Nov
9
Wed
Managing Academic Software Development
Nov 9 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

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.

Dec
14
Wed
Lab Notebooks for Computational Mathematics, Sciences & Engineering
Dec 14 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

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 December webinar is titled Lab Notebooks for Computational Mathematics, Sciences & Engineering; and will be presented by Jared O’Neal (Argonne National Laboratory). The webinar will take place on Wednesday, December 14, 2022 at 1:00 pm ET.

Abstract:

As computational mathematics, science, and engineering problems become larger, more ambitious, and more complex, it is increasingly important to develop and use tools and techniques that ensure that computational research is based on a strong foundation of general, low-level scientific best practices. In this webinar, the speaker will relate his experience of transitioning from working in the worlds of experimental and observational sciences to the world of computational sciences as well as his experience adapting experimental tools and techniques to computational research. In particular, the speaker will focus on the role of lab notebooks in experimental sciences and present concrete examples to address the challenges associated with adapting lab notebooks to computational research.

Jan
11
Wed
Openscapes: supporting better science for future us
Jan 11 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

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 January webinar is titled Openscapes: supporting better science for future us; and will be presented by Julia Stewart Lowndes (Openscapes). The webinar will take place on Wednesday, January 11, 2023 at 1:00 pm ET.

Abstract:

Openscapes champions open practices in environmental science to help uncover data-driven solutions faster. In this webinar the speaker will share how she transitioned from doing her own marine ecology research to founding Openscapes to support other researchers and grow the global Open Science movement. The speaker will share lessons learned from her work mentoring government, non-profit, and academic environmental and Earth teams, with specific stories from projects with NASA and NOAA Fisheries. The webinar will reuse parts of a recent keynote at RStudio::conf that was the global launch of Quarto, a new, open-source, scientific and technical publishing system. The webinar will include a demo on some features of Quarto for R and Python users and highlight how more reusing and less reinventing is critical for science. The speaker will also discuss how open source/science is a daily practice, and an important avenue to increase inclusion in science and contribute to the climate movement.

Mar
15
Wed
Our Road to Exascale: Particle Accelerator & Laser-Plasma Modeling
Mar 15 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

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 March webinar is titled Our Road to Exascale: Particle Accelerator & Laser-Plasma Modeling; and will be presented by Axel Huebl (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory). The webinar will take place on Wednesday, March 15, 2023, at 1:00 pm ET.

Abstract:

Particle accelerators, among the largest, most complex devices, demand increasingly sophisticated computational tools for the design and optimization of the next generation of accelerators that will meet the challenges of increasing energy, intensity, accuracy, compactness, complexity and efficiency. It is key that contemporary software take advantage of the latest advances in computer hardware and scientific software engineering practices, delivering speed, reproducibility and feature composability for the aforementioned challenges.

The webinar will discuss the experience of the developers of WarpX in the US DOE Exascale Computing Project (ECP), which led to the 2022 ACM Gordon Bell Prize. Including the first Exascale supercomputer Frontier, WarpX uses GPUs and CPUs at massive scale; research efforts have advanced particle-in-cell algorithms such as dynamic load balancing, block-structured mesh-refinement, and modern relativistic Maxwell solvers. The webinar will present strategies and results in performance portability. In particular, the webinar will discuss the team-of-teams approach for software co-design in AMReX, software architecture, quality assurance, developer & user productivity, and ecosystem interplay that has lifted up accelerator modeling activities to be fast, open, modular and sustainable over the long term.

Apr
12
Wed
Facilitating Electronic Structure Calculations on GPU-based Exascale Platforms
Apr 12 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

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 April webinar is titled Facilitating Electronic Structure Calculations on GPU-based Exascale Platforms; and will be presented by Jean-Luc Fattebert (Oak Ridge National Laboratory). The webinar will take place on Wednesday, April 12, 2023, at 1:00 pm ET.

Abstract:

GPUs accelerators offer the prospect of speeding up ab initio molecular dynamics and other large-scale first-principles atomistic simulations. Taking advantage of these devices is, however, not a trivial task given their specificities. Some algorithms struggle, while others thrive with the high level of thread concurrency available on modern GPUs. The PROGRESS and BML libraries, developed within ECP’s Co-design Center for Particle Applications (CoPA) project, allow electronic structure codes to offload their most expensive kernels, with a unified interface for various matrix formats and computer architectures. The webinar will focus on implementations and algorithmic choices made in those libraries, and lessons learned while trying to achieve performance portability on exascale platforms. Specifically, the webinar will discuss eigensolvers and their alternatives, as well as strong scaling in fast time-to-solution in molecular dynamics.

May
10
Wed
Lessons Learned Developing Performance-Portable QMCPACK
May 10 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

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 May webinar is titled Lessons Learned Developing Performance Portable QMCPACK; and will be presented by Paul Kent (Oak Ridge National Laboratory). The webinar will take place on Wednesday, May 10, 2023, at 1:00 pm ET.

Abstract:

During DOE’s Exascale Computing Project the open source QMCPACK code has been redesigned and reimplemented to run portably and performantly on multiple vendors GPUs as well as CPUs. The QMCPACK code implements Quantum Monte Carlo algorithms to predict the properties of materials with benchmark accuracy. The new implementation has now fully replaced the prior non-portable GPU solution. This webinar will outline some of the design considerations and new algorithms implemented both to run efficiently and to reduce burdens on the developers and maintainers. A key factor has been the adoption of modern development practices, including an extensive test suite. This has accelerated development, improved code quality, and also enabled isolation of problems in the wider HPC software stack, including in compilers and numerical libraries. The webinar will summarize these strategies and other recommendations for HPC application developers and facilities.

Jun
14
Wed
The OpenSSF Best Practices Badge Program
Jun 14 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

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 June webinar is titled The OpenSSF Best Practices Badge Program; and will be presented by Roscoe A. Bartlett (Sandia National Laboratories). The webinar will take place on Wednesday, June 14, 2023, at 1:00 pm ET.

Abstract:

The Linux Foundation’s OpenSSF Best Practices Badge Program represents an impressive collection of the open source community’s knowledge base for creating, maintaining, and sustaining robust, high quality, and (most importantly) secure open source software. At its foundation is a featureful “Badge App” website, which provides a database of projects that document what best practices they have adopted and supporting evidence. This set of best practices (along with the detailed documentation and supporting justifications for each item) also serves as an incremental learning tool and as a foundation for incremental software process and quality improvements efforts. The webinar will provide an overview of this effort and describe some of its surprising benefits. The webinar will also describe how the OpenSSF Best Practices Badge Program can be used to help continue the recent advances in software quality and sustainability efforts in the computational science and engineering community going forward.

Jul
12
Wed
Writing Clean Scientific Software
Jul 12 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

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 July webinar is titled Writing Clean Scientific Software; and will be presented by Nick Murphy (Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian). The webinar will take place on Wednesday, July 12, 2023, at 1:00 pm ET.

Abstract:

Most scientists are largely self-taught as programmers. Even many of us who spend most of our time coding have never had formal training in writing software. This webinar is intended for students and scientists who have some experience writing code but who have had to learn mostly on their own. The webinar will describe tips and strategies on how to write readable, reusable, and maintainable code. These tips include writing short functions that do exactly one thing with no effects, and measuring the length of a variable name by the time needed to understand its meaning rather than by number of characters. The webinar will describe strategies for restructuring a complicated function into smaller and more manageable chunks, and provide tips on how to make the best use of comments and error messages. Overall, the webinar will embolden the CS&E community to think of code as communication.

Jul
26
Wed
Introduction to High-Performance Parallel Distributed Computing using Chapel, UPC++ and Coarray Fortran
Jul 26 – Jul 27 all-day

Schedule:

This two-day tutorial will run July 26-27, 12:00pm-3:25pm ET.

Abstract:

A majority of HPC system users use scripting languages such as Python to prototype their computations, coordinate their large executions, and analyze the data resulting from their computations. Python is great for these many uses, but it frequently falls short when significantly scaling up the amount of data and computation, as required to fully leverage HPC system resources. In this tutorial, we show how example computations such as heat diffusion, k-mer counting, file processing, and distributed maps can be written to efficiently leverage distributed computing resources in the Chapel, UPC++, and Fortran parallel programming models. This tutorial should be accessible to users with little-to-no parallel programming experience, and everyone is welcome. A partial differential equation problem will be shown in all three programming models along with performance and scaling results on big machines. Attendees will be shown how to compile and run these programming examples, and provided opportunities to experiment with different parameters and code alternatives while being able to ask questions and share their own observations. Come join us to learn about some productive and performant parallel programming models!

Current OLCF users with access to Frontier will be able to access a reservation on Frontier to work the examples. Current NERSC users will be able to use Perlmutter. Training accounts on Perlmutter are available for participants who do not have access to either Frontier or are not NERSC users. The examples will also be available in a Docker container and a cloud-based virtual desktop environment for access by any attendee.

Keywords:

  • Basic and introductory topics for expanding broader engagement
  • Software engineering for portable performance and scalability
  • Parallel programming methods, models, languages and environments
  • Clusters and distributed systems
Aug
9
Wed
Infrastructure for High-Fidelity Testing in HPC Facilities
Aug 9 @ 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm

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 August webinar is titled Infrastructure for High-Fidelity Testing in HPC Facilities; and will be presented by Ryan Prout (Oak Ridge National Laboratory). The webinar will take place on Wednesday, August 9, 2023, at 1:00 pm ET.

Abstract:

The Exascale Computing Project (ECP) is investing heavily in software for exascale systems, as can be seen in the many tools, libraries and software components within ECP. In order to boost software integration across computing facilities, ECP has developed infrastructure and tools for high-fidelity testing. This infrastructure is made accessible to ECP software technology developers to provide a trusted and efficient testing environment that employs continuous integration (CI). At the core of the ECP-enabled testing infrastructure is the Jacamar CI tool. This tool allows us to link multi-tenant HPC systems to Gitlab CI workflows. This webinar will provide an overview of the ECP testing infrastructure, discuss what this could look like post-ECP, and how it could benefit other HPC facilities.