Richard Kenway
Exascale Initiatives at Edinburgh
Edinburgh-Tsukuba Workshop Feb 2010Edinburgh-Tsukuba Workshop Feb 2010
Richard KenwayUniversity of Edinburgh
Feb 2010 Richard Kenway 2
Exascale = Extreme Scale
• Embedded terascale (hand-held, 10-100W)
• Departmental petascale (1-2 racks, 10-100kW)
• (Inter)national exascale (100 racks, 25-50MW)
• Challenges– strong scaling = find 1000× more parallelism in applications– fault tolerance = new algorithms + validation/verification– energy efficiency = new programming model(s), eg minimise data
movement, intelligent powering– novel hardware = GPGPUs, heterogeneous chips– massive (potentially corrupted) data = new I/O models
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ExascaleExascaleTechnologyTechnologyCentreCentre
EESIEUROPEANEXASCALESOFTWARE INITIATIVE
?
Edinburgh Research Environment
systems
systems
algorithm
s
algorithm
s
applications
applications
datadata
IDEA Lab
Informatics
Physics & Astronomy
Mathematics
Exascale ResearchInitiative
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Strong Scaling
• Hybrid programming models– feasibility of OpenMP + MPI for a set of applications– 24-way (HECToR) → 1000-way (exascale) SMP nodes– investigate new hybrid strategies for key algorithms e.g. FFTs
• PGAS languages– investigate advantages and disadvantages of PGAS languages for
exascale systems
• Develop demonstrator applications and investigate
performance characteristics– CP2K?
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Other Areas of Interest
• GPGPU/accelerator programmability – limited error detection/correction– variable precision– rich memory hierarchy
• I/O performance– real-time massive data analyses
• Verification and fault tolerance– asynchronous algorithms– tolerance to errors in data, communications, computation
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Co-Design Vehicles
• Aspiration pull vs applications chasm– global challenges make the case
… but the codes are too immature– codes that are ready (eg QCD) don’t justify the investment
• Technology push is not enough – politically – cost too high, too few companies will benefit– technically – there are many roads towards exascale
… and potential dead ends
• CDVs– applications that are scientifically sound with the potential to scale– provide development paths
… while global challenge codes develop in parallel
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G8 Call for Proposals – Opportunity for Collaboration