Increasing Workload Demand and Complexity

High-performance computing (HPC) workloads are essential for modeling complex phenomena. They are used for weather prediction, computational fluid dynamics, quantum chemistry, and molecular dynamics in scientific research. HPC workloads are revolutionizing how organizations optimize business operations, increase efficiency, and drive innovation to stay ahead of the competition. The compute power demand for HPC and AI has grown at an unprecedented rate over the past decade. With the rapidly increasing volume, throughput requirements, and variety of available data being processed, the challenge to process this data efficiently only increases.  To meet the challenge of processing and analyzing vast amounts of data quickly and accurately, HPC workloads become increasingly complex. Traditional infrastructure and technologies struggle to support these workloads cost-effectively.

Ready to Meet the Challenge

QCT is well-positioned to meet the ever-increasing demand. As a data center solution provider, QCT is looking for more efficient ways to integrate and maintain multiple software stacks for its developer-focused solution. More software development kits, libraries, and utility integration offer a more flexible development environment, offering tools and solutions for even the most challenging software development projects. This flexibility does, however, also increase the complexity and maintenance cost. Intel’s oneAPI Toolkit provides the means to achieve the desired level of flexibility and scale by offering hassle-free code conversion and optimization across different processor architectures and programming paradigms. Having a common, comprehensive, feature-rich set of development tools backed by the oneAPI initiative and its ecosystem helps QCT to enable more efficient ways to manage diverse developer solution requirements within QCT DevCloud.

oneAPI Provides the Solution

The Intel® oneAPI Toolkits are based on the oneAPI Initiative. oneAPI is an open, cross-architecture programming model that frees developers to use a single code base across multiple architectures. One key feature of oneAPI is that it provides compatibility tools for automatic code conversion and optimization across different processor architectures and programming paradigms. A CUDA-based program targeting GPU offload acceleration can be migrated to C++ with SYCL using the Intel® DPC++ Compatibility Tool or its open-source initiative counterpart, SYCLomatic. The resulting codebase can then be compiled against a SPIR-V* specification-compliant device backend runtime using the Intel® oneAPI DPC++/C++ Compiler. This way, code can run on 3^rd party vendor CPUs and GPUs.  Codeplay*’s oneAPI Plugin for NVIDIA* GPUs is an example of this. Therefore, oneAPI not only eases the burden of programming but also delivers optimized codes without vendor lock-in.

QCT Platform On Demand for HPC using Intel® oneAPI Toolkits

QCT DevCloud is an implementation of the QCT POD reference architecture, a testbed for evaluating the performance of heterogeneous processor architectures. It is an environment for developers offering a comprehensive infrastructure to develop and test their converged HPC and AI workload-driven applications. QCT DevCloud’s remotely accessible development cluster includes precompiled workloads and development toolkit support across a range of hardware platforms such as Intel® 3^rd and 4^th Gen Xeon Scalable Processor based server platform with pre-deployed Intel® oneAPI Base Toolkit and Intel® HPC Toolkit.

QCT DevCloud is a heterogeneous system supporting bare-metal development without containers, as well as Kubernetes-based containerization environments. Users can access resources and services in the QCT DevCloud using a web browser over HTTPS to access JupyterHub* Jupyter Notebook services. Alternatively, SSH-based terminal access is also available for traditional X11 terminal-based HPC bare-metal environments. This helps end users develop their HPC as well as AI applications and run their workloads on both bare-metal compute nodes and Kubernetes worker nodes.

Conclusion

OneAPI supports a cross-architecture programming model, and it has the strength to explore hardware-specific optimization for improving application performance. With the increasing complexity of processor architectures and diverse computational units, it has become challenging to optimize application performance. oneAPI addresses this challenge by supporting hardware-specific optimization, allowing developers to achieve optimum performance across various platforms and accelerators.

The QCT DevCloud Program offers access to QCT QuantaGrid servers powered by Intel Xeon Scalable processors. These servers support key Intel technologies like Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX) and Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (Intel AMX), enhancing security and accelerating the development of high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, and data analytics workloads. Additionally, Intel oneAPI provides a robust set of development tools, increasing productivity in heterogeneous infrastructures.

To learn more about it QCT Platform On Demand (intel.com), Quanta Cloud Technology (QCT) (intel.com) and Ecosystem Developer Resources for Intel Tools