Source: ISC High Performance
Like last year, the IT Center and NHR4CES were delighted to be part of the NHR Association’s joint stand at ISC High Performance 2024. The HPC group complemented this year’s ISC with tutorials and presentations. The Hamburg conference attracted 3,227 participants and offered many opportunities for exchange and further education.
Tutorials
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Dr. Christian Terboven
The conference on Sunday began with two exciting tutorials. Our colleague Dr. Christian Terboven (IT Center, NHR4CES) from the CSG Parallelism and Performance organized the half-day tutorial “Advanced OpenMP: Performance and 5.2 Features”. Together with Michael Klemm (Extern) and Bronis R. de Supinski (Extern), he highlighted the advanced features of the OpenMP programming language, including vectorization and computational acceleration. The focus was on performance aspects such as data and thread locality on NUMA architectures.
Alexander Hück, Joachim Jenke, Adrian Schmitz and Simon Schwitanski (IT Center) led through the tutorial “Continuous Correctness Checking for HPC Applications”. This half-day tutorial in the context of NHR4CES taught participants how to use correctness analysis tools for their HPC applications in a continuous integration setup.
Sofa Talks
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The Sof Talks were a particular highlight, organized in collaboration with the other eight NHR centers. These informal discussion rounds offered our experts the opportunity to present current topics and exchange ideas with the community.
- Visualization for and with HPC infrastructure: Tim Gerrits (IT Center, NHR4CES) from CSG Visualization moderated an exciting discussion about current challenges and success stories in the community. His sofa talk on visualization and HPC infrastructure is already a firm tradition at the ISC.
- Certified HPC curriculum: The further development of the HPC Certification Forum and the improvement of HPC training were discussed. The aim is to better align the defined competencies and available curricula and to converge them in the long term.
- Promoting diversity in HPC: In this discussion, participants shared their personal experiences and developed ideas to improve the career situation for underrepresented experts* in the HPC industry. The Sofa Talk ‘Fostering Diversity in HPC’ recognized numerous challenges for a diverse scientific workforce.
- GCS/NHR/HPC.NRW AI strategy: Our colleague Marc-André Hermanns (IT Center) discussed in this round how the various contributors from all HPC computing levels can improve their collaboration in the weekly consultation hour on AI on supercomputers. The aim is to help users find sufficient computing time and support to move their AI workload from their laptop to the supercomputer.
- HPC competence network at state level: The core topic of this discussion round was the revitalization and further development of HPC competence networks at state level. Thorsten Reimann (NHR4CES) and Marc-André Hermanns (IT Center) held discussions with various experts to promote the exchange between the NHR centers and the HPC competence centers of the federal states in Germany. Particular emphasis was placed on training, certification and the importance of continuous dialog. Future regular meetings are planned to further strengthen cooperation.
- Security in NHR: Gerrit Toehgiono, member of CSG Parallelism and Performance, spoke about security in NHR. He contributed his perspective as a system administrator on IT security at HPC and discussed the current state of security with his guests: for example, what measures have been introduced and what risks exist for users.
- Continuous correctness check for HPC applications: After their tutorial Simon Schwitanski “Continuous Correctness Checking for HPC Applications“, (IT Center) and Joachim Jenke (IT Center, NHR4CES), member of the CSG Parallelism and Performance, offered attendees the opportunity to clarify further questions at the NHR booth during a sofa talk as an additional offer.
As last year, the Sofa Talks proved to be a great success and will be continued in 2025.
Workshops
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As in previous years, the last day of the conference offered workshops on specific research topics related to HPC, in which the IT Center and NHR4CES were also involved: Marcel Krüger presented InsitUE, a Catalyst2-compatible library for hybrid in-situ visualization with the Unreal Engine, at the Workshop for In-Situ Visualization (WOIV’24). Simon Schwitanski (IT Center) explained at the workshop for compiler-based correctness analysis and performance optimization (C3PO’24) how compiler analysis can accelerate the search for data races in programs with remote memory accesses.
The associated papers will be published in the next few weeks in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Springer LNCS).
BoF Talks
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Prof. Matthias Müller
Professor Matthias Müller, Director of the IT Center as well as NHR4CES, spoke at the BoF ‘Synergistically Integrating HPC and Cloud’ about the convergence of HPC and cloud from different perspectives, including cloud providers, public HPC centers, AI research centers, large scientific projects and industry.
Dr. Christian Terboven (IT Center, NHR4CES) also appeared as an OpenMP expert at the BoF session ‘What to Expect from OpenMP API Version 6.0’ and shared his thoughts on the new version of the OpenMP API. He also spoke at the BoF talk ‘AI Service Centers: Pioneering AI Research and Infrastructure in Germany’ about the AI Service Center WestAI, one of the four national AI service centers funded by the BMBF.
The ISC High Performance 2024 was a complete success for the IT Center. Through our active participation and the numerous positive feedbacks, we are already looking forward to the next conference in June 2025. Until then, we will continue to stay at the forefront of HPC developments and provide our community with valuable resources and support.
Responsible for the content of this article are Janin Iglauer, Malak Mostafa und Svenja Wimmers,
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