Conceptual and Technical Challenges for High Performance Computing

10/06/2020
by   Claude Tadonki, et al.
0

High Performance Computing (HPC) aims at providing reasonably fast computing solutions to scientific and real life problems. The advent of multicore architectures is noticeable in the HPC history, because it has brought the underlying parallel programming concept into common considerations. At a larger scale, there is a keen interest in building or hosting frontline supercomputers; the Top500 ranking is a nice illustration of this (implicit) racing. Supercomputers, as well as ordinary computers, have fallen in price for years while gaining processing power. We clearly see that, what commonly springs up in mind when it comes to HPC is computer capability. However, when going deeper into the topic, especially on large-scale problems, it appears that the processing speed by itself is no longer sufficient. Indeed, the real concern of HPC users is the time-to-output. Thus, we need to study each important aspect in the critical path between inputs and outputs. The first step is clearly the method, which is a conjunction of modelling with specific considerations (hypothesis, simplifications, constraints, to name a few) and a corresponding algorithm, which could be numerical and/or non numerical. Then comes the topic of programming, which should yield a skillful mapping of the algorithm onto HPC machines. Based on multicore processors, probably enhanced with acceleration units, current generation of supercomputers is rated to deliver an increasing peak performance, the Exascale era being the current horizon. However, getting a high fraction of the available peak performance is more and more difficult. The Design of an efficient code that scales well on a supercomputer is a non-trivial task. The present note will discuss the aforementioned points, interleaved with commented contributions from the literature and our personal views.

READ FULL TEXT

page 3

page 8

page 9

page 10

page 11

page 12

page 14

page 20

research
05/26/2021

The Petascale DTN Project: High Performance Data Transfer for HPC Facilities

The movement of large-scale (tens of Terabytes and larger) data sets bet...
research
06/22/2021

High Performance Optimization at the Door of the Exascale

quest for processing speed potential. In fact, we always get a fraction ...
research
02/04/2018

HPC Curriculum and Associated Ressources in the Academic Context

Hardware support for high-performance computing (HPC) has so far been su...
research
08/26/2016

Containers for portable, productive and performant scientific computing

Containers are an emerging technology that hold promise for improving pr...
research
04/01/2019

A Comparative Study of Asynchronous Many-Tasking Runtimes: Cilk, Charm++, ParalleX and AM++

We evaluate and compare four contemporary and emerging runtimes for high...
research
03/05/2019

Lessons Learned from a Decade of Providing Interactive, On-Demand High Performance Computing to Scientists and Engineers

For decades, the use of HPC systems was limited to those in the physical...
research
05/19/2022

Prediction for Distributional Outcomes in High-Performance Computing I/O Variability

Although high-performance computing (HPC) systems have been scaled to me...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset