ScicomP 15 Overview

ScicomP 15 kicked off May 18 in Barcelona with an emphasis on programming the next generation of massively parallel, more specialized, low power supercomputers. ScicomP is the users group for scientists and engineers who use and support the largest IBM supercomputers in the world. The meeting is co-located with the SP-XXL user group for those who administer and develop infrastructure support for the same IBM systems. The meetings are being hosted by the Barcelona Supercomputer Center (BSC).

The week begin with a full-day, hand-on tutorial on programming the IBM cell processor. The tutorial was conducted by IBM and BSC. The Cell Broadband Engine is found in the Playstation 3 and has been incorporated into HPC systems like Roadrunner at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which was the most powerful supercomputer in the world when it was unveiled last year. While Roadrunner is a very specialized architecture and very difficult to program, other Cell architectures promise to be more mainstream. Still, the basic Cell design - a PowerPC chip with attached Cell "accelerators" - is an emerging paradigm in HPC. Many believe the HPC architectures in the immediate future will be some combination of traditional CPU (with many cores) combined with accelerators, e.g. an attached GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). The traditional HPC programming paradigm - Fortran and C/++ using the MPI message passing API - have no native support for accessing these accelerators. A number of different programming paradigm are competing to offer this functionality, but there is no clear leader among the candidates: Cell CDK, CUDA, OpenCL, OpenMP, CellSs.

The groups also heard presentations from leaders at HPC sites that will soon be unveiling huge systems. Thomas Lippert gave a keynote presentation about science and systems at the Juelich Supercomputer Center, which is slated to host Europe's first Petaflop supercomputer, an IBM Blue Gene/P. There were also talks about the coming Sequoia system at Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL) and the IBM Blue Waters project at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

ScicomP brings together computational scientists and engineers interested in achieving maximum performance and scalability on all IBM HPC platforms, including POWER, Blue Gene, Cell, Blade, and hybrid architectures. At yearly meetings presentations are given by HPC users, HPC center staff, and IBM staff with a focus on sharing real-world experiences porting, tuning, and running codes on IBM supercomputers. Meetings are co-located with SP-XXL, the members-only user group for sites with large IBM systems.