March 3 — The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) is joining forces with National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) to produce three GPU hackathon events in 2015. The goal of each hackathon is for current or prospective user groups of large hybrid CPU-GPU systems to send teams of 3-6 developers along with either (1) a (potentially) scalable application that needs to be ported to GPU accelerators, or (2) an application running on accelerators which needs optimization. The deadline for registration for the first event to be held at NCSA the week of April 20 is this Friday, March 6.
Background
General-purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs) potentially offer exceptionally high memory bandwidth and performance for a wide range of applications. The challenge in utilizing such accelerators has been the difficulty in programming them. The OpenACC Directives for Accelerators offers straightforward pragma extensions to C++ and Fortran to address this programming hurdle.
Hackthon goal
The goal of each hackathon is for current or prospective user groups of large hybrid CPU-GPU systems to send teams of 3-6 developers along with either (1) a (potentially) scalable application that needs to be ported to GPU accelerators, or (2) an application running on accelerators which needs optimization. There will be intensive mentoring during this 5-day hands-on workshop, with the goal that the teams leave with applications running on GPUs, or at least with a clear roadmap of how to get there. Our mentors come from national laboratories, universities and vendors, and besides having extensive experience in programming with OpenACC, many of them develop the OpenACC-capable compilers and help define the OpenACC standard.
Target audience and format
We are looking for teams of 3-6 developers with a scalable* application to port to or optimize on a GPU accelerator. Collectively the team should know the application intimately. (*By scalable we really mean node-to-node communication implemented, but don’t be discouraged to apply if your application is less than scalable. We are also looking for breadth of application areas.)
Participation Costs
Participation in the workshop is free of charge. The meeting room and lunches, as well as access to the supercomputers throughout the event are offered by participating sites. Mentors and learning materials introduced by the instructors are sponsored by participating sites the following partner organizations: Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), Cray, NVIDIA, PGI, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Technische Universität Dresden, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Please contact Fernanda Foertter [email protected] for questions.
For more information, visit: https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/
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Source: OLCF