Speakers: Lubomir Riha and Ondřej Vysocký, IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center

Moderator: Esteban Mocskos, Universidad de Buenos Aires

High-Performance Computing centers consume megawatts of electrical power, which is a limiting factor in building bigger systems on the path to exascale and post-exascale clusters. Such high power consumption leads to several challenges including robust power supply and its network, enormous energy bills, or significant CO2 emissions. To increase power efficiency, vendors accommodate various heterogeneous hardware that must be fully utilized by users’ applications, to be used efficiently. Such requirements may be hard to fulfill, which open a possibility of limiting the available resources for additional power and energy savings with no or small performance penalty.

The talk will present best practices on how to grant rights to control hardware parameters, how to measure the energy consumption of the hardware, and what can be expected from performing energy-saving activities based on hardware tuning.

About the speakers:

Lubomir Riha, Ph.D. is the Head of the Infrastructure Research Lab at IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center. Previously he was a research scientist in the High-Performance Computing Lab at George Washington University, ECE Department. He received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic, and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Bowie State University, USA. Currently, he is a local principal investigator of two EuroHPC Centers of Excellence: MAX and SPACE, and two EuroHPC projects: SCALABLE and EUPEX (designs a prototype of the European Exascale machine). Previously he was a local PI of the H2020 Center of Excellence POP2 and H2020-FET HPC READEX projects. His research interests are optimization of HPC applications, energy-efficient computing, acceleration of scientific and engineering applications using GPU and many-core accelerators, and parallel and distributed rendering.

Ondrej Vysocky is a Ph.D. candidate at VSB – Technical University of Ostrava, Czech Republic and at the same time he works at IT4Innovations in Infrastructure Research Lab. His research is focused on energy efficiency in high-performance computing. He was an investigator of the Horizon 2020 READEX project which dealt with the energy efficiency of parallel applications using dynamic tuning. Since that time, he develops a MERIC library, a runtime system for energy measurement and hardware parameters tuning during a parallel application run. Using the library he is an investigator of several H2020 projects including Performance Optimisation and Productivity (POP2), or European Pilot for Exascale (EUPEX). He is also a member of the PowerStack initiative, which works on a holistic, extensible, and scalable approach of power management.

Speaker: João Barbosa, INESC TEC & MACC

Moderator: Bernd Mohr, Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC)

In the coming age of exascale computing, traditional post-hoc scientific visualization and analysis suffer similar challenges as numeric simulation. This talk will cover new methodologies of scientific visualization in high-performance computing systems specially designed for large-scale scientific visualization that provides greater scalability, flexibility, and detail to overcome some of these challenges.

About the speaker: João Barbosa joined the Minho Advanced Computing Center (MACC) in March 2020 as a full-time researcher in High-performance Computing, specializing in Scientific Visualization. Previously, he was part of the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) Scalable Visualization team. As Research Associate at TACC, João has worked on several Scientific Visualization (SciVis) projects ranging from high-level applications such as Gas and Oil to low-level high-performance software packages in partnership with leading hardware and software companies. His current research focuses on high-performance real-time in-situ photo-realistic ray tracing for SciVis.

 

Speaker: Alba Cervera Lierta, Barcelona Supercomputing Center

Quantum Computers are computational devices composed by a hardware piece that follows the laws of quantum mechanics, other equipment (electronics, cryogenics, photonics, …) that controls the quantum hardware and a software stack that connects all pieces and allows us to program and utilize the quantum chip. The quantum processing units (QPU) that are at the core of quantum computers are treated as computational accelerators suitable to tackle particular problems out of range for standard HPC systems. However, current QPU are still prototypes prone to errors. As technology improves, several algorithmic proposals emerge that combine traditional HPC requirements with quantum computation. For that to happen, we need to properly integrate the QPUs into the HPC infrastructures. In this talk, I will address the state of the art in quantum-HPC integration and review the basic requirements, challenges and opportunities of this hybrid computational approach.

About the speaker:

Alba Cervera-Lierta is a Senior Researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. She earned her PhD in 2019 at the University of Barcelona, where she studied her physics degree and a Msc in particle physics. After her PhD, she moved to the University of Toronto as a postdoctoral fellow at the Alán Aspuru-Guizik group. She works on near-term quantum algorithms and their applications, high-dimensional quantum computation, and artificial intelligence strategies in quantum physics. Since October of 2021, she is the coordinator of the Quantum Spain project, an initiative to boost the quantum computing ecosystem that will acquire and operate a quantum computer at the BSC-CNS. She is also the quantum technical coordinator of EuroQCS-Spain project, one of the six selected projects from EuroHPC-JU to host a European Quantum computer and integrate it into the supercomputing infrastructure.

Registrations are closed.

Speaker: Rosa M. Badia, Barcelona Supercomputing Center

Moderator: Esteban Mocskos, Universidad de Buenos Aires

The evolution of High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems towards every-time more complex machines is opening the opportunity of hosting larger and heterogeneous applications. In this sense, the demand for developing applications that are not purely HPC, but that combine aspects of Artifical Intelligence and or Data analytics is becoming more common. However, there is a lack of environments that support the development of these complex workflows. The webinar will present PyCOMPSs, a parallel task-based programming in Python. Based on simple annotations, sequential Python programs can be executed in parallel in HPC-clusters and other distributed infrastructures.

PyCOMPSs has been extended to support tasks that invoke HPC applications and can be combined with Artificial Intelligence and Data analytics frameworks.

Some of these extensions are made in the framework of the eFlows4HPC project, which in addition is developing the HPC Workflows as a Service (HPCWaaS) methodology to make the development, deployment, execution and reuse of workflows easier. The webinar will present the current status of the PyCOMPSs programming model and how it is being extended in the eFlows4HPC project towards the project needs. Also, the HPCWaaS methodology will be introduced. 

About the speaker: Rosa M. Badia holds a PhD on Computer Science (1994) from the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC).  She is the manager of the Workflows and Distributed Computing research group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC).

Her current research interests are programming models for complex platforms (from edge, fog, to Clouds and large HPC systems).  The group led by Dr. Badia has been developing StarSs programming model for more than 15 years, with a high success in adoption by application developers. Currently the group focuses its efforts in PyCOMPSs/COMPSs, an instance of the programming model for distributed computing including Cloud.

Dr Badia has published nearly 200 papers in international conferences and journals in the topics of her research. Her group is very active in projects funded by the European Commission and in contracts with industry. Dr Badia is the PI of the eFlows4HPC project.

Registrations are now closed.