ONLINE -- MSA Seminar: Plasma Physics with PIConGPU – Lessons learned from 10 years of living with the HPC hardware zoo

Modular Supercomputing Architectures Seminar

Speaker: Michael Bussmann, Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf HZDR

Beating Moore's law by using more than one core has been central to the efficient use of compute hardware for almost 20 years. One would think that this means solutions for many-core computing have reached maturity and scientific software developers can now focus on solving their domain problems. Unfortunately, a quick look at the top ten of HPC systems in the world and upcoming road maps for Exascale computing tell you the exact opposite. The hardware solution zoo is growing bigger, from the well known CPU and GPUs and new, strange animals like ARM and FPGAs to species believed to be extinct like vector processors and RISC-V.

A second look tells us that we do not have a single set of tools to deal with all these beasts, a common programming model is clearly missing. How do scientific software developers deal with this if they need more than standard libraries like BLAS? Following our real life experience developing the PIConGPU code for over 10 years now, we introduce our solution to the problem.

Meet Alpaka, you won't be disappointed!

This seminar is offered online via BigBlueButton at https://webconf.fz-juelich.de/b/and-2jh-qj4 .

In case of difficulties with BigBlueButton, the seminar will be switched to DFNconf streaming at https://www.conf.dfn.de/stream/nr5hm44jym4c4