6th International Special Session on Current Trends in Numerical Simulation for Parallel Engineering Environments

In today's world, the use of parallel programming and architectures is essential for simulating practical problems in engineering and related disciplines. Remarkable progress in CPU architecture (multi- and many-core, SMT, transactional memory, virtualization support, etc.), system scalability, and interconnect technology continues to provide new opportunities, as well as new challenges for both system architects and software developers. These trends are paralleled by progress in parallel algorithms, simulation techniques, and software integration from multiple disciplines. In its 6th year ParSim continues to build a bridge between computer science and the application disciplines and to help with fostering cooperations between the different fields. In contrast to traditional conferences, emphasis is put on the presentation of up-to-date results with a shorter turn-around time. This offers the unique opportunity to present new aspects in this dynamic field and discuss them with a wide, interdisciplinary audience. The EuroPVM/MPI conference series, as one of the prime events in parallel computation, serves as an ideal surrounding for ParSim. This combination enables the participants to present and discuss their work within the scope of both the session and the host conference. This year, ten papers with authors in ten countries were submitted to ParSim, and after a quick turn-around, yet thorough review process we decided to accept three of them for publication and presentation during the ParSim session. These three papers show the use of simulation in a range of different application fields including earthquake and turbulence simulation. At the same time, they also address computer science aspects and discuss different parallelization strategies, programming models and environments, as well as scalability. We are confident that this provides an attractive program and that ParSim will yet again be an informal setting for lively discussions and for fostering new collaborations. Several people contributed to this event. Thanks go to Jack Dongarra, the EuroPVM/MPI general chair, and to Thomas Herault and Franck Cappello, the PC chairs, for their support to continue the ParSim series at EuroPVM/MPI 2007. We would also like to thank the numerous reviewers, who provided us with their reviews in such a short amount of time (in most cases in just a few days) and thereby helped us to maintain the tight schedule. Last, but certainly not least, we would like to thank all those who took the time to submit papers and hence made this event possible in the first place. We are confident that this session will fulfill its purpose to provide new insights from both the engineering and the computer science side and encourages interdisciplinary exchange of ideas and cooperations. We hope that this will continue ParSim's tradition at EuroPVM/MPI

Current Trends in Numerical Simulation for Parallel Engineering Environments New Directions and Work-in-Progress

In today's world, the use of parallel programming and architectures is essential for simulating practical problems in engineering and related disciplines. Remarkable progress in CPU architecture, system scalability, and interconnect technology continues to provide new opportunities, as well as new challenges for both system architects and software developers. These trends are paralleled by progress in parallel algorithms, simulation techniques, and software integration from multiple disciplines. ParSim brings together researchers from both application disciplines and computer science and aims at fostering closer cooperation between these fields. Since its successful introduction in 2002, ParSim has established itself as an integral part of the EuroPVM/MPI conference series. In contrast to traditional conferences, emphasis is put on the presentation of up-to-date results with a short turn-around time. This offers a unique opportunity to present new aspects in this dynamic field and discuss them with a wide, interdisciplinary audience. The EuroPVM/MPI conference series, as one of the prime events in parallel computation, serves as an ideal surrounding for ParSim. This combination enables the participants to present and discuss their work within the scope of both the session and the host conference. This year, eleven papers from authors in nine countries were submitted to ParSim, and we selected five of them. They cover a wide range of different application fields including gas flow simulations, thermo-mechanical processes in nuclear waste storage, and cosmological simulations. At the same time, the selected contributions also address the computer science side of their codes and discuss different parallelization strategies, programming models and languages, as well as the use nonblocking collective operations in MPI. We are confident that this provides an attractive program and that ParSim will be an informal setting for lively discussions and for fostering new collaborations. We hope this session will fulfill its purpose to provide new insights from both the engineering and the computer science side and encourages interdisciplinary exchange of ideas and cooperation. We hope that this will continue ParSim's tradition at EuroPVM/MPI

Research and Education in Computational Science and Engineering

Over the past two decades the field of computational science and engineering (CSE) has penetrated both basic and applied research in academia, industry, and laboratories to advance discovery, optimize systems, support decision-makers, and educate the scientific and engineering workforce. Informed by centuries of theory and experiment, CSE performs computational experiments to answer questions that neither theory nor experiment alone is equipped to answer. CSE provides scientists and engineers of all persuasions with algorithmic inventions and software systems that transcend disciplines and scales. Carried on a wave of digital technology, CSE brings the power of parallelism to bear on troves of data. Mathematics-based advanced computing has become a prevalent means of discovery and innovation in essentially all areas of science, engineering, technology, and society; and the CSE community is at the core of this transformation. However, a combination of disruptive developments---including the architectural complexity of extreme-scale computing, the data revolution that engulfs the planet, and the specialization required to follow the applications to new frontiers---is redefining the scope and reach of the CSE endeavor. This report describes the rapid expansion of CSE and the challenges to sustaining its bold advances. The report also presents strategies and directions for CSE research and education for the next decade.Comment: Major revision, to appear in SIAM Revie

Cloud computing resource scheduling and a survey of its evolutionary approaches

A disruptive technology fundamentally transforming the way that computing services are delivered, cloud computing offers information and communication technology users a new dimension of convenience of resources, as services via the Internet. Because cloud provides a finite pool of virtualized on-demand resources, optimally scheduling them has become an essential and rewarding topic, where a trend of using Evolutionary Computation (EC) algorithms is emerging rapidly. Through analyzing the cloud computing architecture, this survey first presents taxonomy at two levels of scheduling cloud resources. It then paints a landscape of the scheduling problem and solutions. According to the taxonomy, a comprehensive survey of state-of-the-art approaches is presented systematically. Looking forward, challenges and potential future research directions are investigated and invited, including real-time scheduling, adaptive dynamic scheduling, large-scale scheduling, multiobjective scheduling, and distributed and parallel scheduling. At the dawn of Industry 4.0, cloud computing scheduling for cyber-physical integration with the presence of big data is also discussed. Research in this area is only in its infancy, but with the rapid fusion of information and data technology, more exciting and agenda-setting topics are likely to emerge on the horizon

Modelling and simulation framework for reactive transport of organic contaminants in bed-sediments using a pure java object - oriented paradigm

Numerical modelling and simulation of organic contaminant reactive transport in the environment is being increasingly relied upon for a wide range of tasks associated with risk-based decision-making, such as prediction of contaminant profiles, optimisation of remediation methods, and monitoring of changes resulting from an implemented remediation scheme. The lack of integration of multiple mechanistic models to a single modelling framework, however, has prevented the field of reactive transport modelling in bed-sediments from developing a cohesive understanding of contaminant fate and behaviour in the aquatic sediment environment. This paper will investigate the problems involved in the model integration process, discuss modelling and software development approaches, and present preliminary results from use of CORETRANS, a predictive modelling framework that simulates 1-dimensional organic contaminant reaction and transport in bed-sediments

Inner product computation for sparse iterative solvers on\ud distributed supercomputer

Recent years have witnessed that iterative Krylov methods without re-designing are not suitable for distribute supercomputers because of intensive global communications. It is well accepted that re-engineering Krylov methods for prescribed computer architecture is necessary and important to achieve higher performance and scalability. The paper focuses on simple and practical ways to re-organize Krylov methods and improve their performance for current heterogeneous distributed supercomputers. In construct with most of current software development of Krylov methods which usually focuses on efficient matrix vector multiplications, the paper focuses on the way to compute inner products on supercomputers and explains why inner product computation on current heterogeneous distributed supercomputers is crucial for scalable Krylov methods. Communication complexity analysis shows that how the inner product computation can be the bottleneck of performance of (inner) product-type iterative solvers on distributed supercomputers due to global communications. Principles of reducing such global communications are discussed. The importance of minimizing communications is demonstrated by experiments using up to 900 processors. The experiments were carried on a Dawning 5000A, one of the fastest and earliest heterogeneous supercomputers in the world. Both the analysis and experiments indicates that inner product computation is very likely to be the most challenging kernel for inner product-based iterative solvers to achieve exascale