In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and need for many to transition to unplanned remote work, the IDEAS-ECP Productivity project launched the panel series Strategies for Working Remotely, which explores important topics in this area.
Abstract:
- Earlier this year many workers abruptly transitioned from a primarily on-site to a primarily remote work experience due to a global pandemic. As we bring 2020 to a close, what have we learned so far, and what do we have yet to learn about working remotely, and working effectively in hybrid configurations? In this fireside chat, we look at key highlights from each of the Strategies for Working Remotely panel discussions in the series and dig deeper. What has worked, why, and where can we improve? What do we have yet to learn, or unlearn? “Ask me anything” questions can be submitted by the audience in advance to [email protected].
Panelists:
- Lori Diachin, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
- Tom Evans, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
- Elaine Raybourn, Sandia National Laboratories
Moderator:
- Ashley Barker, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
The IDEAS Productivity project, in partnership with the DOE Computing Facilities of the ALCF, OLCF, and NERSC and the DOE Exascale Computing Project (ECP) has resumed the webinar series on Best Practices for HPC Software Developers, which we began in 2016.
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 Extreme-scale Scientific Software Stack (E4S), and will be presented by Sameer Shende (University of Oregon) and David Honegger Rogers (Los Alamos National Laboratory). The webinar will take place on Wednesday, January 13, 2021 at 1:00 pm ET.
Abstract:
With the increasing complexity and diversity of the software stack and system architecture of high performance computing (HPC) systems, the traditional HPC community is facing a huge productivity challenge in software building, integration and deployment. Recently, this challenge has been addressed by new software build management tools such as Spack that enable seamless software building and integration. Container based solutions provide a versatile way to package software and are increasingly being deployed on HPC systems. The DOE Exascale Computing Project (ECP) Software Technology focus area is developing an HPC software ecosystem that will enable the efficient and performant execution of exascale applications. Through the Extreme-scale Scientific Software Stack (E4S), it is developing a curated, Spack-based, comprehensive and coherent software stack that will enable application developers to productively write highly parallel applications that can portably target diverse exascale architectures. E4S provides both source builds through the Spack platform and a set of containers that feature a broad collection of HPC software packages. E4S exists to accelerate the development, deployment, and use of HPC software, lowering the barriers for HPC and AI/ML users. It provides container images, build manifests, and turn-key, from-source builds of popular HPC software packages developed as Software Development Kits (SDKs). This effort includes a broad range of areas including programming models and runtimes (MPICH, Kokkos, RAJA, OpenMPI), development tools (TAU, PAPI), math libraries (PETSc, Trilinos), data and visualization tools (Adios, HDF5, Paraview), and compilers (LLVM), all available through the Spack package manager. The webinar will describe the community engagements and interactions that led to the many artifacts produced by E4S, and will introduce the E4S containers that are being deployed at the HPC systems at DOE national laboratories.
The presenters will discuss the recent efforts and techniques to improve software integration and deployment for HPC platforms, and describe recent collaborative work on reproducible workflows between E4S and the Pantheon project. Pantheon provides a set of working examples of end-to-end workflows using ECP apps, infrastructure and postprocessing, focused on common vis/analysis operations and workflows of interest to application scientists and show a video of the workflow.
ALCF Developer Sessions Webinar Series
This webinar will cover the NVIDIA HPC SDK, a comprehensive, integrated suite of compilers, libraries, and tools for ThetaGPU and other NVIDIA HPC platforms. The SDK is equipped with new features that continue to open GPU computing to a wider audience of developers and users, including automatic acceleration and tensor core programmability in standard languages, and novel libraries for compute and communication. The webinar will be presented by Tim Costa, HPC Software Product Manager at NVIDIA.
The IDEAS Productivity project, in partnership with the DOE Computing Facilities of the ALCF, OLCF, and NERSC and the DOE Exascale Computing Project (ECP) has resumed the webinar series on Best Practices for HPC Software Developers, which we began in 2016.
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 February webinar is titled Good Practices for Research Software Documentation, and will be presented by Stephan Druskat (Friedrich Schiller University Jena) and Sorrel Harriet (Leeds Trinity University). The webinar will take place on Wednesday, February 10, 2021 at 1:00 pm ET.
Abstract:
This webinar aims to introduce the importance of software documentation and the different approaches that may be taken at various stages, and on various levels, in the software development life cycle. Through the sharing of examples and stimulative questions, the speakers aim to encourage the audience to reflect on the relationship between documentation and process, and to make informed choices about when and how to document their software.
The IDEAS Productivity project, in partnership with the DOE Computing Facilities of the ALCF, OLCF, and NERSC and the DOE Exascale Computing Project (ECP) has resumed the webinar series on Best Practices for HPC Software Developers, which we began in 2016.
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 An Overview of the RAJA Portability Suite, and will be presented by Arturo Vargas (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory). The webinar will take place on Wednesday, March 10, 2021 at 1:00 pm ET.
Abstract:
The RAJA Portability Suite is a collection of open-source software libraries that enable developers to write single-source applications that are portable across a wide range of HPC architectures. The Suite contains tools for portable loop execution (RAJA) and memory management (Umpire and CHAI). The development of the Suite is motivated by the needs of production multiphysics codes, which must run efficiently on laptops, commodity clusters, and massively parallel advanced technology systems at any point in time as well as across multiple platform generations. The scale and complexity of these applications require that they be able to employ system-appropriate native programming models, such as OpenMP, CUDA, and HIP, without significant source code modification. The abstractions that the RAJA Portability Suite provides enable such portable single-source application development. The Suite is used in a diverse range of production codes at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). It is also funded as a Software Technology Project in DOE’s Exascale Computing Project, where the Suite supports a number of key applications. The webinar will provide an overview of the Suite and its capabilities and discuss status and plans to support applications on exascale platforms. The webinar will present code examples that illustrate basic usage and compare to programming with native programming models, and performance results for several applications that rely on the Suite for platform portability.
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:
- Many of us have been working remotely well over 13 months now due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve hosted 7 panel discussions since April 2020 that allowed us to share resiliency strategies for working remotely as most of us transitioned from co-located to fully virtual work. That said, 13 months and 7 panel discussions later, how much do we know about how working remotely and a phased return to “the office” will impact our creativity? Do we do our best work when isolated? What is it about serendipitous face-to-face interactions that we find difficult to replicate online? In our eighth installment of the panel discussion series, we explore the topics of creativity and innovation with software development teams who are applying agile techniques, thinking differently about co-located collaboration, and questioning the unintended effects of working remotely. Panelists mae brief introductory comments followed by open discussion. Questions were collected from the audience in advance to [email protected].
Panelists:
- Addi Thakur Malviya, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
- Pat Quillen, Mathworks
- Elaine Raybourn, Sandia National Laboratories
- Damian Rouson, Sourcery Institute
- Francesca Samsel, TACC (Texas Advanced Computing Center), University of Texas at Austin
Moderator:
- Ashley Barker, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
The Exascale Computing Project (ECP) Community Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) Days provide an opportunity for the HPC community to engage with ECP teams to discuss our latest development efforts. Each BOF will be a 90-minute session on a given topic, with a brief overview followed by Q&A. Please see more information about the BOFs below and register for as many as you would like to attend. The BOFs will be conducted via Zoom, and the Zoom link will be sent to you upon successful registration. Please note all times are shown in the EASTERN STANDARD TIME ZONE.
The IDEAS Productivity project, in partnership with the DOE Computing Facilities of the ALCF, OLCF, and NERSC and the DOE Exascale Computing Project (ECP) has resumed the webinar series on Best Practices for HPC Software Developers, which we began in 2016.
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 A Workflow for Increasing the Quality of Scientific Software, and will be presented by Tomislav Maric (TU Darmstadt). The webinar will take place on Wednesday, April 7, 2021 at 1:00 pm ET.
Abstract:
The webinar will present a workflow that increases the quality of research software in Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) by applying established software engineering practices extended with CSE-specific testing and visualization, and periodical cross-linking of software with reports/publications and datasets. The workflow is minimalistic. It introduces a small amount of work overhead, which is crucial for research groups without dedicated funding for ensuring the quality of research software and reproducibility of scientific results.
This tutorial was held on April 12, 2021 as part of the 2021 ECP Annual Meeting.
At LLNL, we have developed a workflow enabling users to automate application performance analysis and pinpoint bottlenecks in their codes. Our workflow leverages three open-source tools – Caliper, SPOT, and Hatchet – to provide a wholistic suite for integrated performance data.
In this tutorial, the presenters provided an overview of each of the tools, and demonstrated how to profile your applications with Caliper, how to visualize your performance data in SPOT, and how to programmatically analyze your data with Hatchet. Caliper is a performance analysis toolbox in a library. It provides performance profiling capabilities for HPC applications, making them available at runtime for any application run. This approach greatly simplifies performance profiling tasks for application end users, who can enable performance measurements for regular program runs without the complex setup steps often required by specialized performance debugging tools.
SPOT is a web-based tool for visualizing application performance data collected with Caliper. SPOT visualizes an application’s performance data across many runs. Users can track performance changes over time, compare the performance achieved by different users, or run scaling studies across MPI ranks. With a high-level overview of an application’s performance, users are also quickly able to identify data that they might be interested in analyzing in finer-grained detail. Hatchet is a Python-based tool for analyzing and visualizing performance data generated by popular profiling tools, such as Caliper, HPCToolkit, and gprof.
With Hatchet, users can write small code snippets to answer questions such as: What speedup am I getting from using the GPUs? Which portions of my code are scaling poorly? What differences exist in using one MPI implementation over another?
To answer these questions, Hatchet provides operations (e.g., sub-selection, aggregation, arithmetic) to analyze and visualize calling context trees and call graphs from one or multiple executions.
LLNL-ABS-818869
This tutorial was held on April 12, 2021, as part of the 2021 ECP Annual Meeting.
This tutorial explained the design and use of the CoPA developed Cabana Particle Simulation Toolkit and provided hands-on exercises in the form of simple examples and proxy applications. A full description of the library, connections to other ECP projects, and existing use cases began the session. Cabana uses Kokkos for on-node performance portability, extending to particle-specific sub-motifs, and MPI for multi-node simulations. Cabana provides capabilities for nearly all particle-based applications: neighbor list generation, particle redistribution, halo exchange, particle-grid interpolation, and more. A hands-on, interactive walk-through of the tutorial available within the Cabana repository introduced users to the library. Descriptions and code demonstrations of current use cases, including both proxy apps and production code kernels, exemplified what can be done with Cabana. Key design decisions for performance was an emphasis of this last section.
