Monday, Full Day
Room A207

Title: Extreme! Scientific Parallel Computing

Presenters: Alice E. Koniges, David C. Eder, and David E. Keyes, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Rolf Rabenseifner, High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart

Level: 25% Introductory | 40% Intermediate | 35% Advanced

Abstract:

Teraflop performance is no longer a thing of the future. Indeed, advances in application computing continue to boggle the mind. What does it really take to get a major application performing at the "extreme" level? How do the challenges vary from cluster computing to the largest architectures? In the introductory material, we provide an overview of terminology, hardware, performance issues and software tools. Then, we draw from a series of large-scale application codes and discuss specific challenges and problems encountered in parallelizing these applications. The applications, some of which are drawn from a new book ("Industrial Strength Parallel Computing," Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2000), are a mix of industrial and government applications including aerospace, biomedical sciences, materials processing and design, and plasma and fluid dynamics. We also consider applications that were winners of Gordon Bell prizes for parallel performance. Advanced topics cover parallel I/O and file systems and combining MPI with Pthreads and/or OpenMP.