensure it will truly protect an organizations' data into the foreseeable future. In this session, we will share information about what HPC environments should consider before implementing a cloud storage solution for long-term retention.


Molly Rector (Primary Session Leader) - Spectra Logic

Brandon Canaday (Secondary Session Leader) - Dell

Jerry Shoopman (Secondary Session Leader) - Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

of 94

End-to-End Performance Problems in High-speed Networks

SESSION: End-to-End Performance Problems in High-speed Networks


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Constantine Dovrolis, Raj Kettimuthu, Wenji Wu

ROOM:TCC 305

ABSTRACT: Achieving efficient data movement over high-speed networks remains an ongoing challenge. Factors that affect end-to-end performance can exist in host systems, within local-area networks, across wide-area paths, and at storage systems. The problem space consists of a highly complex set of layers and domains, including application software, middleware, OS software, system hardware, network software/hardware, file systems and storage. What is worse, the nature of these performance problems is very different, compared to those we are all trained to watch for and diagnose. We need tools that can detect, localize and diagnose transient bottlenecks in complex end-to-end distributed systems. This BoF will focus on the following questions: (1) What are the performance problems that take place in high-end distributed systems? (2) How can such performance problems be detected, diagnosed and localized? (3) How can existing network performance monitoring and diagnosis tools/services scale to high-speed networks?


Constantine Dovrolis (Primary Session Leader) - Georgia Institute of Technology

Raj Kettimuthu (Secondary Session Leader) - Argonne National Laboratory

Wenji Wu (Secondary Session Leader) - Fermi National Laboratory

of 94

Energy Efficiency at Extreme Scales: Tools and Challenges

SESSION: Energy Efficiency at Extreme Scales: Tools and Challenges


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Darren J. Kerbyson, Kevin J. Barker, Abhinav Vishnu

ROOM:TCC LL5

ABSTRACT: Power consumption will become a major concern for future generation supercomputers. Current systems consume more than a Megawatt per Petaflop. Exascale levels of computation, a 100x improvement in performance from today, will be significantly constrained if power requirements were to similarly scale. The optimization of power and energy at all levels, from application to system software and to hardware, is required. This BOF will discuss state-of-the-art tools and techniques for observing and optimizing power consumption. These are often limited by hardware capabilities and in their ability to associate measurements with software. Additionally, control mechanisms such as Dynamic-Voltage-Frequency-Scaling are often limited. The challenges ahead are many-fold. Increasing parallelism, memory systems, interconnection networks, storage and uncertainties in programming models all add to the complexities. More rapid realization of energy savings will require significant increases in measurement resolution and optimization techniques. The interplay between performance, power, and reliability also leads to complex trade-offs.


Darren J. Kerbyson (Primary Session Leader) - Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Kevin J. Barker (Secondary Session Leader) - Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Abhinav Vishnu (Secondary Session Leader) - Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

of 94

High-level Programming Models for GPU Computing

SESSION: High-level Programming Models for GPU Computing


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Douglas Miles, Duncan Poole

ROOM:TCC 202

ABSTRACT: There is consensus in the community that higher-level GPU programming models based on directives or language extensions have significant value for enabling GPU programming by domain experts. Several efforts are under way to develop such models layered on top of standard C, C++ and Fortran through either standards committees or the introduction of proposed de facto standard solutions by large industry players. This BoF will explore and debate the merits of several current options and approaches for high-level heterogeneous manycore programming.


Douglas Miles (Primary Session Leader) - PGI

Duncan Poole (Secondary Session Leader) - NVIDIA

of 94

INCITE and Next-generation Leadership Systems

SESSION: INCITE and Next-generation Leadership Systems


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Julia C. White

ROOM:WSCC 211

ABSTRACT: The Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program will grant allocations totaling more than 1.7 billion core hours at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne and Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facilities (LCFs) in 2013. Researchers around the world with high-impact, computationally intensive projects are invited to apply. At the BoF, LCF staff will discuss new systems to be allocated through INCITE: a Cray XK6 and IBM Blue Gene/Q at the Oak Ridge and Argonne centers, respectively. Characteristics of successful proposals will be covered and writing tips will be provided for potential proposal authors, with emphasis on the importance of maximizing node-level parallelism. Instructions on requesting early access for benchmarking will also be covered. Join us for open discussion and Q&A on topics ranging from LCF system architectures to INCITE proposal review criteria.


Julia C. White (Primary Session Leader) - INCITE

of 94

Network Service Interface: Providing virtualized, dynamic services over the Wide Area Network

SESSION: Network Service Interface: Providing virtualized, dynamic services over the Wide Area Network


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Inder Monga, Tomohiro Kudoh, Guy Roberts

ROOM:TCC 205

ABSTRACT: Network Service Plane can be broadly defined as a set of abstracted network capabilities presented as provisionable service objects that can interoperate and be incorporated into an application resource provisioning workflow. The existence of this network service plane enables researchers to dynamically create and manage a communication infrastructure to enable their science, rather than be bound to constraints of deployed physical network connectivity or long negotiations of new services from their network service provider. The network service plane creates an infrastructure that supports the ephemeral nature of research and collaboration requirements. If we are allowed to draw a parallel from the manufacturing industry, the current way of managing network infrastructure is similar to fixed assembly lines i.e. after the physical network is provisioned, no change takes place for a long time. The Network Service Plane enables the creation of the “Just-in-time” model for the network, similar to the model that revolutionized the manufacturing industry. Developments in the NSP also matches the recent advances in distributed computing and storage especially in fields of storage/compute virtualization, Grid and Cloud computing. This has led to the development of an activity within Open Grid Forum (OGF) to create the standard for interaction between applications and the multi-administrative Network Service Plane(s). This resource allocation is proposed within OGF to be performed on an interface called the “Network Service Interface” (NSI-WG). Contributions to these standard efforts come from the experience and research conducted within community projects across EU, Americas and Asia (Phosphorus/Harmony, Viola, Autobahn, G-Lambda, OSCARS, IDC, DRAGON, DRAC, UCLP). The BOF will be a mechanism to outreach to the scientific community who are potential users of this network service capability and solicit feedback before the standard is finalized. There are many implementations planning in Sept, and the results from that protocol BOF will also be shared.


Inder Monga (Primary Session Leader) - Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

Tomohiro Kudoh (Secondary Session Leader) - National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science & Technology

Guy Roberts (Secondary Session Leader) - DANTE

of 94

Open Petascale Libraries

SESSION: Open Petascale Libraries


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Ross Nobes, Kenichi Miura, Gerard Gorman

ROOM:TCC LL2

ABSTRACT: Hardware is evolving to make efficient use of multi-core CPUs. For example, the K Computer features technologies to allow fast inter-core communication, sharing of the programmable L2 cache, and so on. The advent of multi-core computers has led to a re-evaluation of the programming model. The flat MPI approach is sub-optimal, and while PGAS models might offer a solution in the longer term, the best compromise at present is a hybrid model where thread parallelism is used within a node and MPI is used for communication between nodes. Use of numerical libraries that support this model presents a practical way to extract high performance from application codes. Open Petascale Libraries is a global collaboration that aims to promote the development of open-source thread-parallel and hybrid numerical libraries. This session introduces the project, provides an update on progress, and seeks to obtain feedback from the wider community on future directions.


Ross Nobes (Primary Session Leader) - Fujitsu Laboratories of Europe

Kenichi Miura (Secondary Session Leader) - National Institute of Informatics

Gerard Gorman (Secondary Session Leader) - Imperial College London

of 94

OpenCL: the ultimate in portable parallel programming

SESSION: OpenCL: the ultimate in portable parallel programming


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Tim Mattson, Ben Gaster

ROOM:TCC 101

ABSTRACT: Heterogeneous computing with CPUs, GPUs, and other processors has arrived. It seems everyone is experimenting with it. To move from “experimenting with” to “routine production computing platform” we need a rich software ecosystem. And that means we need a standard software platform so programmers can “write once to compile and run anywhere”. OpenCL is that standard. In this BOF we will talk about what’s new with OpenCL. We will also have a panel of experts discuss controversial and engaging issues pertaining to OpenCL. But most importantly, we will engage with the attendees to answer questions, gather input for future development of OpenCL, and have a good time sharing experiences with this new programming model.


Tim Mattson (Primary Session Leader) - Intel Corporation

Ben Gaster (Secondary Session Leader) - AMD

of 94

OpenSHMEM

SESSION: OpenSHMEM


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Tony Curtis, Steve Poole

ROOM:TCC 303

ABSTRACT: OpenSHMEM: From Message Passing to PGAS the Easy Way OpenSHMEM is the new open community standard for the one-sided PGAS/RMA-based communication paradigm that dominates the solution space for several problem domains that exist on massively parallel systems. We invite users, application developers and researchers from industry, academic and government communities to participate in developing an open organization and specification for OpenSHMEM. The initial specification is based on the original SGI API (SHMEM is a trademark of SGI), and now is the ideal time to join us and engage in the ongoing active extension of the OpenSHMEM specification for version 2.0! Background material, documentation, benchmarks, a V&V test suite, and the reference implementation will be available on http://www.openshmem.org/ prior to SC11.


Tony Curtis (Primary Session Leader) - University of Houston

Steve Poole (Secondary Session Leader) - ORNL

of 94

Petascale Systems Management BOF

SESSION: Petascale Systems Management BOF


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):William R. Scullin, Narayan Desai, Matt Ezell

ROOM:WSCC 204

ABSTRACT: Bringing together a wide range of systems administrators, the Petascale Systems management BOF aims to: identify the issues that commonly arise with the management of petascale systems, such as Blue Gene /P, Cray XT5 systems, and extremely large clusters; share solutions and approaches to issues; introduce members of the systems administration community to one another.


William R. Scullin (Primary Session Leader) - Argonne National Laboratory

Narayan Desai (Secondary Session Leader) - Argonne National Laboratory

Matt Ezell (Secondary Session Leader) - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

of 94

Programming weather, climate and earth-system models on heterogeneous multi-core platforms

SESSION: Programming weather, climate and earth-system models on heterogeneous multi-core platforms


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Ilene Carpenter, Mark Govett, Chris Kerr

ROOM:WSCC 613/614

ABSTRACT: Heterogeneous multi-core platforms provide a challenge for the applications used in the weather, climate and earth-system modeling community. These applications typically have relatively flat profiles, low use of optimized math libraries and a large community of developers. They have low computational intensity and require high memory bandwidth, however they have substantial parallelism and several models have been successfully ported to run on GPUs. The purpose of the BOF is to report on the conclusions of a workshop titled “Programming weather, climate, and earth-system models on heterogeneous multi-core platforms” held September 7-8, 2011 at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Session leaders will discuss the conclusions from the technical sessions of the workshop including: (1) Programming Environments (2) Programming Tools, (3) Portability. The BOF is also intended to foster the evolving community of modelers who are using or preparing to use heterogeneous multi-core platforms for their weather, climate and earth-system models.


Ilene Carpenter (Primary Session Leader) - NREL

Mark Govett (Secondary Session Leader) - NOAA

Chris Kerr (Secondary Session Leader) - NOAA

of 94

Proxy applications for the DOE NNSA ASC campaign

SESSION: Proxy applications for the DOE NNSA ASC campaign


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Richard Barrett, Allen McPherson, Bert Still

ROOM:TCC 102

ABSTRACT: Application proxies (mini-, skeleton-, and, compact applications, etc) provide a means of enabling rapid exploration of the parameter space that spans the performance of complex scientific application programs designed for use on current, emerging, and future architectures. Beginning with an introduction by Thuc Hoang, program manager from the Office of Advanced Computing and Simulation (ASC) for Department of Energy/National Nuclear Security Administration, this meeting will include presentations describing work encompassing a broad set of issues impacting a broad set of application programs critical to the mission of the ASC campaign, particularly with regard to exascale preparations. (Working group reports at http://asc.llnl.gov/exascale/) This meeting is also designed to encourage participation by an expanding set of collaborators, including those from universities, vendors, and other research institutions. We are particularly interested in engaging those with expertise throughout the codesign space, from application developers through hardware architects.


Richard Barrett (Primary Session Leader) - Sandia National Laboratories

Allen McPherson (Secondary Session Leader) - Los Alamos National Laboratory

Bert Still (Secondary Session Leader) - Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

of 94

Scripting Languages and DSLs for Productive Development of HPC Applications

SESSION: Scripting Languages and DSLs for Productive Development of HPC Applications


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Michael McCool

ROOM:TCC LL4

ABSTRACT: Scripting languages such as Python and Javascript, and Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) such as R hold out the promise of higher productivity application development. However, the performance of scripting languages can be poor. To enable the use of scripting languages for HPC, it is possible to embed a DSL in them, which allows reuse of existing infrastructure for tasks which are not performance critical. DSLs make the application developer’s task easier by providing programming models tuned for particular application areas. By supporting more restrictive programming models, DSLs can target higher performance. We will discuss NumPy/SciPy as well as Copperhead, both of which are embedded in Python; a data-parallel extension to Javascript which supports performance-critical applications embedded in web browsers; and a high-performance implementation of R. NumPy/SciPy takes a library approach, while Copperhead compiles to NVIDIA’s CUDA and the high-performance R implementation uses Intel’s Array Building Blocks virtual machine.


Michael McCool (Primary Session Leader) - Intel

of 94

SLURM User Group Meeting

SESSION: SLURM User Group Meeting


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Morris Jette, Danny Auble

ROOM:WSCC 611/612

ABSTRACT: The SLURM is an open source job scheduler used many on of the TOP500 systems and provides a rich set of features including managing a workload across multiple clusters, topology aware optimized resource allocation, the ability to expand and shrink jobs on demand, the ability to power down idle nodes and restart them as needed, hierarchical bank accounts with fair-share job prioritization and many resource limits. The meeting will consist of three parts: The SLURM development team will present details about the recently released version 2.3, discussion of ongoing and future projects (e.g. improved support for fault tolerance and cloud computing) and discussion of the SLURM roadmap with solicitation of user feedback. Everyone interested in SLURM use and/or development is encouraged to attend. Please bring your suggestions.


Morris Jette (Primary Session Leader) - SchedMD

Danny Auble (Secondary Session Leader) - SchedMD

of 94

SPEC HPG benchmarks for MPI & OpenMP, power, accelerators and much more.

SESSION: SPEC HPG benchmarks for MPI & OpenMP, power, accelerators and much more.


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Kalyan Kumaran, Matthias Müller

ROOM:TCC LL1

ABSTRACT: The High Performance Group of SPEC has a long history of creating industry standard leading edge benchmarks to compare HPC systems since its inception around 1995. Current existing benchmarks support multiple programming models including MPI and OpenMP and are based on real applications from various science domains (MPI2007 and OMP2001). These benchmarks come with run rules and metrics that allow fair and objective comparisons and with a peer review for publication of results on the SPEC website. The group is currently working on the release of a new suite based on OpenMP, that will serve as a replacement to its existing suite, and will include features from the latest OpenMP standard and support a power/performance metric. Details of this new benchmark, power metric, and a roadmap of future plans including an accelerator benchmark will be presented. SPEC HPG is a popular industry consortium comprising leading HPC companies and research labs.


Kalyan Kumaran (Primary Session Leader) - Argonne National Laboratory

Matthias Müller (Secondary Session Leader) - Technical University Dresden

of 94

The IESP and EESI Efforts

SESSION: The IESP and EESI Efforts


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Jack Dongarra, Pete Beckman, Jean-Yves Berthou

ROOM:TCC 304

ABSTRACT: Over the last twenty years, the international open source community has increasingly provided the software at the heart of the world’s high-performance computing systems. The community provides everything from operating system components to compilers and advanced math libraries. As an international community we have only loosely coordinated activities and plans for development. The new rapidly changing technologies in multicore, power consumption, GPGPUs, and memory architectures creates an opportunity for the community to work together and build an international program to design, build, and deliver the software so critical the science goals of our institutions. To help plan how the international community could build a partnership to provide the next generation of HPC software to support scientific discovery, we have had a series of workshops. We plan to report on the effort and solicit feedback from the community. This BOF will also cover the European Exascale Software Initiative (EESI).


Jack Dongarra (Primary Session Leader) - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Pete Beckman (Secondary Session Leader) - Argonne National Laboratory

Jean-Yves Berthou (Secondary Session Leader) - EDF

of 94

The MPI 3.0 Standard - The Final Stages

SESSION: The MPI 3.0 Standard - The Final Stages


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Richard Graham

ROOM:TCC 301/302

ABSTRACT: The Message Passing Interface (MPI) is the ubiquitous standard used by parallel scientific applications to satisfy their communication and process control needs(http://www.mpi-forum.org ). The MPI Forum, which is the MPI standards body, is in the last stages of finalizing version 3.0 of the standard, with several functional enhancements on their way to final standardization. Support for several things has already been added to the MPI 3.0 draft standard, including nonblocking collective, with features, such as support for MPI fault-tolerance, improved support for remote memory operations, and standardized hooks for tool access to information internal to MPI implementations, are in the in final stages of standardization. We will discuss the status of the MPI-3 standardization effort and solicit input from attendees aspects of the standard that should be improved past the MPI 3.0 standard.


Richard Graham (Primary Session Leader) - Oak Ridge National Laboratory

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1000 x 0 = 0. Single-node optimisation does matter.

SESSION: 1000 x 0 = 0. Single-node optimisation does matter.


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Bettina Krammer, Georg Hager, Jan Treibig

ROOM:TCC 205

ABSTRACT: With current systems approaching 10 petaflops and future systems potentially reaching exaflop performance, much attention has been drawn to scalability of applications, runtime environments and tools, while an important aspect often gets neglected: single-node optimisation is still necessary, contributing significantly to overall performance, be it w.r.t. execution time, resource contention or power consumption. This is evident even from the most basic performance and scalability models. However, contrary to popular views the problem of getting good single-node performance is far from being solved. We show some experiences with real-world applications using our approach of combining various performance tools, from high-level analysis (e.g. MPI communication behaviour) down to low-level analysis (e.g. memory behaviour, microbenchmarking). We address both multi-node and single-node issues, but put emphasis on single-node optimisation, since application developers often miss out on tuning opportunities there. We invite application, middleware and tools developers to discuss their experiences and requirements with us.


Bettina Krammer (Primary Session Leader) - Exascale Computing Research

Georg Hager (Secondary Session Leader) - Erlangen Regional Computing Center

Jan Treibig (Secondary Session Leader) - Erlangen Regional Computing Center

of 94

A proposed award for advancements in simulation and modeling in ISV codes

SESSION: A proposed award for advancements in simulation and modeling in ISV codes


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Mark Seager, Benjy Grover, Rob Neely

ROOM:TCC LL1

ABSTRACT: We will discuss development of a new award aimed solely at Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) who develop software for modeling and simulation. Commercial software is a critical component to many of industry's biggest challenges. As well-understood market trends continue, encouraging ISV’s to keep pace with available parallelism will be critical to the ability of users to investigate increases in problem fidelity and dramatically reduced time to solution. Discussion points include: Will this incentivize ISV's to scale their codes? What are metrics for a review committee? Requirements for inclusion and submission? Structure of prize awards? Like the Gordon Bell prize, the goal is to reward scaling to larger core counts and problem sizes, and measuring progress in parallel programming in the commercial software sector. ISV's and potential vendor sponsors are encouraged to provide input to what we hope will become inducement for a new level of scalability in the ISV marketplace.


Mark Seager (Primary Session Leader) - Intel Corporation

Benjy Grover (Secondary Session Leader) - DOE Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research

Rob Neely (Secondary Session Leader) - Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

of 94

Adaptive Computing User's Birds of a Feather

SESSION: Adaptive Computing User's Birds of a Feather


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Frank Indiviglio

ROOM:TCC 305

ABSTRACT: Adaptive Computing’s products are widely used within the SC community. This meeting will provide a forum for users of Moab & Gold to share ideas, connect, and promote best practices. The session will be split between presentations and a panel discussion/open forum to discuss issues, implementation details, and ideas for improving the product line.


Frank Indiviglio (Primary Session Leader) - NOAA

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Collaboratively mining rich information to prepare the Exascale challenges

SESSION: Collaboratively mining rich information to prepare the Exascale challenges


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Marie-Christine Sawley, Grigori Fursin

ROOM:WSCC 204

ABSTRACT: In this BOF we want to discuss novel ways to overcome the complexity of Exascale computing systems through community-driven auto-tuners and optimization repositories. Modern computing systems have reached unprecedented levels of complexity due to a large number of available design and optimization choices. Various auto-tuning and machine learning techniques have been proposed recently to effectively tackle this complexity. However, current architectures, applications and tools are not yet well adapted to such automatic tuning. Furthermore, data mining techniques require collection of a massive amount of data that is not trivial to process. Therefore, we are developing collaborative repositories and techniques that can transparently distribute characterization and optimization of applications and architectures among multiple users. We believe that such collaborative approaches will be vital for developing efficient Exascale computing systems and software. With this BOF, we would like to share our experience with some existing frameworks and how to improve them.


Marie-Christine Sawley (Primary Session Leader) - Intel Corporation

Grigori Fursin (Secondary Session Leader) - INRIA

of 94

Decision Points in Implementing a Small HPC Cluster

SESSION: Decision Points in Implementing a Small HPC Cluster


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):David M. Stack, Beth Anderson, Roger A. Bielefeld

ROOM:WSCC 3A

ABSTRACT: Many institutions are in the process of setting up and operating campus-scale clusters. Often staffing resources are limited and cluster system administrators are without a local peer group. This BoF is an opportunity for those affiliated with campus-scale, capacity clusters to share what has worked and not worked when configuring and managing these resources. The discussion will encompass storage environments, submit/compile environments, scheduler environments, software installation practices, monitoring tools, reporting tools, and historical trend analysis. Live polling via the attendees’ devices and laptops will be conducted during the session to generate a report on what choices the community has made. Meanwhile the discussion will capture what has worked well for people in building their clusters and what people wish they had done differently. This BoF continues the ongoing discussion that has taken place over the last two Supercomputing conferences and the Google Group for Small Centers for High Performance Computing.


David M. Stack (Primary Session Leader) - University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Beth Anderson (Secondary Session Leader) - University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Roger A. Bielefeld (Secondary Session Leader) - Case Western Reserve University

of 94

Developing, Recruiting, and Retaining a Diverse Workforce in HPC

SESSION: Developing, Recruiting, and Retaining a Diverse Workforce in HPC


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Rebecca Hartman-Baker, Samantha Foley, Judith Hill

ROOM:TCC LL2

ABSTRACT: While the majority of people are in principle supportive of efforts to increase the population of underrepresented groups in high-performance computing, few know how to do so in practice. In this BOF we will present concrete advice from people who have been successful at recruiting and retaining students, postdocs, and employees from diverse backgrounds. We will begin with a discussion of the challenges that underrepresented minorities face in the HPC workplace, including challenges unique to the field, and examine practices that can be implemented to alleviate these challenges. The panelists, representing academic, industrial, and laboratory HPC workplaces, will present ideas and strategies that have met with success. The session will continue with a Q&A session and an open discussion. In this BOF, we hope to empower employers and supervisors in the HPC field with the tools to create a work or educational environment where people of all types can flourish.


Rebecca Hartman-Baker (Primary Session Leader) - Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Samantha Foley (Secondary Session Leader) - Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Judith Hill (Secondary Session Leader) - Oak Ridge National Laboratory

of 94

European Exascale Research BoF

SESSION: European Exascale Research BoF


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Mark Parsons, Alex Ramirez, Wolfgang Guerich

ROOM:TCC 304

ABSTRACT: Meeting the challenges that computing at the exascale poses requires research and development on a global scale. Worldwide a number of exascale research programmes are now being created to tackle these challenges. The European Union announced the start of its exascale research programme in October 2011 with the funding of three complementary Framework 7 research projects. The CRESTA, DEEP and Mont-Blanc projects, with a combined funding of €25 million, will each study different aspects of the exascale challenge using a co-design model spanning hardware, systemware and software applications. This funding represents the first tranche in a sustained investment in exascale research by Europe. This Birds of a Feather session, organised by the coordinators of the three projects, will present each of them, discuss their specific research focus and show how they complement each other and other research worldwide. The target audience for the session is the global exascale research community.


Mark Parsons (Primary Session Leader) - EPCC, The University of Edinburgh

Alex Ramirez (Secondary Session Leader) - Barcelona Supercomputing Center

Wolfgang Guerich (Secondary Session Leader) - Forschungzentrum Juelich

of 94

Extending Cyberinfrastructure Beyond Its Own Boundaries -- Campus Champions

SESSION: Extending Cyberinfrastructure Beyond Its Own Boundaries -- Campus Champions


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Kimberley Dillman, Jeff Pummill, Barr von Oehsen

ROOM:TCC 202

ABSTRACT: The vision of the Campus Champions program is for faculty, IT professionals, and students on every campus to be able to easily provide and/or utilize the cyberinfrastructure (CI) resources available locally, regionally, nationally and/or internationally to advance science and engineering research and education. The program provides a vibrant national organization of campus representatives working together towards this vision. Champions are trained on a variety of CI resources and services and are able to assist local users in bridging from their desktop to those resources in support of computational science research and education. The program has three goals: empowering Champions by providing access to resources and people with extensive CI expertise, providing solutions for bridging to CI resources which simplify access between CI resources and the campus desktop, and engaging new, non-traditional, and under-represented campuses and users to advance STEM research and education.


Kimberley Dillman (Primary Session Leader) - Purdue University

Jeff Pummill (Secondary Session Leader) - University of Arkansas

Barr von Oehsen (Secondary Session Leader) - Clemson University

of 94

Heterogeneous supercomputing on ORNL's Titan

SESSION: Heterogeneous supercomputing on ORNL's Titan


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Adam B. Simpson, Anthony DiGirolamo

ROOM:WSCC 3B

ABSTRACT: The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility's (OLCF) next leadership-class system, Titan, will thrust heterogeneous computing to the forefront of supercomputing and bring along with it a new set of programming challenges. This BoF will provide an introduction to the specific tools and techniques that the OLCF plans to offer in order to address these challenges and then transition into an open discussion. During these discussions, participants are encouraged to share their difficulties or expected difficulties with porting their scientific code to a massively hybrid system like Titan. The intent of this BoF is to provide an avenue to discuss specifically what the OLCF can provide to ease the transition into heterogenous computing on Titan.


Adam B. Simpson (Primary Session Leader) - ORNL

Anthony DiGirolamo (Secondary Session Leader) - ORNL

of 94

Large-Scale Reconfigurable Supercomputing

SESSION: Large-Scale Reconfigurable Supercomputing


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Martin Herbordt, Alan George, Herman Lam

ROOM:WSCC 211

ABSTRACT: Reconfigurable computing is characterized by hardware that adapts to match the unique needs of each application, which offers unique advantages in speed per unit energy. With a proven capability of 1 PetaOPS at 10K Watts, large-scale reconfigurable supercomputing has an important role to play in the future of high-end computing. One such system, the Novo-G machine in the NSF CHREC Center at the University of Florida, has a user base of over a dozen research groups distributed worldwide and is rapidly moving towards production utilization in Bioinformatics and other scientific and engineering domains. The purpose of this BOF is to introduce the basic architecture of such systems, describe applications and tools being developed for them, and provide a forum for discussing emerging opportunities and issues in terms of performance (speed and scalability), productivity (programmability and portability), and sustainability (energy and TCO).


Martin Herbordt (Primary Session Leader) - Boston University

Alan George (Secondary Session Leader) - University of Florida

Herman Lam (Secondary Session Leader) - University of Florida

of 94

MPI Debugging Tips and Tricks

SESSION: MPI Debugging Tips and Tricks


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Chris Gottbrath

ROOM:TCC LL4

ABSTRACT: If you've ever had to troubleshoot an MPI job that was crashing, hanging or producing invalid results you know that it can be both daunting and fascinating. This BOF is an open forum for HPC developers to share war-stories from the debugging battlefront and strategies that they use to simplify understanding and eliminating defects in parallel applications. We're looking for brief presentations that recount specific experiences, outline useful strategies, and give information on clever and helpful ways of using or customizing available tools. Some specific topics might include: working with problems at scale, dealing with problems that come and go randomly, dealing with memory errors, strategies for comparative debugging, ways to customize the display of data, automatic/script based debugging, reverse debugging, or dealing with accelerators. A handful of short user talks of 5-15 minutes each will be followed by a general discussion. While this session is organized by Rogue Wave this session features HPC users and is anticipated to cover a range of tools and techniques for parallel debugging. Community members interested in reserving time in this session should contact [email protected].


Chris Gottbrath (Primary Session Leader) - Rogue Wave Software

of 94

PRACE – The European HPC Infrastructure

SESSION: PRACE – The European HPC Infrastructure


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Dietmar Erwin, Anni Jakobsson

ROOM:TCC 301/302

ABSTRACT: The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) is an international non-profit association. It forms the top level of the European HPC ecosystem. European researchers and their international collaborators with applications of potential for high scientific and societal impact may request resources on PRACE systems. Grants are awarded after peer review by leading European researchers. By mid 2011 PRACE granted 1.1 billion CPU hours to 36 high profile scientific projects. In addition, 54 million core hours of will be available through cross-national Tier-1 access. Outstanding research results achieved with PRACE resources, and how to apply for resources, services, and application support on PRACE’s Tier-0 and Tier-1 systems will be presented. The session is a unique opportunity to talk to PRACE representatives and to establish contacts with other researchers requiring HPC resources. PRACE receives funding from the EU's FP7 under grant agreements RI-261557 and FP7-261557.


Dietmar Erwin (Primary Session Leader) - Forschungzentrum Juelich

Anni Jakobsson (Secondary Session Leader) - CSC - IT Center for Science

of 94

Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation

SESSION: Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Gabrielle Allen

ROOM:WSCC 206

ABSTRACT: This session invites the scientific research community, funding agencies and vendors to discuss the role of software in advancing computational and data-enabled science through research and education. Software plays an integral role in scientific discovery and innovation and plays a major role in the National Science Foundation’s “Cyberinfrastructure Framework for 21st Century Science and Engineering”. Recognizing the importance of software the NSF created a new program entitled “Software Infrastructure for Sustained Innovation (SI2)” to transform innovations in research and education into sustained software resources that are an integral part of an overarching cyberinfrastructure. US and international funding agencies and communities are invited and encouraged to participate in and contribute to a discussion covering opportunities, challenges, best practices and visions for building a sustainable software infrastructure for sustainability for scientific research. In particular, NSF representatives will present their vision for future software institutes as long-term community-wide hubs of sustained software excellence.


Gabrielle Allen (Primary Session Leader) - National Science Foundation

of 94

Terabit Networks: Opportunity and Challenges in Extreme-Scale Science and Massive Data Movement

SESSION: Terabit Networks: Opportunity and Challenges in Extreme-Scale Science and Massive Data Movement


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Thomas Ndousse, Steve Cotter

ROOM:TCC LL5

ABSTRACT: The volume of data generated by Exascale computing, complex scientific instruments, and commercial internet activities in the next decade will far exceed the level that can be handled efficiently by today’s best IP networks. The traditional incremental improvement approach may not be adequate to address the massive data movement needs. Terabits networks that leverage the emerging 100GigE technology offer a path forward for addressing the anticipated data movement needs. However, exploiting 100 GigE technologies will be challenging. It will involve developing fundamentally new networks protocols and scaling ones. Radically new approaches such as hybrid traffic engineering schemes that combine packets and circuit switching; new transport protocols that effectively deliver multi-gigabits to science applications; fundamentally new schemes for cross multi-layer protection; robust standards to facilitate multi-layers/ multi-domain and inter-operability of multi-vendor networking; and innovative disk-to-network I/O sub-systems. Meeting these challenges will require effective collaboration between network researchers, R&E networks, and vendors.


Thomas Ndousse (Primary Session Leader) - DOE

Steve Cotter (Secondary Session Leader) - Energy Sciences Network

of 94

The NSF Cyberinfrastructure for the 21st Century Program and DataNet Program

SESSION: The NSF Cyberinfrastructure for the 21st Century Program and DataNet Program


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Rob Pennington, Gabrielle Allen, Irene Qualters

ROOM:TCC 101

ABSTRACT: The NSF-wide Cyberinfrastructure for the 21st Century program, CIF21, addresses the requirements of researchers in science and engineering who are increasingly relying on cyberinfrastructure, including data intensive research environments, algorithms and tools, on a long term sustainable basis. This session is intended for researchers, educators and vendors who fund, design, implement, support or utilize data intensive cyberinfrastructure environments. The NSF DataNet program and related programs support the development of new methods, management structures and technologies to manage the diversity, size, and complexity of current and future data sets and data streams by creating a set of exemplar data research infrastructure organizations that provide unique opportunities to communities of researchers to advance research and education. The status of current programs will be discussed and input will be solicited from the high performance computing research community for the development of new programs and directions to address research requirements for the coming decades.


Rob Pennington (Primary Session Leader) - National Science Foundation

Gabrielle Allen (Secondary Session Leader) - National Science Foundation

Irene Qualters (Secondary Session Leader) - National Science Foundation

of 94

The Score-P Community Project -- An Interoperable Infrastructure for HPC Performance Analysis Tools

SESSION: The Score-P Community Project -- An Interoperable Infrastructure for HPC Performance Analysis Tools


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Andreas Knuepfer, Felix Wolf, Sameer Shende

ROOM:TCC 102

ABSTRACT: The Score-P project is a community effort for a unified parallel performance tool infrastructure that supports different analysis tools. At this BOF we will present the first public beta release of the Score-P Open Source package. We invite potential users and other tool developers for an informative overview, for feedback and for potential future collaborations. The main benefits of our community approach are: 1) better user acceptance, only one learning curve, 2) better interoperability of tools and simplified uniform installation 3) reduction of redundant functionality and development effort, and 4) joint user support and user training activities. The Score-P project was initiated by a number of leading performance tool groups and already works as common run-time measurement component for the established tools Scalasca, Vampir, Periscope, and TAU. It supports profile recording, event-trace collection, and comes with an on-line access interface and many more features. For more information visit http://www.score-p.org/.


Andreas Knuepfer (Primary Session Leader) - ZIH, TU Dresden

Felix Wolf (Secondary Session Leader) - German Reasearch School for Simulation Sciences

Sameer Shende (Secondary Session Leader) - Performance Research Lab, NIC, University of Oregon

of 94

Web2.0 Applications on HPC Speeds

SESSION: Web2.0 Applications on HPC Speeds


TIME: 12:15PM - 1:15PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Gilad Shainer, Jeffrey Layton, Scot Schultz

ROOM:TCC 303

ABSTRACT: High-performance technologies typically find themselves as the primer solutions for scalable high-performance computing infrastructures that are being used for engineering simulation and research, and less in the enterprise data center. But with the emerging Web2.0 applications and the expansion of cloud infrastructures the need for speed has been extended into the Web2.0 applications as well. The benefits of low latency and high CPU efficiencies are been used for faster parallel database mapping, RDMA support is been added to Hadoop and MemCached and high throughput is being used for live migrations. Do the clouds help to drive HPC technologies into new frontiers? The session will review several cases of Web2.0 users that have decided to use HPC technologies and how those technologies can benefit the entire set of cloud application.



Jeffrey Layton (Secondary Session Leader) - Dell Inc.

Scot Schultz (Secondary Session Leader) - AMD

of 94

Application Grand Challenges in the Heterogeneous Accelerator Era

SESSION: Application Grand Challenges in the Heterogeneous Accelerator Era


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Pavan Balaji, Satoshi Matsuoka

ROOM:TCC 202

ABSTRACT: Accelerators have recently gained prominence as the next disruptive technology with a potential to provide a non-incremental jump in performance. However, the number of applications that have actually moved to these technologies is still limited. This is because of many reasons, arguably the biggest of which is the gap in understanding between accelerator hardware developers (what features are available and upcoming) and application developers (what applications need). This BoF session aims to provide a unique opportunity to fill this gap. It will be organized as a debate-and-discuss session between two camps. In the first camp, application developers from different domains would be asked to describe their requirements and point out the challenges they are facing with current accelerator technologies. In the second camp, a panel of accelerator hardware/software developers would then be on the "hot-seat" to address these concerns, from the application developers and the audience, and give appropriate suggestions.


Pavan Balaji (Primary Session Leader) - Argonne National Laboratory

Satoshi Matsuoka (Secondary Session Leader) - Tokyo Institute of Technology

of 94

Building a Scientific Data Warehouse, including Multi-boot HPC Capabilities

SESSION: Building a Scientific Data Warehouse, including Multi-boot HPC Capabilities


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Clark Gaylord, William Lu

ROOM:TCC LL5

ABSTRACT: The Virginia Tech Transportation Institute’s (VTTI) naturalistic driving studies observe driver behavior in the real world, using more than 3,000 vehicles instrumented to collect video and sensor data. This petascale research exemplifies data intensive scientific investigation and produces studies of unprecedented scale to better understand driving behavior relative to safety critical events. Discover how VTTI harnesses state-of-the-art HPC technologies, melding storage and data management capabilities with traditional HPC computational platforms, as an integral part of Virginia Tech’s Scientific Data Warehouse environment and throughout the data lifecycle. Attendees will learn how to: - Ensure your IT infrastructure design maximizes efficiency, including key processes; - Further capitalize on the savings achieved through HPC management tools that leverage dynamic multi-boot functionalities across varying operating systems and automated provisioning to optimize performance; - Apply HPC management lessons learned by one of the world’s premier transportation research facilities to the enterprise and other related industries.


Clark Gaylord (Primary Session Leader) - Virginia Tech

William Lu (Secondary Session Leader) - Platform Computing

of 94

First Experience with InfiniBand FDR

SESSION: First Experience with InfiniBand FDR


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Gilad Shainer, Michael Kagan, Eyal Gutkind

ROOM:WSCC 3B

ABSTRACT: The new InfiniBand roadmap announced by the IBTA unveiled new speeds for bandwidth that expands the previously-defined InfiniBand speeds to include FDR and EDR. InfiniBand FDR (14Gb/s data rate per lane) in conjunction with PCIe Gen3 increases the InfiniBand throughput by 80% when compared to InfiniBand QDR and PCIe Gen2 platforms. The new InfiniBand FDR technology incorporate a new link level encoding scheme and new reliability mechanisms for increasing the scalability and efficiency in Petascale computing and beyond. The session will provide a detailed review on the new InfiniBand speeds and the new feature set that InfiniBand FDR provides. The session will also include, for the first time, a report on the first real experience with InfiniBand FDR and the impact of the new features on leading applications and workloads. The session will also drive a discussion on new capabilities that should be added to future generations beyond InfiniBand FDR.



Michael Kagan (Secondary Session Leader) - Mellanox Technologies

Eyal Gutkind (Secondary Session Leader) - Mellanox Technologies

of 94

Genomics in the Cloud

SESSION: Genomics in the Cloud


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Matt Wood, Michael Schatz

ROOM:TCC 303

ABSTRACT: Cloud computing is helping to unlock and enable modern genomics. Fuelled by lower costs and wider availability of second and third generation sequencing technologies, cloud computing is playing a central role in managing the size and complexity of today's genomics data. This Birds of a Feather session aims to discuss real world usage, best practices and the growing ecosystem of tools and services to help analyse, store, manage, share and collaborate around genomic data in the cloud. We'll introduce the best of breed analytics tools, distributed technologies and use cases before opening the floor for a discussion of best practices, gotchas and the future of genomic tools with the arrival of petabyte-scale genomics.


Matt Wood (Primary Session Leader) - Amazon Web Services

Michael Schatz (Secondary Session Leader) - Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

of 94

Harnessing the power of GPUs for Numerical Problems in Finance/Oil&Gas

SESSION: Harnessing the power of GPUs for Numerical Problems in Finance/Oil&Gas


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Donal O'Mahony

ROOM:TCC 304

ABSTRACT: Targeted at people working on numerical problems in the domains of computational finance and Oil & Gas who are interested in harnessing the power of GPU technology in solving problems involving techniques such as Monte-Carlo simulation. Intended to serve as a discussion forum centring on possible hardware choices, code speedups that are achievable and choices of programming environment. A number of professionals who already have experience in this area have already been approached and will contribute with short presentations, followed by an open-forum which we hope will attract discussion by analysts who will extract the results from these calculations and technology providers that provide facilities to analyst groups.


Donal O'Mahony (Primary Session Leader) - University of Dublin, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

of 94

HDF5: State of the Union

SESSION: HDF5: State of the Union


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Quincey Koziol, Elena Pourmal

ROOM:WSCC 206

ABSTRACT: HDF5 is an open-source technology suite for managing diverse, complex, high-volume data in heterogeneous computing and storage environments. HDF5 includes: (1) a versatile self-describing data model that can represent very complex data objects and relationships, and a wide variety of metadata; (2) a completely portable binary file format with no limit on the number or size of data objects; (3) a software library with time and space optimization features for reading and writing HDF5 data; and (4) tools for managing, manipulating, viewing, and analyzing data in HDF5 files. This session will provide a forum for HDF5 developers and users to interact. HDF5 developers will describe the current status of HDF5 and discuss future plans. Ample time will be allowed for questions and discussion, and direct users of HDF5 technologies, as well of users of software built on top of HDF5, will be encouraged to share their successes, challenges, and requests.


Quincey Koziol (Primary Session Leader) - HDF Group

Elena Pourmal (Secondary Session Leader) - Group

of 94

HPC Best Practices

SESSION: HPC Best Practices


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Jason C. Hick, Gary Grider

ROOM:WSCC 204

ABSTRACT: Four HPC Best Practices Workshops, sponsored by the DOE Office of Science and the NNSA, have been held in the last four years. These workshops and their findings have provided the basis for a cross-agency and cross-facility understanding of the methods used to run effective HPC centers. Annual topics have spanned systems integration, risk management, sustainable software lifecycles, and power management. By SC 2011 a fifth workshop will have been conducted on file systems and archives. This BOF will serve as a high level summary to the reports, presenting their findings, develop a discussion of progress since the workshops. The BOF is open to all, but is particularly targeted toward managers and directors of large scale HPC facilities. Previous workshop reports are available here: https://outreach.scidac.gov/pmbp/


Jason C. Hick (Primary Session Leader) - Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Gary Grider (Secondary Session Leader) - Los Alamos National Laboratory

of 94

HPC Centers

SESSION: HPC Centers


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Robert Whitten Jr

ROOM:TCC LL2

ABSTRACT: This BOF provides an open forum for user assistance personnel to discuss topics of interest. Topics include but are not limited to ticket procedures, queue policies, organization and structure of support options, and any pressing topic. The goal of this BoF is to provide an opportunity for user support staff from HPC centers (NSF, DOE, DOD, NASA, university, and others from USA and around the world) to share ideas and discuss common problems and concerns. Members should expect to share, discuss and compare Best Practices in order to further the goals of HPC centers.This BOF is an ongoing meeting of the HPC Centers working group and all interested parties are encouraged to attend.


Robert Whitten Jr (Primary Session Leader) - Oak Ridge National Laboratory

of 94

HPC in the Cloud

SESSION: HPC in the Cloud


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Deepak Singh, Nigel Duffy

ROOM:TCC 301/302

ABSTRACT: Supercomputing offers a unique opportunity for the HPC community to meet and discuss the latest trends and technologies. This Birds of a Feather session offers a forum for. After a short introductory session from Deepak Singh, Principle Product Manager for Amazon EC2, this user focused group will discuss all aspects of using and managing high performance systems in the cloud. This will include reviews of real world usage, applications, elastic capacity, rapid provisioning and the role of HPC in enabling new models of programmability, scale and research.


Deepak Singh (Primary Session Leader) - Amazon Web Services

Nigel Duffy (Secondary Session Leader) - Numerate

of 94

HPC NFS (Not your Father’s Storage)

SESSION: HPC NFS (Not your Father’s Storage)


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Jeff Layton

ROOM:TCC LL4

ABSTRACT: NFS is undergoing a renaissance in HPC. In this BoF, various aspects of NFS storage for HPC will be presented and discussed. Included willl be hardware, networking and file systems. The focus is on scalability for performance and capacity including the next generation. Various speakers from vendors and users will share their experiences.


Jeff Layton (Primary Session Leader) - Dell Inc.

of 94

HPC Runtime System Software

SESSION: HPC Runtime System Software


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Rishi Khan, Thomas Sterling, Vivek Sarkar

ROOM:TCC 101

ABSTRACT: Future extreme-scale systems may require aggressive runtime strategies to achieve both high efficiency and high scalability for continued performance advantage through Moore’s Law. Exploitation of runtime information will support dynamic adaptive techniques for superior resource management and task scheduling through introspection for better system utilization and scaling. This BoF brings together runtime system software developers, application programmers, and members of the broader HPC community to discuss the opportunities and challenges of using new runtime system software. This BoF considers how parallelism can be significantly increased, how latency of memory access and system resource access will be hidden, the ways in which critical path overheads may be minimized, and adaptive methods for avoiding hotspots and mitigating energy demands. Presentations will discuss how runtime systems can handle heterogeneity of architectures, memory/network subsystems, energy consumption, and continued execution in the presence of faults. Among systems discussed will be Habanero, ParalleX-HPX, Charm++, and SWARM.


Rishi Khan (Primary Session Leader) - ET International, ET International, Inc.

Thomas Sterling (Secondary Session Leader) - Indiana University

Vivek Sarkar (Secondary Session Leader) - Rice University

of 94

HPC Visualization: Seeing is Understanding

SESSION: HPC Visualization: Seeing is Understanding


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Elliott Berger

ROOM:TCC 205

ABSTRACT: Visualization has become an essential tool in scientific research, spanning many areas of science and engineering research and design. This session will share first-hand experiences in conceptualization, planning, design and implementation of visualization solutions, from entry-level to the largest clusters and walls. Various speakers from vendors and users will share their experiences.


Elliott Berger (Primary Session Leader) - Dell Inc.

of 94

New Developments in the Global Arrays Programming Model

SESSION: New Developments in the Global Arrays Programming Model


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Bruce Palmer, Abhinav Vishnu

ROOM:TCC 102

ABSTRACT: The purpose of this BOF is to obtain input from the Global Array user community on proposed development of the GA toolkit. The main focus will be on extending the GA programming model to post-petascale architectures but other topics, including the addition of desirable features relevant for programming on existing platforms will also be entertained. The discussion will focus on addressing bottlenecks to scalability, including fault tolerance, data consistency in one-sided communication models, and flexible distributed data structures. The session format will be geared towards informal discussion and will invite extensive input from session attendees. The session leaders will provide a brief overview of the GA programming model and then discuss issues associated with extending the GA programming model to the next generation of computers and current plans to deal with them. The session will then be opened up for discussion and comments by session participants.


Bruce Palmer (Primary Session Leader) - Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Abhinav Vishnu (Secondary Session Leader) - Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

of 94

Punctuated Equilibrium at Exascale

SESSION: Punctuated Equilibrium at Exascale


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Ronald G. Minnich, Lee Ward

ROOM:WSCC 3A

ABSTRACT: Until the proposed U.S. Department of Energy Exascale Initiative becomes official, the path and approach of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Advanced Simulation and Computing program for the next decade will be "evolutionary": how we might bend or adapt existing technologies to serve as a basis and environment for computing at Exascale? Many believe that such an approach is sub-optimal, that the unique problems or unprecedented scale represent an opportunity to reexamine past choices, or that the "evolutionary" approach will introduce significant software engineering risks, without complementary mitigation. In this interactive panel, composed of DOE/NNSA researchers, we will present some thoughts on alternative out-of-the-box or "revolutionary" options, actively solicit ideas from the audience, and moderate a group discussion between the panel and audience on the topic. The scope is broad, encompassing programming environments, altered application strategies, architecture, I/O. on-system and real-time data triage and analysis, power management, and operations.


Ronald G. Minnich (Primary Session Leader) - Sandia National Laboratories

Lee Ward (Secondary Session Leader) - Sandia National Laboratories

of 94

Python for High Performance Computing

SESSION: Python for High Performance Computing


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Andreas Schreiber, William R. Scullin, Andy R. Terrel

ROOM:TCC 305

ABSTRACT: The Python for High Performance Computing BoF is a forum for presenting products, projects, ideas, and problems related to Python as short lightning talks (5 minutes each). The goal is to get in contact with other colleagues for further discussion and joint activities. All presentations should be related to Python in some way, for example: introduction of existing software using Python as an implementation language for HPC applications, experience reports with advantages or drawbacks of Python for HPC, announcements of events related to Python and HPC, proposals for projects where Python plays a role, or request for collaboration and search for partners.


Andreas Schreiber (Primary Session Leader) - German Aerospace Center (DLR)

William R. Scullin (Secondary Session Leader) - Argonne National Laboratory

Andy R. Terrel (Secondary Session Leader) - Enthought, Inc.

of 94

Resilient Software for ExaScale Computing

SESSION: Resilient Software for ExaScale Computing


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Marie-Christine Sawley, Roel Wuyts

ROOM:WSCC 211

ABSTRACT: ExaScale computing systems will likely consist of millions of cores executing applications with billions of threads, based on 14nm or less CMOS technology, according to the ITRS roadmap. Processing elements built on this technology, coupled with dynamic power management will exhibit high variability in performance, between cores and across different runs. Even worse, preliminary figures indicates that on average about every couple of minutes –at least- something in the system will break. Traditional checkpointing strategies are unlikely to work, given the time it will take to save the huge quantities of data combined with the fact that they will need to be restored frequently. This BoF wants to investigate resilient software: software that is able to survive failing hardware and continue to run, without minimal performance impact. Furthermore, we may also discuss tradeoffs between rerunning the application and the cost of instrumentation to deal with resilience.


Marie-Christine Sawley (Primary Session Leader) - Intel Corporation

Roel Wuyts (Secondary Session Leader) - IMEC

of 94

System Monitoring Meets Application Performance Analysis - The HOPSA EU-Russia Project

SESSION: System Monitoring Meets Application Performance Analysis - The HOPSA EU-Russia Project


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Bernd Mohr, Vladimir Voevodin, Erik Hagersten

ROOM:TCC LL1

ABSTRACT: To maximize the scientific output of a high-performance computing system, different stakeholders pursue different strategies. While application developers are trying to shorten the time to solution by optimizing their codes, system administrators are tuning the configuration of the overall system to increase its throughput. Yet, the complexity of today's machines with their strong interrelationship between application and system performance presents serious challenges to achieving these goals. This BOF session will present strategies and preliminary results addressing this challenge developed in the EU-Russia "Holistic Performance System Analysis" project (HOPSA, http://www.hopsa-project.eu ). One part consists of the collection, aggregation, and management of system-wide performance metrics as part of system monitoring. The other part comprises well-known application-centric performance analysis tools covering complementary aspects. Both will be integrated in an end-to-end performance analysis work-flow which will incorporate presently separated aspects such as system hardware status, job submission, individual application processes and parallel application behavior.


Bernd Mohr (Primary Session Leader) - Juelich Supercomputing Centre

Vladimir Voevodin (Secondary Session Leader) - Moscow State University Research Computing Center

Erik Hagersten (Secondary Session Leader) - Rouge Wave Software AB

of 94

The Green500 List

SESSION: The Green500 List


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Wu Feng, Kirk Cameron

ROOM:WSCC 611/612

ABSTRACT: The Green500 List, now entering its fifth year, seeks to encourage sustainable supercomputing by raising awareness to the energy efficiency of such systems. Since its official launch at SC07, the list has continued to evolve to serve the high-performance computing (HPC) community. This BoF will present (1) new metrics, methodologies, and workloads for measuring the energy efficiency of a HPC system, (2) highlights from the latest Green500 List, (3) trends across the entire history of the Green500 List and the trajectory towards exascale, and (4) analysis of the new exploratory Green500 Lists, in particular, the Little Green500 List. In addition, the BoF will actively solicit constructive feedback from the HPC community to improve the impact of the Green500 on efficient high-performance system design. The BoF will close with an awards presentation that will recognize the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world.


Wu Feng (Primary Session Leader) - Virginia Tech

Kirk Cameron (Secondary Session Leader) - Virginia Tech

of 94

Women in HPC: Community Building

SESSION: Women in HPC: Community Building


TIME: 5:30PM - 7:00PM

SESSION LEADER(S):Samantha S. Foley, Rebecca J. Hartman-Baker, Judith C. Hill

ROOM:WSCC 613/614

ABSTRACT: Despite the fact that women comprise more than half the world's population, they are underrepresented in high-performance computing. One way to improve gender diversity in HPC is to build communities for women to interact, advise and share success stories to inspire and encourage women at all career levels. We will begin with a presentation on the goals of the session, and information on creating and maintaining a strong community. Participants will then form groups to brainstorm ideas for building communities for women in HPC in local and online settings, as well as at SC. The remainder of the time will be spent discussing the ideas generated in the brainstorming activity, planning ways to implement them, and general discussion related to supporting women in HPC. We hope that attendees will gain new friends and colleagues, and generate more opportunities to interact throughout the year.


Samantha S. Foley (Primary Session Leader) - Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Rebecca J. Hartman-Baker (Secondary Session Leader) - Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Judith C. Hill (Secondary Session Leader) - Oak Ridge National Laboratory

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