NSC GPU and Accelerator Pilot

Name	NSC GPU and Accelerator Pilot
Description	GPU/Accelerator Pilot Project at NSC
Project financing	SNIC
Is active	Yes
Start date	2012-04-01
End date	2013-12-31

NSC recently started the pilot project for constructing accelerator systems. Currently two candidate systems are nVidia GPU cluster and IntelMIC. nVidia cluster system configuration will be clear when they provide their new Kepler card (Presumably at the end of Q2 2012). IntelMIC system is planned to be equipped at the end of 2012.

Along with hardware construction, we will testify different programming models for accelerators. That will include

• OpenCL or CUDA programming model
• OpenACC formulation
• IntelMIC pragmas

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Abstract

Here are a list of to-dos in this project.

1) Hardware-related

• Construction of nVidia and IntelMIC clusters
• Cluster Configuration (Performance test of synthetic benchmarks: 1*4 VS 2*2 VS 4*1 node*card/node)

2) Software-service

• Synthetic Benchmarks (HPL, SHOC)
• Installation/benchmark of Open-source Scientific Codes (Gromacs, LAMMPS, Luxrender, PetaChem, Gamess, OpenFOAM: List of installed softwares are subject to change)
• Compiler comparison for OpenACC (PGI, CAPS, Pathscale)
• GPU debugger, profiler installation

3) Programming-related

• OpenCL (and/or) CUDA programming practice
• OpenACC programming practice
• OpenACC Code Porting: Any existing open-source scientific codes which attracts our interest
• IntelMIC Code Porting: The same code as OpenACC. Also compare the performance between those two systems/programming models
• Hybrid (OpenCL + MPI) Modeling/Code Tuning for Best Performance

Full plans available here (accessible from NSC internal network).

Members

	Centre	Role	Field
Soon-Heum Ko (NSC)	NSC	Application expert	Computational fluid dynamics