HPCwire: Oak Ridge Hosts Petascale Workshop

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June 01, 2007

Oak Ridge Hosts Petascale Workshop

Hands-on event will team researchers with experts from ORNL and Cray

May 31 -- Experts from Oak Ridge National Laboratory's (ORNL's) National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) and Cray Inc. will work directly with researchers during a 3-day workshop focused on ORNL's upcoming multicore systems.

The NCCS Scaling to Petaflops Workshop, which will help researchers use the center's enormous computing resources to deliver scientific breakthroughs, will be held July 30 through August 1 at ORNL. During this hands-on event, NCCS and Cray experts will meet individually with computational scientists to ensure they can take full advantage of upcoming Cray systems using quad-core processors.

The NCCS will be moving to quad-core supercomputers as it aggressively upgrades its computing power. The center's XT4 Jaguar system will be upgraded from dual-core to quad-core processors in late 2007, taking it to a peak performance of 250 teraflops. In addition, the center will install a petaflops Cray system in 2008, and that system will also contain quad-core processors. These unique, state-of-the-art systems will enable users to run simulations of unprecedented complexity.

While these systems will be similar to the current dual-core Jaguar, users must nevertheless look closely at the ability of their applications to use more cores per socket, because with the upgrade the network and memory bandwidth will remain constant. The workshop will help them identify areas that might be bottlenecks on the upcoming architectures and new algorithms that might aid in scaling the applications to higher node counts.

NCCS and Cray staff will explain the benefits of multithreading application programming interfaces such as OpenMP and POSIX Threads, which can be used to alleviate the limited memory and network injection bandwidth for each node. They will also help users investigate ways the applications can be modified to achieve optimal I/O performance for running larger core counts.

The workshop is open to users and potential users of Cray XT systems. For more information, visit the workshop Web site at nccs.gov/news/workshops/fy07scalingworkshop or contact Don Frederick at frederickdm@ornl.gov.

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Source: Oak Ridge National Laboratory

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