1. 1October 2003HPC@EPCC High Performance Computing at EPCC Alan D Simpson Technical Director Telephone: +44 131 650 5120 Fax: +44 131 650 6555 Email: a.simpson@epcc.ed.ac.uk http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/

2. 2October 2003HPC@EPCC Overview  Background  HPC Facilities at EPCC  HPCx –Current Status –HPCx and the Grid  Training and Research in HPC  Summary

3. 3October 2003HPC@EPCC EPCC  Founded in 1990 as a focus for the University of Edinburgh activities in HPC  Mission “to accelerate the effective exploitation of novel computing in industry, academia, and commerce”  One of leading HPC Centres in Europe  65 staff –40 applications consultants + support staff  Income £2.7M per annum; 30% from Industry  Academic and industrial clients from UK, Europe and beyond

4. 4October 2003HPC@EPCC Technology Transfer Academic: o National HPC Facilities o Research o Support Training: o Academia o Industry o MSc Europe: o Visitor Programmes o Technology Transfer o Strategic Planning Industry: o Projects o Consultancy o Middleware

5. 5October 2003HPC@EPCC Industrial Consultancy  Provide project-based consultancy to industry and commerce  Over 30 clients in 3 years  Large enterprises... –eg, UK Met Office, Sun, C&G, AEA, Cisco ...to local SMEs –eg, Weidlinger, Quadstone, Jardine  40% of technical staff  Funded by direct contracts with business, local government and European Commission

6. 6October 2003HPC@EPCC Industrial Clients USA: o Cisco Systems o Cray Research Inc o Schlumberger Geoquest o Sun Microsystems Japan: o Fujitsu Research Laboratories o Hitachi UK: o AEA Technology o AlphaData Ltd o Applied Research & Technology Ltd o Avro International plc o British Aerospace plc o CN Software Ltd o Cray Research (UK) Ltd o Crown Office o DTI o Digital Equipment Corp o Edinburgh Old Town Renewal Trust o Edinburgh Petroleum Services Ltd o Enterpris Ltd o EPSRC o High Speed Productions Ltd o Integriti Solutions Ltd o Kwik-Fit Holdings plc o LEEL o MCS/Hampco o Peter Tilling Plastics Ltd o Quadstone Ltd o Rolls Royce plc o SCI Ltd o Scottish Enterprise o Scottish Office o SIAS Ltd o Silicon Graphics (UK) Ltd o UK Meteorological Office o Upstream Systems Ltd o 3L Ltd Europe: o AGIP S.p.A, Italy o Digital Equipment BV, Ireland o European Commission o Hitachi Dublin Laboratory o Kjaergaard Industri Automatic o Statoil, Norway

7. 7October 2003HPC@EPCC European Programmes  Collaborative research –HPC-Europa: EPCC coordinates pan-European visitor programme –DEISA: connecting national centres across Europe  IST (industrial) projects –EUTIST-IMV: co-ordination of 80 machine vision organisations –Gridstart: co-ordination of all EU Grid development projects

8. 8October 2003HPC@EPCC 1997 Cray T3E (344 processors) 1997 Hitachi SR2201 2000 Sun UltraSPARC III Cluster HPC Facilities at EPCC 1990 Meiko i860 CS (64 processors) 1991 TMC CM-200 (16K processors) 1992 Meiko i860 CS (16 processors) 1982 ICL DAPs 1986 Meiko T800 CS (400 processors) 1988 AMT DAP608 1994 Cray T3D (512 processors) Cray Y-MP 1995 Meiko CS-2 2002 Sun E15000 (54 processors) 2002 IBM p690 Cluster (1280 processors) 2004 QCDOC

9. 9October 2003HPC@EPCC UoE HPC Service  Funded by £400K JREI grant –awarded to EPCC in 1998 –freely available to local researchers  Service based on Sun SMP clusters –familiar software and easy porting –recently upgraded to Sunfire E15K –large memory and CPU with a single system image  EPCC is a Sun Centre of Excellence in HPC and Grid Computing

10. 10October 2003HPC@EPCC QCDOC  QCDOC is a collaborative project to develop a special-purpose computer for QCD –involving EPCC, Physics, Columbia University, IBM,…  QCD: Quantum ChromoDynamics –key part of Standard Model of particle physics –has very extreme computing requirements  Price-performance is critical –may be cheaper to design special purpose machines for particular problems –only pay for what you use –put extra effort into what is important to you

11. 11October 2003HPC@EPCC QCDOC  Each node is small and consists of a single specially designed chip plus some memory –very large numbers of nodes are possible  Equivalent general purpose machine would be huge and expensive  Difficulty of chip design reduced by including components (eg, CPU) from IBM design library  10TF machine to be installed at EPCC in 2004

12. 12October 2003HPC@EPCC HPCx Overview  UK’s major HPC facility, funded by EPSRC  £53M/6 year contact awarded to UoE HPCX Ltd –wholly-owned subsidiary of University of Edinburgh –work subcontracted to CCLRC (DL), EPCC and IBM  Largest academic supercomputer in Europe –doubling in performance every 2 years

13. 13October 2003HPC@EPCC HPCx Objectives  Capability computing for world-leading science –Capability computing: jobs which use a significant fraction of the resource, eg, at least 512 CPUs  Maximise benefits to the UK’s computational science and engineering community  IBM technology roadmap: –1 2/02: 40x32-way Regatta H frames + Colony Switch initially #9 on Top 500 list –07/04: 48x32-way Regatta H+ frames + Federation switch –11/06: 96x32-way Regatta H+ frames + Federation switch  Science support is key for effective use

14. 14October 2003HPC@EPCC Partnership  EPCC and CCLRC –are partners in C 3 ES (Consortium for Capability Computing and e-Science) –providing science support and systems management for HPCx –underpinned by MoU between UoE and CCLRC –combines Europe’s foremost academic HPC, e-Science and technology transfer centres –significant experience of: operating national HPC services developing capability applications –the strongest UK partnership ever to support scientific computing

15. 15October 2003HPC@EPCC Virtual Organisation Outreach Life sciences New applications Applications Support Helpdesk Training Liaising with users Users Technology Software Engineering Underpinning technology Grid/e-Science Systems & Networking Flexible and responsive capability service Smooth transitions between phases Terascaling Capability applications Scalable algorithms Performance optimisation

16. 16October 2003HPC@EPCC HPCx and the Grid  Key responsibility for Software Engineering team  HPCx is committed to support access via Grid –currently provided through Globus 2 –Globus 3 support when appropriate  HPCx is key part of UK collaboration with Extensible Teragrid Facility project in the US –focus is exploiting unique features of Grid + HPC systems for capability computing –initial experiment planned for SC2003 RealityGrid computational steering HPCx is major compute resource

17. 17October 2003HPC@EPCC HPCx Status  HPCx builds on significant complementary experience at EPCC and DL  Very successful start –averaging >75% utilisation –…with capability usage already up to 35%  Committed to e-Science and the Grid –ETF experiment at SC2003  HPCx is focussed on capability computing –world-class service for world-class research

18. 18October 2003HPC@EPCC MSc in HPC  £400K grant from UK research council –runs for 5 years –just started year 3  One of a very few such courses in the world  Each year an increasing number of students, especially overseas students

19. 19October 2003HPC@EPCC Training in HPC  Courses include –Fundamental Concepts of HPC –Practical Software Development –Message Passing Programming –Shared Memory Programming –Parallel Decomposition –Applied Computer Science –Object Oriented Programming for HPC –Exploiting the Computational Grid –Applied Numerical Algorithms –Performance Optimisation –Scientific Visualisation  Remote runs at, eg, Cambridge, Daresbury, …

20. 20October 2003HPC@EPCC HPC Research  Java Grande Forum –EPCC leads the benchmarking activity –including parallel benchmarks and language comparisons –have taught Java tutorials at Supercomputing  OpenMP –EPCC a full member of OpenMP Architecture Review Board –OpenMP microbenchmarks tests quality of the compiler implementation becoming a de-facto standard

21. 21October 2003HPC@EPCC HPC Research  JOMP –an OpenMP-like standard for Java –research implementation available for download  Mixed Mode –combined OpenMP + MPI becoming popular –topic of investigation at EPCC for over 3 years  Single Sided MPI –EPCC produced implementations for Cray, Sun, …  Optimised Libraries –BLAS, FFTs, ScaLAPACK,…

22. 22October 2003HPC@EPCC Summary  EPCC is multidisciplinary and multi-funded –... supporting a large spectrum of activities... –… and a critical mass of expertise  Proven track record in Technology Transfer –business-like approach benefits whole organisation  New initiatives –MSc in HPC –European programmes –Grid middleware –HPCx  EPCC has a unique breadth of expertise