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.

Abstract

Mentorship is a dynamic, career-long phenomenon spanning many different relationships that support our personal and professional development. A wealth of scholarship on mentorship practices has emerged across many disciplines studying how mentorship happens in the workplace, its benefits, and what institutions can do to foster those relationships.  While mentorship can benefit everyone, studies have shown that positive mentorship experiences are especially significant for members of underrepresented groups; through a close working alliance with a mentor, women and minority mentees can acquire not just the skills they need to succeed but also an affirmation of belonging and professional identity that is so crucial to retention. In this way, inclusive mentoring is especially significant as a strategy for workforce development and retention in computing. Like good software engineering, good human workforce engineering can be built by developing processes that make it easier to widely implement. In this talk, Reed Milewicz, a computer scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, will describe insights into the science of mentorship, his ongoing research into mentorship among computing professionals, and his experiences with inclusive mentorship training as offered by Center for the Improvement of Mentored Experience in Research.

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 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.

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.

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.

Abstract

The ECP Broadening Participation Initiative seeks to foster a supportive and inclusive culture within the computing sciences at DOE national laboratories. Its mission is to establish a sustainable plan to recruit and retain a diverse workforce in the DOE high-performance computing community. This webinar will provide an overview the ECP Broadening Participation Initiative’s current activities and then invite community input about challenges, gaps, and opportunities in computing workforce development and retention at DOE national labs and collaborating institutions.

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 overview part of 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 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.