Live at ISC21
Source: Own illustration
This year, the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) was once again held digitally from June 24 to July 2, 2021. With more than 3,500 attendees and exhibiting companies, this year’s ISC 2021 Digital is the largest virtual community gathering for High Performance Computing (HPC), Machine Learning (ML) and High Performance Data Analytics (HPDA).
The schedule
At ISC, participants will learn about the most important developments, trends and research results in HPC, machine learning and data analytics. Presentations, discussions, and the exhibit floor will focus on how these technologies can be successfully applied in science, engineering, and business. Participants can communicate with each other in real time, interact with exhibiting companies, as well as arrange meetings.
Our team
The HPC team of the IT Center consisting of Tim Cramer, Marc-André Hermanns, Radita Liem, Philipp Martin, Fabian Orland, Joachim Protze, Adrian Schmitz, Simon Schwitanski, Christian Terboven and Sandra Wienke was also present this year and participated in the exhibition area as well as with a tutorial and a poster presentation.
Digital exhibition
Source: Own illustration
The digital exhibition
Matchmaking and engagement features on the ISC allowed exhibiting companies to connect and interact with participants in real time. On the digital presentation site, meetings with our HPC team could be booked and much could be read about our projects and engagements.
Tutorial: Mastering Tasking with OpenMP
Mastering Tasking with OpenMP
Source: Own illustration
OpenMP is the de-facto standard for parallel programming on shared memory computer architectures. Since 2008, OpenMP has enabled, among other things, the so-called tasking concept, which allows the creation of composable parallel software blocks and thus the parallelization of irregular algorithms. However, exploiting the tasking concept requires developers to rethink how they structure their code and parallelize it accordingly.
This tutorial addressed exactly this critical aspect. For this purpose, the OpenMP tasking concept was presented in detail and solution samples to many known problems were presented.
Poster presentation
Source: Own illustration
Poster Presentation: An IO500-based Workflow For User-centric I/O Performance Management
On HPC systems with several 100 users, predicting performance for IO operations is a major challenge. The first step in doing this is to measure IO performance on HPC storage systems, which can be done using the IO500 benchmark.
This poster presents a first step for a user-centric workflow that will be evaluated at the RWTH Cluster CLAIX-2018. It is based on measurements of the IO500 benchmark and aims to optimize IO performance. For this purpose, the best- and worst-case performance results for bandwidth and metadata rate are determined using the IO500 benchmark and presented as a bounding box. Users’ HPC applications are mapped within this box, illustrating the potential and direction of individual IO optimization.
Our impressions of ISC High Performance 2021 Digital
A digital event across multiple continents and especially diverse time zones is a major challenge. In addition to the session recordings, there were nevertheless also good opportunities to engage in direct exchange with colleagues worldwide: via chat, via video or during discussions in the “ISC Hallway”. However, we all hope that we can meet again next year in presence!
Responsible for the content of this article are Sandra Wienke and Janin Vreydal.
