Professor Arthur Trew Director, EPCC EPCC: KT in novel computing

leading Europe mission - “ to be the premier European computational science centre” –the European equivalent of one of the big US centres, eg NCSA, University of Chicago  think globally, act locally

building the vision Training HPCfacilities+skills Partnerships Industry + Academia Dbase + Grid expertise R&Dexcellence Europeanleadership Vital statistics: –75 staff –£4.5 M turnover (almost) all from external sources Multidisciplinary and multi-funded –... with a large spectrum of activities –… and a critical mass of expertise Supports and undertakes research at UoE through: –access to facilities –training (MSc and some undergraduate) –HPC-Europa visitor programme –collaborative research (eg NAIS, RealityGrid … )

HECToR 4 th generation national facility managed by Edinburgh HPCx + HECToR = £150M HECToR 250 Tflops peak –Most powerful computer in UK academia –shortly to be upgraded to 350 Tflops … used for a wide variety of physical, engineering, environmental and biological projects … opportunities for industry involvement –through facility access, or direct collaboration

win-win-win

the second age of parallelism the end of Moore’s law at the core level multi-core chips ← parallelism → very many processors HT Multi-core era Scalar and parallel applications Many-core era Massively parallel applications Increasing HW Threads Per Socket … today’s top-end HPC techniques will have widespread applicability tomorrow the same parallel techniques used to get performance on Blue Gene could be required everywhere

making an economic impact projects based on delivering business benefit –not pushing a particular technology –based within the University we have access to a wide range of leading-edge expertise … on time, on budget and to specification we now need to diversify from bespoke consultancy EPCC Industry Hub to be launched in 2009 –use ISV’s to target wider markets –make facilities available as a paying service –seeking SE and industry support Academic R&D Commercialexploitation `

The challenges the end of (not) Moore’s Law –levels of parallelism may increase, but can we use it? –will, say, MPI scale to Exascale? –how can we create fault-tolerant applications? –is there really an economic basis for HPC based on commodity components? escalating infrastructure costs –power, space, cooling … verification of results –rigorous testing of QCD has shown numerous hardware problems –choosing appropriate algorithms essential –widespread training required if computational science can truly stand alongside theory and experiment

… and our response Exascale Technology Centre –funded by the University in collaboration with Cray to investigate key scalability problems –hybrid programming models –PGAS languages –GPU-based architectures Numerical Algorithms & Intelligent Software (NAIS) –collaboration with Numerical Analysts and Computer Scientists –5-year project to develop new algorithms designed to be parallel –written to be WORA (Write-Once, Run-Anywhere) –… with increased information to aid the compiler to generate highly-efficient code high-impact demonstrators –eg. real-time simulation of fire spread in the Olympic Stadium

the need for partnership the Exascale challenge is beyond any one institution … perhaps even beyond any one country so, there is a clear desire to collaborate G8 funding call a clear opportunity to build on the Tsukuba- Edinburgh –the scale may be small, but it will grow … collaborationhttp:// 8-initiative/index.html