5 research outputs found
Shall Numerical Astrophysics Step Into the Era of Exascale Computing?
High performance computing numerical simulations are today one of the more effective instruments to implement and study new theoretical models, and they are mandatory during the preparatory phase and operational phase of any scientific experiment. New challenges in Cosmology and Astrophysics will require a large number of new extremely computationally intensive simulations to investigate physical processes at different scales. Moreover, the size and complexity of the new generation of observational facilities also implies a new generation of high performance data reduction and analysis tools pushing toward the use of Exascale computing capabilities. Exascale supercomputers cannot be produced today. We discuss the major technological challenges in the design, development and use of such computing capabilities and we will report on the progresses that has been made in the last years in Europe, in particular in the framework of the ExaNeSt European funded project. We also discuss the impact of these new computing resources on the numerical codes in Astronomy and Astrophysics
Performance and energy footprint assessment of FPGAs and GPUs on HPC systems using Astrophysics application
New challenges in Astronomy and Astrophysics (AA) are urging the need for a
large number of exceptionally computationally intensive simulations. "Exascale"
(and beyond) computational facilities are mandatory to address the size of
theoretical problems and data coming from the new generation of observational
facilities in AA. Currently, the High Performance Computing (HPC) sector is
undergoing a profound phase of innovation, in which the primary challenge to
the achievement of the "Exascale" is the power-consumption. The goal of this
work is to give some insights about performance and energy footprint of
contemporary architectures for a real astrophysical application in an HPC
context. We use a state-of-the-art N-body application that we re-engineered and
optimized to exploit the heterogeneous underlying hardware fully. We
quantitatively evaluate the impact of computation on energy consumption when
running on four different platforms. Two of them represent the current HPC
systems (Intel-based and equipped with NVIDIA GPUs), one is a micro-cluster
based on ARM-MPSoC, and one is a "prototype towards Exascale" equipped with
ARM-MPSoCs tightly coupled with FPGAs. We investigate the behavior of the
different devices where the high-end GPUs excel in terms of time-to-solution
while MPSoC-FPGA systems outperform GPUs in power consumption. Our experience
reveals that considering FPGAs for computationally intensive application seems
very promising, as their performance is improving to meet the requirements of
scientific applications. This work can be a reference for future platforms
development for astrophysics applications where computationally intensive
calculations are required.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables; Preprint (V2) submitted to MDPI
(Special Issue: Energy-Efficient Computing on Parallel Architectures
Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems XXVI
This volume contains papers presented at the twenty-sixth annual conference on Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems (ADASS XXVI). The ADASS conference is the premier conference for the exchange of information about astronomical software and is held each year, hosted by a different astronomical institution.
The conference provides a forum for astronomers, software engineers and data specialists from all around the world to discuss software, algorithms, technologies and recommendations applied to all aspects of astronomy, from telescope operations to data reduction, from data management to computing.
The key themes for ADASS XXVI included: long-term data management in astronomical data archives, management of scientific and data analysis projects, connections between large databases and data reduction and analysis, HPC and distributed computing, the usage of Python in astronomy, and others. The conference also touched upon data modelling in astronomy and other topics, including demo booths, "bird of a feather" sessions, focus demos, and tutorials.
This proceedings volume presents over a hundred and eighty reports from the oral, posters and other contributions to the conference