650 research outputs found
The future of computing beyond Moore's Law.
Moore's Law is a techno-economic model that has enabled the information technology industry to double the performance and functionality of digital electronics roughly every 2 years within a fixed cost, power and area. Advances in silicon lithography have enabled this exponential miniaturization of electronics, but, as transistors reach atomic scale and fabrication costs continue to rise, the classical technological driver that has underpinned Moore's Law for 50 years is failing and is anticipated to flatten by 2025. This article provides an updated view of what a post-exascale system will look like and the challenges ahead, based on our most recent understanding of technology roadmaps. It also discusses the tapering of historical improvements, and how it affects options available to continue scaling of successors to the first exascale machine. Lastly, this article covers the many different opportunities and strategies available to continue computing performance improvements in the absence of historical technology drivers. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'Numerical algorithms for high-performance computational science'
ASCR/HEP Exascale Requirements Review Report
This draft report summarizes and details the findings, results, and
recommendations derived from the ASCR/HEP Exascale Requirements Review meeting
held in June, 2015. The main conclusions are as follows. 1) Larger, more
capable computing and data facilities are needed to support HEP science goals
in all three frontiers: Energy, Intensity, and Cosmic. The expected scale of
the demand at the 2025 timescale is at least two orders of magnitude -- and in
some cases greater -- than that available currently. 2) The growth rate of data
produced by simulations is overwhelming the current ability, of both facilities
and researchers, to store and analyze it. Additional resources and new
techniques for data analysis are urgently needed. 3) Data rates and volumes
from HEP experimental facilities are also straining the ability to store and
analyze large and complex data volumes. Appropriately configured
leadership-class facilities can play a transformational role in enabling
scientific discovery from these datasets. 4) A close integration of HPC
simulation and data analysis will aid greatly in interpreting results from HEP
experiments. Such an integration will minimize data movement and facilitate
interdependent workflows. 5) Long-range planning between HEP and ASCR will be
required to meet HEP's research needs. To best use ASCR HPC resources the
experimental HEP program needs a) an established long-term plan for access to
ASCR computational and data resources, b) an ability to map workflows onto HPC
resources, c) the ability for ASCR facilities to accommodate workflows run by
collaborations that can have thousands of individual members, d) to transition
codes to the next-generation HPC platforms that will be available at ASCR
facilities, e) to build up and train a workforce capable of developing and
using simulations and analysis to support HEP scientific research on
next-generation systems.Comment: 77 pages, 13 Figures; draft report, subject to further revisio
Development of an oceanographic application in HPC
High Performance Computing (HPC) is used for running advanced application programs
efficiently, reliably, and quickly.
In earlier decades, performance analysis of HPC applications was evaluated based on
speed, scalability of threads, memory hierarchy. Now, it is essential to consider the
energy or the power consumed by the system while executing an application.
In fact, the High Power Consumption (HPC) is one of biggest problems for the High
Performance Computing (HPC) community and one of the major obstacles for exascale
systems design.
The new generations of HPC systems intend to achieve exaflop performances and will
demand even more energy to processing and cooling. Nowadays, the growth of HPC
systems is limited by energy issues
Recently, many research centers have focused the attention on doing an automatic tuning
of HPC applications which require a wide study of HPC applications in terms of power
efficiency.
In this context, this paper aims to propose the study of an oceanographic application,
named OceanVar, that implements Domain Decomposition based 4D Variational model
(DD-4DVar), one of the most commonly used HPC applications, going to evaluate not
only the classic aspects of performance but also aspects related to power efficiency in
different case of studies.
These work were realized at Bsc (Barcelona Supercomputing Center), Spain within the
Mont-Blanc project, performing the test first on HCA server with Intel technology and then on a mini-cluster Thunder with ARM technology.
In this work of thesis it was initially explained the concept of assimilation date, the
context in which it is developed, and a brief description of the mathematical model
4DVAR.
After this problem’s close examination, it was performed a porting from Matlab
description of the problem of data-assimilation to its sequential version in C language.
Secondly, after identifying the most onerous computational kernels in order of time, it
has been developed a parallel version of the application with a parallel multiprocessor
programming style, using the MPI (Message Passing Interface) protocol.
The experiments results, in terms of performance, have shown that, in the case of
running on HCA server, an Intel architecture, values of efficiency of the two most
onerous functions obtained, growing the number of process, are approximately equal to
80%.
In the case of running on ARM architecture, specifically on Thunder mini-cluster,
instead, the trend obtained is labeled as "SuperLinear Speedup" and, in our case, it can
be explained by a more efficient use of resources (cache memory access) compared with
the sequential case.
In the second part of this paper was presented an analysis of the some issues of this
application that has impact in the energy efficiency.
After a brief discussion about the energy consumption characteristics of the Thunder
chip in technological landscape, through the use of a power consumption detector, the
Yokogawa Power Meter, values of energy consumption of mini-cluster Thunder were
evaluated in order to determine an overview on the power-to-solution of this application
to use as the basic standard for successive analysis with other parallel styles.
Finally, a comprehensive performance evaluation, targeted to estimate the goodness of
MPI parallelization, is conducted using a suitable performance tool named Paraver,
developed by BSC.
Paraver is such a performance analysis and visualisation tool which can be used to
analyse MPI, threaded or mixed mode programmes and represents the key to perform a parallel profiling and to optimise the code for High Performance Computing.
A set of graphical representation of these statistics make it easy for a developer to
identify performance problems. Some of the problems that can be easily identified are
load imbalanced decompositions, excessive communication overheads and poor average
floating operations per second achieved.
Paraver can also report statistics based on hardware counters, which are provided by the
underlying hardware.
This project aimed to use Paraver configuration files to allow certain metrics to be
analysed for this application.
To explain in some way the performance trend obtained in the case of analysis on the
mini-cluster Thunder, the tracks were extracted from various case of studies and the
results achieved is what expected, that is a drastic drop of cache misses by the case ppn
(process per node) = 1 to case ppn = 16.
This in some way explains a more efficient use of cluster resources with an increase of
the number of processes
Towards exascale real-time RFI mitigation
We describe the design and implementation of an extremely scalable real-time
RFI mitigation method, based on the offline AOFlagger. All algorithms scale
linearly in the number of samples. We describe how we implemented the flagger
in the LOFAR real-time pipeline, on both CPUs and GPUs. Additionally, we
introduce a novel simple history-based flagger that helps reduce the impact of
our small window on the data.
By examining an observation of a known pulsar, we demonstrate that our
flagger can achieve much higher quality than a simple thresholder, even when
running in real time, on a distributed system. The flagger works on visibility
data, but also on raw voltages, and beam formed data. The algorithms are
scale-invariant, and work on microsecond to second time scales. We are
currently implementing a prototype for the time domain pipeline of the SKA
central signal processor.Comment: 2016 Radio Frequency Interference (RFI2016) Coexisting with Radio
Frequency Interference, Socorro, New Mexico, USA, October 201
Towards Exascale Scientific Metadata Management
Advances in technology and computing hardware are enabling scientists from
all areas of science to produce massive amounts of data using large-scale
simulations or observational facilities. In this era of data deluge, effective
coordination between the data production and the analysis phases hinges on the
availability of metadata that describe the scientific datasets. Existing
workflow engines have been capturing a limited form of metadata to provide
provenance information about the identity and lineage of the data. However,
much of the data produced by simulations, experiments, and analyses still need
to be annotated manually in an ad hoc manner by domain scientists. Systematic
and transparent acquisition of rich metadata becomes a crucial prerequisite to
sustain and accelerate the pace of scientific innovation. Yet, ubiquitous and
domain-agnostic metadata management infrastructure that can meet the demands of
extreme-scale science is notable by its absence.
To address this gap in scientific data management research and practice, we
present our vision for an integrated approach that (1) automatically captures
and manipulates information-rich metadata while the data is being produced or
analyzed and (2) stores metadata within each dataset to permeate
metadata-oblivious processes and to query metadata through established and
standardized data access interfaces. We motivate the need for the proposed
integrated approach using applications from plasma physics, climate modeling
and neuroscience, and then discuss research challenges and possible solutions
CFD Vision 2030 Study: A Path to Revolutionary Computational Aerosciences
This report documents the results of a study to address the long range, strategic planning required by NASA's Revolutionary Computational Aerosciences (RCA) program in the area of computational fluid dynamics (CFD), including future software and hardware requirements for High Performance Computing (HPC). Specifically, the "Vision 2030" CFD study is to provide a knowledge-based forecast of the future computational capabilities required for turbulent, transitional, and reacting flow simulations across a broad Mach number regime, and to lay the foundation for the development of a future framework and/or environment where physics-based, accurate predictions of complex turbulent flows, including flow separation, can be accomplished routinely and efficiently in cooperation with other physics-based simulations to enable multi-physics analysis and design. Specific technical requirements from the aerospace industrial and scientific communities were obtained to determine critical capability gaps, anticipated technical challenges, and impediments to achieving the target CFD capability in 2030. A preliminary development plan and roadmap were created to help focus investments in technology development to help achieve the CFD vision in 2030
- …