International Supercomputing Conference 2012, June17 - June 21, 2012, Hamburg/Germany

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 17:15:00 +0200

Lustre Community Pavillion @SC11

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 10:03:00 +0100

Booster for Next-Generation Supercomputers

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 12:36:00 +0100

Jülich, 15 November 2011 - Today supercomputers are an indispensable tool in almost all fields of research. However, present concepts cannot be extended indefinitely without causing an unreasonable increase in effort and costs. For this reason, scientists plan to develop a new platform for next-generation supercomputers as part of the EU DEEP project (Dynamical ExaScale Entry Platform), with applications for brain research, climatology and seismology, to name but a few. The project will be launched this December and showcased at the world’s most important supercomputing conference, the SC’11 in Seattle, on 17 November 2011. Even today scientists already need gigantic computing capacity in order to model biological organs and to develop ever more multifaceted models of climate or the universe or complex building blocks of matter. To ensure that European research continues to have access to the necessary resources for high-performance computing (HPC) in future, Forschungszentrum Jülich is planning to enter the exaflop/s age by 2020 with the DEEP project – together with Intel, ParTec and 12 other European partners from 8 countries. An exaflop/s computer of this type, performing a quintillion (1018) calculations per second, would be a thousand times faster than today’s supercomputers. The scientists expect a first prototype as early as 2014/2015 that will have a capacity of 100 petaflop/s, around one hundred times faster than today’s petaflop/s computers, such as JUGENE, the fastest computer in Germany. With the exaflop/s class, scientists will be able to tackle challenges which still seem unrealistic today, such as detailed simulation of the human brain. However, increases in performance on this scale can only be achieved by parallel computing employing millions of processors. Using today’s technology, this would mean that energy costs would become prohibitive. In order to pave the way for a viable exascale computer, researchers in the DEEP project, funded with € 8 million by the European Commission, will be optimizing the networking of different hardware components and integrating new energy-saving cooling systems. Scientists at Jülich have designed a new type of “cluster booster architecture” for DEEP. One important element is the processors that are still under development and are specially designed for parallel computing, the Intel® Many Integrated Core Architecture, with 50 plus cores on a single chip. Each of these 512 MIC processors will be linked to a booster that accelerates the entire system via a high-speed network called Extoll developed by the University of Heidelberg. “Working closely with Intel helps us to accelerate the development of cluster architectures for the exascale and to address the hardware and software challenges of building, programming and operating such systems”, explains Prof. Thomas Lippert, head of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre. The new approach takes into account the fact that large-scale, future simulations will consist of multiple and very diverse tasks with complicated communication patterns between the processors. The underlying idea: the complex components of a program are executed on the “core” of the parallel computer, a cluster with Intel Xeon server processors. In contrast, simple, highly parallel program components that do not rely on such CPUs will be offloaded to the booster modules which, thanks to their large number of more simply structured computer cores, are able to perform the calculations for tasks of this kind with far greater energy efficiency. “The close collaboration between Intel, Europe's largest scientific computer centre in Jülich and the leading cluster software vendor ParTec presents a unique opportunity to accelerate the evolution of cluster HPC platforms. Work on the novel DEEP architecture will be a key component in the understanding and development of future exascale systems, middleware and applications”, explains Stephen Pawlowski, Intel Senior Fellow and General Manager, Datacenter and Connected Systems Pathfinding. Hugo R. Falter, Chief Operating Officer at ParTec, reports: “I am glad that the ParaStation Cluster Operating System can contribute to the success of this visionary project.” Based on an expanded version of this cluster operating system, an entire software environment for the new hardware architecture will be created with DEEP. As part of the project, in addition to tools for application developers, application software for brain research, climatology, seismology, high-temperature superconductivity and computational fluid engineering will also be transferred to the platform. Forschungszentrum Jülich, Intel and ParTec have collaborated closely since 2010 in the Exacluster Laboratory at Jülich on developing novel system architectures and software tools for cluster computers. The main focus is on the scalability of hardware and software up to the exascale class and on ensuring the reliability of these systems. The DEEP project was initiated under the auspices of the ExaCluster Laboratory. for further information look at our printed press release (pdf)

European industry and research centres join forces to create a European Technology Platform for High Performance Computing

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 12:36:00 +0100

Major European suppliers of High Performance Computing (HPC) technologies, Allinea, ARM, Bull, Caps Entreprise, Eurotech, ParTec, STMicroelectronics and Xyratex associated with HPC research centres BSC, CEA, CINECA, Fraunhofer, Forschungszentrum Juelich and LRZ have decided to combine forces to create a European Technology Platform (ETP), building on the previous work of PROSPECT and Teratec. The objective of the ETP is to define Europe’s research priorities to develop European technology in all the segments of the HPC solution supply chain. It will strengthen European competitiveness in HPC, a key capability for future research and innovation. The effort will be beneficial to a wide range of social and economic challenges. HPC is an indispensable instrument to resolve problems of the highest complexity that require extremely large and very efficient computational and storage capabilities for activities such as modelling natural phenomena (weather, climate change or epidemics), optimizing energy resources, researching novel materials and shortening engineering development cycles, which would foster innovation across the region. The ETP will be an industry led forum that will propose a Strategic Research Agenda taking advantage of European industry strengths to increase the value created in Europe from future HPC systems. Currently the design of supercomputer solutions face significant challenges such as management of the extreme parallelism experienced in HPC architectures or the reduction of the power consumption, addressing these presents opportunities for European players to improve their position in the worldwide market.

To achieve these objectives the current consortium will set up an organization that will be open to any businesses, groups or individuals who have R&D activities in any aspect of HPC and are located in Europe. The goal is to bring together all the research forces in Europe including R&D activities of SMEs, European corporations, international corporations and research centres to benefit from their competences and to foster these capabilities by proposing an ambitious research plan to the European Commission. The consortium will act promptly to create the ETP and to propose a Vision Paper. The ETP will prepare the Strategic Research Agenda seeking acknowledgement from the European Commission to provide inputs towards the Horizon 2020 program that will define the future European research objectives. This initiative is an important step to encourage and strengthen the position of the European HPC industry. The impressive set of competencies of the members gathered on this initiative show that Europe can be at the forefront of the HPC industry in coming years if an ambitious R&D program is put in place. The ETP will provide the catalyst for such a movement and the impact will be a stronger European HPC industry that will create employment, added value, and a stimulus for students and academic researchers in the area. Through this improved capability and capacity, HPC users will gain the ability to achieve new results in science and technology and to design more innovative products and services.

press release in pdf format

High-Tech Consortium launches European Technology Platform for High-Performance Computing

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 15:56:00 +0200

PROSPECT, an open European association of leading suppliers and users of supercomputers from industry and academia, starts a European Technology Platform for High-Performance Computing. Its aim is to help Europe realise the highly promising economic, scientific and societal benefits of High Performance Computing (HPC).The Technology Platform will define research priorities for European HPC in the form of a Strategic Research Agenda submitted to the Commission and will help ensure that public investment in HPC delivers the widest possible benefit to European business and society.

press release in pdf format German press release in pdf format There was also a session on the International Suercomputing Conference ISC´11 in Hamburg, which was taped and published in InsideHPC http://insidehpc.com/2011/08/15/video-prospect-creating-a-european-technology-platform-for-hpc/ PROSPECT panelists discuss the creation of a European Technology Platform for HPC. Discussion Panel:

Moderator: Dr S. Girona, Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, Operations Director
Kostas Glinos, The European Commission
Dr. G. Tecchiolli, Eurotech, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer
Mr. H. R. Falter, ParTec Cluster Competence Center, Chief Operating Officer
Prof. T. Lippert, Research Centre Jülich, Institute for Advanced Simulation (IAS), Managing Director, also Prospect Executive Committee member
Prof. A. Bode, Leibniz Research Centre, Managing Director, also Prospect Executive Committee member

JuRoPA Supercomputer simulates galaxy formation in unprecedented detail over a huge part of the observable Universe

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0200

This information herein is sourced from an article published in inSiDE • Vol. 8 No. 2 • Autumn 2010 entitled: The Millennium-XXL Project: Simulating the Galaxy Population of dark Energy Universes authored by: • Volker Springel, Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies and Heidelberg University, Germany
• Raul Angulo, Simon D.M. White, Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics, Garching, Germany
• Adrian Jenkins, Carlos S. Frenk, Carlton Baugh, Shaun Cole, Institute for Computational Cosmology, University of Durham, United Kingdom
Source: http://inside.hlrs.de/htm/Edition_02_10/article_06.html Modern cosmology as encoded in the leading ΛCDM model confronts astronomers with two major puzzles. One is that the main matter component in today's Universe appears to be a yet undiscovered elementary particle whose contribution to the cosmic density is more than 5 times that of ordinary baryonic matter. This cold dark matter (CDM) interacts extremely weakly with regular atoms and photons, so that gravity alone has affected its distribution since very early times. The other is a mysterious dark energy force field, which dominates the energy content of today's Universe and has led to its accelerated expansion in recent times. In the standard model, this component is described in terms of Einstein's cosmological constant ('Λ'). Uncovering the nature of dark energy has become one of the most actively pursued goals of observational cosmology. Simulations of the galaxy formation process are arguably the most powerful technique to accurately quantify and understand these effects. However, this is an extremely tough computational problem, because it requires ultra-large volume N-body simulations with sufficient mass resolution to identify the halos likely to host the galaxies seen in the surveys, and a realistic model to populate these halos with galaxies. Given the significant investments involved in the ongoing galaxy surveys, it is imperative to tackle these numerical challenges to ensure that accurate theoretical predictions become available both to help to quantify and understand the systematic effects, and to extract the maximum amount of information from the observational data. The State of the Art The N-body method for the collisionless dynamics of dark matter is a long established computational technique used to follow the growth of cosmic structure through gravitational instability. The Boltzmann-Vlasov system of equations is here discretized in terms of N fiducial simulation particles, whose motion is followed under their mutual gravitational forces in an expanding background space-time. While conceptually simple, calculating the long-range gravitational forces exactly represents an N2-problem, which quickly becomes prohibitively expensive for interesting problem sizes. However, it is fortunately sufficient to calculate the forces approximately, for which a variety of algorithms have been developed over the years. This allowed the sizes of cosmological simulations to steadily increase since the early 1980s, roughly doubling the particle number every 17 months and hence providing progressively more faithful models for the real Universe. Such simulations have proven to be an indispensable tool to understand the low- and high-redshift Universe by comparing the predictions of CDM to observations, since these calculations are the only way to accurately calculate the outcome of non-linear cosmic structure formation. A milestone in the development of cosmological simulations was set by the Millennium Run (MR), performed by theVirgo Consortium group in 2004. This simulation was the first, and for many years the only run with more than 1010 particles, exceeding the size of previous simulations by almost an order of magnitude. Its success was not only computational but most importantly scientific – more than 300 research articles in the fields of theoretical and observational cosmology have used the MR data-products since. The MR has an exquisite mass resolution and accuracy but, unfortunately, its volume is insufficient to get reliable statistics on large scales at the level needed for future surveys. The team of researchers around Prof. Springel have therefore set out to perform a new ultra-large N-body simulation of the hierarchical clustering of dark matter, featuring a new strategy for dealing with the data volume, and combining it with semi-analytical modeling of galaxy formation, which allows a prediction of all the luminous properties of the galaxies that form in the simulation. This group of researchers designed the simulation project, dubbed Millennium-XXL (MXXL), to follow more than 303 billion particles (67203) in a cosmological box of size 4.2 Gpc across, resolving the cosmic web with an unprecedented combination of volume and resolution. While the particle mass of the MXXL is slightly worse than that of the MR, its resolution is sufficient to accurately measure dark matter merger histories for halos hosting luminous galaxies, within a volume more than 200 times larger than that of the MS. In this way the simulation can provide extremely accurate statistics of the large-scale structure of the Universe by resolving around 500 million galaxies at the present epoch, allowing for example highly detailed clustering studies based on galaxy or quasar samples selected in a variety of different ways. This comprehensive information is indispensable for the correct analysis of future observational datasets. The computational Challenge It was clear at the outset that performing a simulation with these characteristics poses significant challenges in terms of raw execution time, algorithm scalability, memory consumption and the disk space required for the output data. For example, simply storing the positions and velocities of the simulation particles in single precision, consumes of order 10 TB of RAM memory. This figure, of course, is greatly enlarged by the extra memory required by the complex data structures and algorithms employed in the simulation code for the force calculation, domain decomposition, and halo and subhalo mapping.. The JuRoPA cluster at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) in Germany was identified as being particularly well suited to fulfilling these challenging computing requirements. Nevertheless, on the JuRoPA machine, the simulation demanded a partition of 1,536 nodes, each equipped with two quad-core X5570 processors and 24 GB of RAM, translating to 12,288 cores in total. This represents a substantial fraction (70%) of the entire machine. Single job execution on such a large machine partition is a relatively uncommon event. It therefore required substantial support on the part of the system administrators at JSC to ensure successful completion of the MXXL production calculation. In particular, severe problems with the memory usage of the simulation jobs were encountered initially, as the code required essentially all the available physical memory of the compute nodes, leaving very little room for memory buffers allocated by the MPI library or the parallel Lustre filesystem. Fortunately, with help from JSC and ParTec GmbH, the software vendor behind the ParaStation MPI software stack, these problems were successfully overcome. The final production run of MXXL required more than 86 trillion force calculations and took in excess of 2.7 million CPU hours (˜300 years), corresponding to 9.3 days of runtime on 12,288 cores. However, a significant fraction (15%) of the overall run time was spent running the sophisticated ‘on-the-fly’ postprocessing software which included group mapping, substructure mapping and power spectrum calculations. Another 14% of runtime was consumed by I/O operations. The long-range force calculations based on 92163 sized FFTs consumed only about 3% of the overall wall time. The group of researchers note that the parallel "friends-of-friends" group mapping for the 303 billion particles at the final output time took just 470 seconds, which they think is a remarkable achievement. First Results and Outlook The Millennium XXL is by far the largest cosmological simulation ever performed and the first multi-hundred billion particle run. The scope of the simulation project has pushed the envelope of what is feasible on current world-class HPC resources, but the expected rich scientific return from the project makes it well worth the effort. At the same time, the successful scaling of the cosmological code to well beyond ten-thousand cores is an encouraging sign for computational research in cosmology, which will address yet more demanding problems on future HPC machines. Prof. Springel explained that this Millennium XXL project was 30 times larger than the previous simulation with more than 30 TByte RAM and 100 TByte storage data used. The ParaStation MPI has successfully scaled to the enormous job size, with 3072 MPI tasks, employing 1536 nodes and 12288 cores, which is 3 times the size of normally allowed jobs at JSC of 512 nodes. The other crucial element for the successful run of Millennium XXL was the professional support also during off hours and on the weekends. So the results were achieved in less than 9,5 days total machine time, which would correspond to 311 years of computation on a single core. Prof. Thomas Lippert, Director of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, explained that "The Simulation on supercomputers has become key to resolving the true nature of dark matter, one of the most important scientific enigma of today. Virtual universes in the supercomputer will either allow us to validate the dark matter hypothesis or ultimately they might force us to accept modifications of the most basic laws of nature." “I am very pleased that our contribution to the Millennium XXL run, the ParaStation MPI and our support quality enabled results, which could not be achieved on any other supercomputer in the world, namely to simulate the development of Galaxies over a time duration of 13 billion years, which was never done in such a quality before”, said Hugo R. Falter, Chief Operating Officer of ParTec Cluster Competence Center, GmbH.

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Tue, 21 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0200

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