ComplexHPC Spring School 2013

– – Heterogeneous computing – impact on algorithms – –
June 3-7, 2013, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

Introduction and Scope

During recent years we are wittnessing significant and irreversible changes the architectural design and the functionality of the available computers. Namely, the technology left the era of continuously improving performance through shorthening the processor clock cycle and exploiting instruction level parallelism and entered the era of improving performance through thread-level parallelism together with high level of heterogeneity, combining numerouc computing units of the same or different type, such as many cores, graphics processing units (GPU), special purpose processors etc.

The technological improvements in the past have enabled increase in performance without a drastic change of the vast variety of existing software products. The changes in the computer architecture today require a considerable effort to adapt, redo or even develop from scratch those applications in order to exploit the performance capabilities of the nowadays computers – a price that is rather high for the end-users.

Both academia and industry realize however that serial performance has reached its zenith, leading to an increased focus on new algorithms that can benefit from parallel and heterogeneous architectures.

The ComplexHPC Spring School 2013 aims to address the impact of the latest trends in the computer architecture desing and its impact on the choice, implementation and the performance evaluation of (some classes of) algorithms on some typical distributed, heterogeneous, and hierarchical systems. We will focus on two types of algorithms:

• algorithms and basic computational kernels arising in the field of Scientific Computing and Numerical Linear Algebra, as those are the backbone of many software packages for performing numerical simulations for problems in Physics, Chemistry, Geophysics, Engineering etc sciences;
• algorithms related to Bioinformatics and dealing with large data sets.

The program includes a number of keynote and theme presentations by internationally renowned leaders in the field, and a series of thematic lectures, where various aspects of the impact of the heterogeneous computer architectures on the development and the implementation of algorithms. Together with each thematic lecture, a hands-on session is provided, to obtain immediate practical experience using a real distributed, heterogeneous, and hierarchical hardware platform. The computer resources to be used for the practical sessions are provided vis the Uppsala Multidisciplinary Center for Advanced Computational Science, one of the six centra in the national metacenter Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC).

Industry showcase, perhaps. During the school, we plan to organize social event, to provide a good atmosphere for informal contacts and discussions, and let you get to know each other better.

Target Audience

The ComplexHPC Spring School 2013 specifically targets doctoral and post-doctoral students in the general field of high-performance and distributed computing with emphasis on algorithm development and implementation. Registration is required, and available for:

• Students and young researchers part of COST Action IC0805: Open Network for High-Performance Computing on Complex Environments,
• External students and young researchers working in the general field of ComplexHPC (depending on availability of places).

See also our formal call for participation.

Posters and Demos

All participants are invited – or: strongly encouraged – to bring a poster covering their current research efforts for presentation during an informal poster-&-demo-&-drinks session at the end of the first day of the Spring School. We specifically would like to urge participants to also consider giving a live demonstration of any working system in the general ComplexHPC domain, to highlight their own recent research results.

The Second International ComplexHPC Challenge

Finally, continuing the positive experience from the First ComplexHPC Spring School 2011 as part of the Spring School we also organize the Second International ComplexHPC Challenge – a ‘competition’ focussing on state-of-the-art solutions in the general domain of ComplexHPC. The Challenge winner will receive a special award + prize – and more importantly: visibility and recognition from your peers in the field.

Welcome to Uppsala to attend the Second ComplexHPC Spring School 2013 and enjoy the spring beauty of this eincient and young Scandinavian city!

The ComplexHPC Spring School 2013 organizers.