Richard Kenway

Exascale Initiatives at Edinburgh

Edinburgh-Tsukuba Workshop Feb 2010Edinburgh-Tsukuba Workshop Feb 2010

Richard KenwayUniversity of Edinburgh

Feb 2010 Richard Kenway 2

Exascale = Extreme Scale

• Embedded terascale (hand-held, 10-100W)

• Departmental petascale (1-2 racks, 10-100kW)

• (Inter)national exascale (100 racks, 25-50MW)

• Challenges– strong scaling = find 1000× more parallelism in applications– fault tolerance = new algorithms + validation/verification– energy efficiency = new programming model(s), eg minimise data

movement, intelligent powering– novel hardware = GPGPUs, heterogeneous chips– massive (potentially corrupted) data = new I/O models

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ExascaleExascaleTechnologyTechnologyCentreCentre

EESIEUROPEANEXASCALESOFTWARE INITIATIVE

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Edinburgh Research Environment

systems

systems

algorithm

s

algorithm

s

applications

applications

datadata

IDEA Lab

Informatics

Physics & Astronomy

Mathematics

Exascale ResearchInitiative

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Strong Scaling

• Hybrid programming models– feasibility of OpenMP + MPI for a set of applications– 24-way (HECToR) → 1000-way (exascale) SMP nodes– investigate new hybrid strategies for key algorithms e.g. FFTs

• PGAS languages– investigate advantages and disadvantages of PGAS languages for

exascale systems

• Develop demonstrator applications and investigate

performance characteristics– CP2K?

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Other Areas of Interest

• GPGPU/accelerator programmability – limited error detection/correction– variable precision– rich memory hierarchy

• I/O performance– real-time massive data analyses

• Verification and fault tolerance– asynchronous algorithms– tolerance to errors in data, communications, computation

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Co-Design Vehicles

• Aspiration pull vs applications chasm– global challenges make the case

… but the codes are too immature– codes that are ready (eg QCD) don’t justify the investment

• Technology push is not enough – politically – cost too high, too few companies will benefit– technically – there are many roads towards exascale

… and potential dead ends

• CDVs– applications that are scientifically sound with the potential to scale– provide development paths

… while global challenge codes develop in parallel

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G8 Call for Proposals – Opportunity for Collaboration