Abstract:

The Extreme-scale Scientific Software Stack (E4S) is a collection of open source software packages for high performance computing. The E4S stack comes with up to 100+ HPC applications, libraries and tools, MPI, development tools such as HPCToolkit, TAU, PAPI, math libraries including PETSC and Trilinos. E4S is available for use via containers, buildcache, AWS EC2 image, and facility tuned spack environments in the form of spack.yaml. E4S provides a new model for providing a standard set of software stack to HPC centers with dedicated support to help bridge the gap between HPC facilities and application developers of E4S products. NERSC has several deployments of E4S on Cori and Perlmutter using the spack package manager. We plan to use E4S as the vehicle for installing and supporting much of the software we provide for users.

Richard Gerber, HPC Department Head will start with opening remarks and present a brief overview of current workloads, software usage, and science applications that run on the NERSC system. Mike Heroux, the lead for ECP Software Technology (ST) group whose focus area is developing applications to run efficiently on exascale systems. E4S consists of many open source products developed by ECP ST teams which are installed on DOE systems at OLCF, ALCF and NERSC. Sameer Shende, who leads the E4S project will present the components of E4S and the different modes on how to access the E4S stack.

Katie Antypas who leads the Hardware Integration (HI) whose focus is application integration at facility, hardware evaluation, training and productivity and software deployment at facility. Katie will present an update on current activities and roadmap for the upcoming year.

We will discuss the E4S software deployment process at HPC centers, with a particular focus on what we’re doing here at NERSC to bring you reliable, performant HPC software. Shahzeb Siddiqui will present an overview of E4S stacks installed at NERSC. This session will be a mix of hands-on and walkthrough the NERSC E4S Documentation. Participants are encouraged to follow the hands-on session if you have access to NERSC systems. Shahzeb will present the Spack Infrastructure project at NERSC that discusses how we leverage Gitlab to automate spack deployments using Continuous Integration capability.

The Software Deployment (SD) group is responsible for deploying ECP software at the DOE facilities via E4S. The SD group partners with Application Development (AD) and ST projects to properly tune their software to run efficiently on the facility system. This group is responsible for providing CI infrastructure to help AD/ST teams automate their workflows using GitLab CI. Ryan Adamson will provide an overview of the Software Deployment group including current challenges and future roadmap.

We will conclude this event with hands-on exercise on how to use spack on Perlmutter to deploy software stack. Sameer will present how to use E4S containers, replacing MPI in an E4S container with the host MPI, creating custom containers for your application, using E4S on AWS and DOE facilities, and building applications using E4S with a bare-metal installation. He will highlight the use of E4S on Perlmutter and answer questions about applying E4S to your projects.

Agenda:

• Welcome, Richard Gerber
• E4S for NERSC and its Users, Richard Gerber
• What is E4S, Sameer Shende
• Overview of Software Technology, Mike Heroux
• Overview of Hardware Integration, Katie Antypas
• NERSC Spack Infrastructure, Shahzeb Siddiqui
• Software Deployment at the Facilities, Ryan Adamson
• E4S User Documentation, Shahzeb Siddiqui
• Spack Training on Perlmutter, Shahzeb Siddiqui
• E4S Training, Sameer Shende
• Q&A

This panel discussion will draw from a featured breakout session held during the 2022 ECP Annual Meeting.

Abstract:

The ECP core mission is to develop a capable exascale computing ecosystem that accelerates scientific discovery and supports addressing critical challenges in energy, earth systems, materials, data, and national security.  The very nature of this mission has drawn a wide range of talented and successful scientists with diverse backgrounds to work together in new ways toward this goal. In this panel discussion, we build on lessons learned from the experiences of the PETSc, Trilinos, xSDK, and E4S as viewed from the lens of “Team of Teams.” We consider how, why, and when each of these distributed teams may and may not function as Teams of Teams and when applying Team of Teams principles might benefit. We present strategies centered around developing engaged and productive virtual software teams and offer a deeper dive into these communities.  We explore how developing a capable exascale ecosystem depends on meeting technical, social, and cultural challenges.

Panelists:

• Todd Munson, Argonne National Laboratory
• Jim Willenbring, Sandia National Laboratories
• Ulrike Yang, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Moderators:

• Elaine Raybourn, Sandia National Laboratories
• Reed Milewicz, Sandia National Laboratories
• Miranda Mundt, Sandia National Laboratories
• Benjamin Sims, Los Alamos National Laboratories

Allyship in the workplace involves using your power, position, or privilege to uplift other coworkers.

Why should teaching ally skills be a core part of a modern workforce development program? This talk explains why focusing on teaching ally skills to people with power and influence is more effective than changing the behavior of marginalized people. It then describes a dozen specific ally skills such as listening, amplifying marginalized voices, and speaking up when it is uncomfortable. It ends with a 20 minute question and answer period.

This webinar is brought to you by the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) HPC Workforce Development and Retention Action Group, which organizes a webinar series on topics related to developing a diverse, equitable, and inclusive work culture in the computing sciences.

The talk will be recorded and posted to our archive, but the Q&A session will not be recorded.

The IDEAS Productivity project, in partnership with the DOE Computing Facilities of the ALCF, OLCF, and NERSC, and the DOE Exascale Computing Project (ECP), organizes the webinar series on Best Practices for HPC Software Developers.

As part of this series, we offer one-hour webinars on topics in scientific software development and high-performance computing, approximately once a month. The September webinar is titled Software Packaging; and will be presented by David Rogers (Oak Ridge National Laboratory). The webinar will take place on Wednesday, September 7, 2022 at 1:00 pm ET.

Abstract:

The ability to “import” a package is the critical enabling technology for software re-use. As a package developer, there are a variety of standards and tools we can adopt to make importing our work easier for our users. This webinar surveys packaging technologies and ideas popular in scientific software (C++, python, and Fortran with autoconf, cmake, python builds, spack, and containers). Good re-usability is a product of thoughtful program structure, build process, version control, and testing. By examining some real-world examples, we show how these steps build on each other in “live” projects to make easy connections between software deployment and package use.

Abstract:

The PaRSEC team will highlight the Template Task Graph (TTG) programming paradigm, the concepts, benefits and requirement of the programming approach as well as the practical aspects necessary to start using TTG on various platforms to write portable task-based applications. The team will provide direct support during the tutorial as well as through GitHub and a mailing list after the tutorial.

What are Template Task Graphs?

Template Task Graphs have been developed to enable a straightforward expression of task parallelism for algorithms working on irregular and unbalanced data sets. The TTG Application Programming Interface employs C++ templates to build an abstract representation of the task graph, and schedule it on distributed resources. It offers a scalable and efficient API to port complex applications on top of task-based runtime systems to gain access to asynchronous progress, computation/communication overlap, and efficient use of all computing resources available on the target system. In this tutorial, we will introduce TTG and its main concepts and features through a variety of applications, ranging from well-known regular to irregular and data dependent examples.

The tutorial, which features many hands-on examples, presents how to install TTG on the ECP platforms and other environments, how to integrate TTG with your application using CMake, how to express task-based data-dependent algorithms for irregular datasets using TTG, and how to integrate these task-based algorithms inside existing applications.

How to Attend:

The tutorial is available to everyone, and participants from any background are welcome to attend. A basic knowledge of C++ and templates will be helpful for participants who wish to try the hands-on.

Presenters will show in-depth demos during the tutorial. Presenters can provide support during and after the tutorial with setup and usage on supported architectures.

Presenters:

Thomas Herault, Joseph Schuchart (University of Tennessee, Knoxville)

Subfiling and Multiple dataset APIs: An introduction to two new features in HDF5 version 1.14

For parallel I/O, the principle behind Subfiling is to find the middle ground between a single shared file and one file per process, thereby avoiding the complexity of one file per process and minimizing the locking issues of a single shared file on a parallel file system. The first part of the talk will cover Subfiling’s implementation, its usage, and the performance benefits observed compared to a single shared file. The second part of the talk will introduce new HDF5 multiple dataset APIs and highlight the performance benefits when using them. The HDF5 library allows a data access operation to access one dataset at a time. However, accessing multiple datasets requires the user to issue an I/O call for each dataset. Hence, the new multiple dataset APIs allow users to access multiple datasets with a single I/O call. In addition, the new routines can improve performance, especially when data is accessed across several datasets from all processes.

Presenters: Neil Fortner and Jordan Henderson

The webinar will be held on September 30, 2022.

The IDEAS Productivity project, in partnership with the DOE Computing Facilities of the ALCF, OLCF, and NERSC, and the DOE Exascale Computing Project (ECP), organizes the webinar series on Best Practices for HPC Software Developers.

As part of this series, we offer one-hour webinars on topics in scientific software development and high-performance computing, approximately once a month. The October webinar is titled Investing in Code Reviews for Better Research Software; and will be presented by Thibault Lestang (Imperial College London), Dominik Krzemiński (University of Cambridge), and Valerio Maggio (Software Sustainability Institute). The webinar will take place on Wednesday, October 12, 2022 at 1:00 pm ET.

Abstract:

Code review is a development practice that improves readability and maintainability of software projects, in addition to making collaboration easier and teamwork more effective. Typically, code review is a conversation between reviewer(s) and the author(s) of the code under review. The code is dissected and analyzed in order to find areas of improvement according to the focus of the review. Examples include, but are not limited to, readability, security or performance improvements. Despite code review being an effective tool for improving software quality, it is still not a standard practice within the scientific software development process. The webinar will detail the benefits that code review can bring to scientific software developers, particularly improvements in software quality, improved teamwork and knowledge transfer. The presenters will highlight common difficulties faced by researchers to set up, perform and maintain frequent code reviews, and they will discuss several approaches and good practices to mitigate these difficulties. The presenters will also describe common tools that make code reviews easier and give examples of how to use them effectively, while explaining a typical code development cycle with continuous integration and automatic code checks.

Abstract

In April, the United States presidential administration announced a whole-of-government effort focused largely on gathering and increasing access to disaggregated data on the experiences of historically underserved groups. The importance of disaggregating the data on specific subpopulations can easily be overlooked in efforts that target diversity broadly. Drawing inspiration from astrophysics, this talk will focus on data and analyses related to the hiring of a specific population that is underrepresented in scientific research: African-American doctoral degree holders. Using the Drake equation to frame the discussion, the talk will address the extent to which the search for African-American terrestrial intelligence (SATI) can be understood through the analytical lens of the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI). With this framing, we will tackle an oft-cited cause for underrepresentation, the pipeline, in light of statistical arguments suggesting the implausibility that pipeline problems fully explain the observed underrepresentation in some elite settings. The talk will briefly touch some unexpected benefits of involving a more diverse population in science, arguing that diverse groups both do scientific research differently and do different scientific research. The talk will conclude with a call for accountability through disaggregating data in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

Closed captions will be available for this talk.

This webinar is brought to you by the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) HPC Workforce Development and Retention Action Group, which organizes a webinar series on topics related to developing a diverse, equitable, and inclusive work culture in the computing sciences.

The talk will be recorded and posted to our archive, but the Q&A session will not be recorded.

The IDEAS Productivity project, in partnership with the DOE Computing Facilities of the ALCF, OLCF, and NERSC, and the DOE Exascale Computing Project (ECP), organizes the webinar series on Best Practices for HPC Software Developers.

As part of this series, we offer one-hour webinars on topics in scientific software development and high-performance computing, approximately once a month. The November webinar is titled Managing Academic Software Development; and will be presented by Sam Mangham (University of Southampton). The webinar will take place on Wednesday, November 9, 2022 at 1:00 pm ET.

Abstract:

Developing academic software can be an unusual exercise, especially compared to traditional software development. The goals and inputs can be undefined and fluctuating, whilst the code itself has traditionally been a stepping stone – a byproduct on the way to papers, ending up ad-hoc, unplanned and undocumented. Fortunately, things are changing. There are tools and techniques that make it easier to design, use, distribute and cite scientific software. This webinar discusses approaches to managing the development and release of academic software, ranging from coding best practices and project boards, to development environments and automated documentation that can help you write sustainable code that is easy to use, cite and collaborate with and on.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and transition to remote work, ECP and the IDEAS Productivity project launched the panel series Strategies for Working Remotely, which explores important topics in this area. 

Abstract:

•  This panel features brief presentations followed by engaging discussion from contributors to the SC22 Early Career Program invited talks on life/work balance conducted at the annual International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC22). Speakers will provide tips and lessons shared with the SC22 Early Career Program panel on work/life balance, parenting, strategies for working remotely, and on how everyone, especially those early in their careers, can apply lessons learned from pandemic-driven change and resiliency.

Speakers:

• Scott Callaghan, University of Southern California (USC)
• Julia Mullen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory
• Elaine Raybourn, Sandia National Laboratories

Moderators:

• Osni Marques, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
• Suzanne Parete-Koon, Oak Ridge National Laboratory