ICHEC news

ISSUE 11 : AUGUST 2011 : WWW.ICHEC.IE

HPC comes to the desktop The advent of GPU (graphics processing unit) computing represents a major step change that has the potential to transform the way we do science. For instance, in drug design, the use of the GPU-enabled AMBER package, which is one of the most widely used codes for simulating the behaviour of biomolecules, has reduced what were traditionally months-long calculations to just a few days. This in turn has considerably shortened the time-to-solution and the overall workflow of theory, computer experiment, and subsequent analysis, and provided significantly more time for reseachers to progress the development of their research ideas.

As GPU technology becomes cheaper, faster and more accessible, ICHEC is well positioned to accelerate the transfer of these benefits to Irish researchers, students and businesses. In the past two years, ICHEC has established itself as a research and education leader, both in Ireland and internationally, in the rapidly evolving technology of GPU-based high-performance computing. After being awarded the status of CUDA Research Centre by NVIDIA a year ago (one of only seven in the world at that time), ICHEC has since been designated an enabling partner by NVIDIA for its continued contributions to this technology, which is being deployed in both academic and industry settings.

Find out in our focus article (page 4) how your research could benefit from the GPU revolution.

Training update ICHEC has officially engaged in formal academic teaching, where it will provide four accredited modules within the structured PhD programme in physics at NUI Galway. These modules (five ECTS credits each) range in scope from scientific programming, software design and carpentry, and HPC and parallel programming, to GPU computing. It is anticipated that they will also be made

ICHEC’s Ivan Girotto upgrades his desktop to TFlops. available to other structured graduate programmes involving different thirdlevel institutions.

Apart from academic accreditation, ICHEC has also gained industry recognition for its professional training services on GPU computing. Our ‘Introduction to CUDA’ course has been officially approved by NVIDIA, and is taught by ICHEC instructors who have been certified as ‘CUDA Certified Programmers’. This three-day course is available as an on-demand service for both our commercial and academic clients.

Coming soon: GPGPU National Service We are delighted to announce the opening of the National GPU Computing Service this autumn. As explained in our focus article on page 4, programming environments for GPU computing have matured to the point where porting user codes is now within reach of experienced programmers, and the number of community applications that have been successfully accelerated includes many popular packages of interest to the Irish research community, with many more underway.

ICHEC is currently in the process of procuring the latest high performance GPU-based hardware, which will support this new service to be made available for the first time to the whole Irish computational research community. It is anticipated that the service will be launched in October of this year and will make use of the existing Stoney cluster as a host platform.

Its overall performance should exceed significantly that of the recently decommissioned national capability computing facility (Schrödinger).

ICHEC@ ISC’11

GPGPU computing

Controlled molecular motion

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Cloud solutions

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New and notable

Irish success as PRACE project goes from strength to strength

High hopes for GPGPU

DR MICHAEL BROWNE celebrates the recent achievements of Irish researchers and offers an update on the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) as it continues to develop.

Welcome to issue 11 of ICHEC News, the newsletter that brings researchers and institutions up to date with the latest highperformance computing news from Ireland. This issue reports on ICHEC’s second exhibition at ISC in Hamburg in June. We also announce the launch of our newly developed course, ‘Introduction to CUDA’, and update you on recent developments with PRACE. Our special feature highlights GPU computing, and describes how GPUs offer the prospect of bringing HPC to the desktop. We also report on the four students selected for our Summer Scholarship Programme, and discuss the benefits of cloud computing in our technology transfer update. We hope you will find ICHEC News to be a valuable source of HPC news and information.

Professor Jim Slevin Director

ICHEC is once again delighted to extend its congratulations to Dr Turlough Downes of Dublin City University (DCU) and the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS) on his recent success in securing PRACE production access in the face of intense competition. His project, ‘Accretion disk dynamics: the multifluid regime’, is a collaboration with Dr Stephen O’Sullivan of Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT), Wayne O’Keeffe of DCU, and Dr Michael Browne of ICHEC. This is a very significant award and builds on success at the prior preparatory access. The project will make use of Jugene, an IBM Blue Gene/P hosted in FZ Jülich in Germany, which has almost 300,000 cores, and only two years ago was Europe’s first petascale supercomputer and the world’s third fastest (petascale performance 15 corresponds to 10 operations per second). PRACE holds six-monthly production access calls, with the next call due to open in the autumn.

Stokes, whose performance is less than the very highest performance or Tier 0 systems, such as Jugene or Curie.

Approximately 20 such systems were available across Europe in this call. This PRACE call replaces the previous DEISA DECI calls; the DECI ‘brand’ has been retained, although the exact meaning of the acronym has been changed. For the first time, a fraction of Stokes’ resources were available in the call. ICHEC wishes the Irish applicants to this call well in the coming peer review process.

It is likely that there will be a further Tier 1 call later in the year aligned to the planned Tier 0 call. A key aspect of the PRACE DECI call is that the scalability requirements are less onerous and the larger number of systems encompassed by the call should lead to a greater success rate for applicants. What is effectively a rolling call for preparatory access continues to operate. We consider this to be an essential precursor for anyone considering Tier 0 access.

Milestones

Continued growth

June 22 marked an important milestone for the PRACE project, as it was the closing date of the first joint Tier 0 and Tier 1 high-performance computing (HPC) access call. Tier 1 systems are typically the machines of national computing centres such as

PRACE continues to grow and now includes Hungary as its 21st member country. In addition to the research infrastructure/HPC access aspect of PRACE, the other elements also continue apace. To date, the PRACE project has completed its so-called

preparatory phase and is now midway through the so-called 1st implementation phase, with the overlapping 2nd implementation phase due to begin this September.

ICHEC is actively involved in both phases and contributes, along with other European partners, on many fronts, working hard to establish PRACE as one of the leading HPC infrastructures worldwide.

With the prediction that, in the near future, approximately 80% of the total HPC cycles available in Europe will be accessible through PRACE, it is clear that Irish researchers with sizeable compute requirements will have to consider these programmes to meet their needs for higher performance computational resources. As the selection process is Europe wide and highly competitive, it is very advisable to pool the combined expertise of the research groups concerned with ICHEC’s computational scientists to maximise the success rate. To date, this collaborative model has helped to enable 19 research projects with researchers from seven Irish higher education institutions to access 11 major supercomputing installations in Europe and the US. For further information, contact Dr Michael Browne at ICHEC, Email: michael.browne@ichec.ie.

Contents Editorial

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New and notable Irish success as PRACE project goes from strength to strength

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News ICHEC at the ISC 2011

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Special feature HPC comes to the desktop

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Research update Are we only a hop, skip and jump away from controlled molecular motion?

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Education and training 7 ICHEC Summer Scholarships 2011 Events calendar

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New course – Introduction to CUDA Courses on demand Technology transfer Cloud solutions

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News

ICHEC@ISC’11: showcasing Irish excellence in HPC and computational science For the past 27 years, the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) has gathered HPC experts and enthusiasts, technology providers and analysts in what has become the largest conference of its kind in Europe.

JC DESPLAT and IVAN GIROTTO report on ICHEC’s presence at this year’s event.

From left: Guillaume Barat, 1st EMEA Sales Manager at CAPS entreprise; Ying MAO, Sales Engineer at CAPS entreprise; Eoin Brazil, ICHEC; and, Dazhi Kou, HPC Application Technology Department, Shanghai Supercomputer Center, China.

ISC combines exhibitors’ areas, tutorials, keynote presentations, discussion panels, and many meetings. This year’s conference, held from June 19 to 23 in Hamburg, broke all records, with over 2,194 registered attendees (a 10% increase on the previous year) and 153 exhibitors. For the second year running, ICHEC hosted an exhibition space showcasing the best of Irish computational science and high-performance computing (HPC).

The ICHEC booth was staffed by a team of four, who collectively possessed in-depth knowledge of: the Irish national HPC service and its research output; research community support through partnerships and education programmes; and, commercial case studies in GPU computing, data mining and cloud computing. This space permitted ICHEC staff to exploit the strong technical focus of the conference to highlight our expertise and engage with technology partners and prospective partners to initiate new collaborations and rekindle existing ones. The team organised back-to-back meetings at our exhibition space, mostly enhancing our strong partnership with NVIDIA, but also hosting technology briefings with other vendors and exploring a number of exciting opportunities for collaborations, increasing the visibility and reputation of Irish research in the global HPC community in the process. The increasing importance of PRACE helped us to promote the work of Irish researchers, particularly at a European level. We estimate that over 500 delegates visited our booth over the duration of the conference.

The success of this year’s ICHEC presence at ISC 2011 has assured our presence there again in 2012.

From left: Eoin McHugh, ICHEC; Eoin Brazil, ICHEC; and, Dr Eng Lim Goh, SGI Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer.

“ISC'11 was a great opportunity to deepen research links between STFC and ICHEC. The discussions focused on research goals in material science and climate modelling. These key areas provide a common ground for collaborations within the 1IP and forthcoming 2IP PRACE FP7 projects. Discussions on the successful GPU port of DL_POLY_4 allowed us to finalise the development roadmap for the next year. The joint and continuing commitment to this leading molecular dynamics package provides tangible evidence highlighting the strength of the strategic relationship between STFC and ICHEC.” Dr Mike Ashworth, Associate Director at STFC’s Computational Science and Engineering Department The ICHEC exhibition space was staffed by Eoin Brazil, Gilles Civario, Ivan Girotto and Eoin McHugh. Full credit goes to Ivan for co-ordinating ICHEC’s participation in ISC, in what proved to be our most successful to date.

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Special feature

Filippo Spiga

Gilles Civario

Ivan Girotto

Nicola McDonnell

Peter Nash

Renato Miceli

Simon Wong

Enda O’Brien

Eoin Brazil

GPU computing @ ICHEC.

HPC comes to the desktop GPGPU computing is changing the way researchers and businesses operate, and ICHEC is at the cutting edge of these major developments, say IVAN GIROTTO, ROB FARBER and GILLES CIVARIO. Concept

Game changer

In the past two years, ICHEC’s work has brought it to a leadership position in graphics processing unit (GPU) -based high-performance computing (HPC), both in Ireland and at the European level, within the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) infrastructure. In addition to securing funding to roll out a general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) national platform to supplement our existing production platform, ICHEC has established itself as a teaching and research leader in this rapidly evolving technology arena. After being awarded the status of CUDA Research Centre by NVIDIA a year ago (one of only seven in the world at that time; see ICHEC News #9), ICHEC has since been designated an enabling partner1 by NVIDIA for its continued contributions to this area, and we expect positive news in the near future with regard to designation as a CUDA teaching centre.

By bringing the supercomputer to the desktop, it is now widely recognised that GPU computing is a genuine ‘game changer’. In December 1996, the United States ASCI Red supercomputer became the fastest supercomputer in the world when it demonstrated that it could perform a trillion double precision floatingpoint operations per second. Today, a ¤2,000 NVIDIA Tesla card can perform over half a trillion operations. More recently, a BlueGene/P such as the recently decommissioned Schrödinger, which provided the National Irish Capability Computing Service, had an overall peak performance of 13.9TFlops; this performance level can now be matched by 21 Tesla M2090 cards.

Raw performance is of little value to researchers unless it translates into commensurate speed-ups for their most important applications. However, the uptake of GPU computing has been surprisingly fast within the developer community, and many popular applications in science and engineering now include some level of acceleration through GPUs. Some examples include NAMD, Amber, DL_POLY, GROMACS and Quantum ESPRESSO for molecular dynamics applications, and most common algorithms in bioinformatics (BLASTP, ClustalW, Smith-Waterman, HMMER). Mainstream environments (such as Matlab or Mathematica) and libraries (such as FFT and MAGMA) have been partly accelerated, facilitating the ‘GPU enablement’ of legacy codes. A list of the 100 fastest accelerated applications shows that on average such applications deliver speeds greater than 1000 over a conventional processor when using a GPU. These applications provide a snapshot of how GPU technology can and already does benefit a very wide range of commercial and scientific applications.

Beyond raw performance, the advent of GPU computing represents a genuine step-change that has the potential to transform the way we do science. For instance, in drug design, users of the AMBER package, one of the most widely

“ICHEC has shown a consistent commitment to exploring the world of heterogeneous computing as testified by their results in the porting efforts with Quantum ESPRESSO and the training activities for the local ecosystem.”

Edmondo Orlotti – NVIDIA HPC Business Development Manager – Education & Research – Southern Europe

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Special feature

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Rob Farber, published author and GPU computing expert. His latest book wil be available for purchase in the first week of November.

FIGURE 1: Optimisation of Monte Carlo simulations by ICHEC (performance improvements are based on comparison with original Java code).

used applications for simulating the behaviours of biomolecules, have reduced months-long calculations to only days on the desktop. This has considerably shortened the time-to-solution and the overall workflow of theory, computer experiment, and subsequent analysis in favour of ‘the thinking’. Remarkably, the disruptive nature of GPU technology can also be observed at both ends of the spectrum, from the workstation to top five supercomputers. For instance, scientists at the San Diego Supercomputing Centre recently broke the world record for scientific computations using AMBER 11 on four Tesla M2090 GPUs coupled with four CPUs, delivering a record performance of 69 nanosecs of simulation per day (compared to a record of only 46 nanosecs per day for a CPUonly supercomputer). At the other extreme, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Process Engineering have run a molecular simulation code at 1.87PFlops, the highest floating point performance ever achieved by a real-world application code.

supercomputers in the world as part of the LINPACK TOP500 benchmark suite.

The phiGEMM project was developed in ICHEC by Philip Yang during a summer scholarship and later optimised by ICHEC staff, up to the recently delivered multiGPU version.

ICHEC leading the way As GPU technology becomes cheaper, faster and more accessible, ICHEC is well positioned to accelerate the transfer of these benefits to Irish organisations and to PRACE, so new applications that efficiently run on different platforms can be developed, from super cellphones to supercomputing desktops and, finally, the cloud.

The fast growing adoption of GPU computing has given organisations such as ICHEC the ability to perform computational research that was previously the sole province of organisations that received tens of millions of Euro of investment.

Under the auspices of the EU FP7 PRACE project, ICHEC computational scientists Ivan Girotto and Filippo Spiga have accelerated the Quantum ESPRESSO quantum chemistry package by a factor of eight using a single GPU. Quantum ESPRESSO is an open source suite of codes currently used for production on ICHEC’s HPC infrastructure by Irish researchers (e.g., in the Tyndall National Institute). Its applicability ranges from simple electronic structure calculations, to the most sophisticated theoretical spectroscopy such as nuclear magnetic resonance and scanning tunnelling microscopy. To achieve greater speedups for this project, the GPU Team created a matrix-matrix multiplication library for multiGPUs hybrid systems. This particular operation performed by the ICHEC phiGEMM library is one of the core methods used to test the fastest

Education and technology transfer Two members of the GPU Developers Team were recently recognised as certified CUDA programmers to teach this technology. ICHEC now provides a three-day beginner to intermediate certified course on programming and using GPGPUs. Participating organisations benefit from this knowledge transfer as they can translate the benefits of the GPU revolution into their particular area of commercial expertise, so they can hire and train their own staff. NVIDIA, the dominant provider of GPU technology, has recently recognised ICHEC as a teaching leader and discussions are ongoing to recognise ICHEC as an NVIDIA teaching centre.

Figure 1 illustrates the success of one collaboration with the computational finance industry. The work carried out by ICHEC computational scientist Gilles Civario brought a three-hour long calculation to one minute. Applications that are well matched to GPU technologies, such as Monte Carlo simulations, prove that it is now possible for approximately ¤20,000 to get around five trillions of floating point operations per second. This brings massive computing to the desktop. This level of performance would place in 14th or 15th position of the Top500 supercomputer rankings.

Unquestionably, computer architectures have undergone a recent and very significant paradigm shift that delivers multi- and many-core systems with tens to hundreds of concurrent hardware processing elements on workstations up to many thousands per data servers or supercomputer node. This powerful computing capacity represents an extraordinary opportunity to speed up both current and further software applications. ICHEC has demonstrated its effectiveness in enabling scientists and business partners to close the gap between legacy software and massively parallel architecture in order to achieve high performance.

Reference 1. http://www.nvidia.co.uk/page/cuda_consultants.html.

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Research update

Are we only a hop, skip and jump away from controlled molecular motion?

Dr Damien Thompson, Tyndall Institute We may very well be, according to a study in this month’s Nature Chemistry. Controlling how molecules move on surfaces could be the key to developing more potent drugs that block the attachment of viruses to cells, and will also speed development of new materials for electronics and energy applications.

The study is the culmination of an EU-funded collaboration between Tyndall/UCC researcher Dr Damien Thompson and colleagues at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. Dr Thompson performed computer simulations that enabled a greater understanding of how two-legged molecules move along patterned surfaces, in a kind of molecular hopscotch.

Widespread industrial uptake of nanotechnology requires cheap, easy and robust solutions that allow manipulation of matter at the smallest scales, and so a key enabling feature will be the ability to move material around molecule by molecule. One of the major difficulties is the very different physics that operates at the scale of atoms and molecules; water, for example, feels more like treacle to a molecule, and molecules tend to huddle and stick together due to microscopic forces between their atoms. Dr Thompson explains: “The experiments performed by the group at Twente were very elegant. They involved making two-legged molecules and using a fluorescence microscope to watch how they move along a wet surface. The molecules are hydrophobic, meaning they don’t like water, and the surface was pockmarked with hydrophobic cavities, so a weak glueing

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The mechanism of molecular motion changes as the environment changes: in this case, a ‘hopping’ pathway is modelled as the dendrimer molecule (blue) moves along the cyclodextrin receptor (red) functionalised surface. (c) Nature Chemistry: Perl, A., Gomez-Casado, A., Thompson, D., Dam, H.H., Jonkheijm, P., Reinhoudt, D.N., et al.

Gradient driven motion of multivalent ligand molecules along a surface functionalised with multiple receptors. Nature Chemistry 2011; 3: 317-322 – doi:10.1038/nchem.1005.

interaction, based on a mutual dislike of water, drives the interaction between the molecules and the surface. While the energetics of this type of interaction was worked out over a decade ago

by George Whiteside’s group at Harvard, its usefulness for materials development was limited because little was known until now about the paths that the molecules take”.

Because the molecules have multiple legs, they display a surprisingly rich behaviour at the surface, beyond simply

attaching/detaching, with Dr Thompson’s computer simulations complementing the experiments and showing the different mechanisms by which the molecules move. The motion switches from walking to hopping to flying, as the environment changes. Dr Thompson continues: “Access to high-performance computing facilities enabled us to model the different pathways and aid interpretation of the microscopy results. We ran most of the simulations on our own Science

Foundation Ireland-supported computing clusters at Tyndall, and also did a few larger-scale calculations at the Irish Centre for High End Computing. It’s an exciting time for research, as experiments and simulations are finally on the same page; the experiments can finally drill down far enough to see molecule-scale features, while advances in computing mean that we can routinely model systems composed of hundreds of thousands, and even millions, of atoms”.

Education and training

ICHEC Summer Scholarships 2011 ICHEC is delighted to congratulate and welcome the recipients of our Summer Scholarships in 2011. This programme has been an annual fixture at ICHEC since 2009, where eligible undergraduate students recruited from all over the world are selected to take part in 10-week summer projects that are related to HPC and/or computational science. Our students from previous years have often made very significant contributions towards the development of new tools in HPC performance analysis; others have

helped to advance our research in the GPU computing space, which is the subject of the main feature in this edition of ICHEC News (see page 4).

Having received 81 applications from universities around the globe, the task of selecting suitable students for the projects on offer was challenging to say the least! However, we are pleased to announce our four summer scholarship students, along with the projects they have been assigned to:

Robert Chen

Ruadhai Dervan

María del Mar Bartolomé

Lisa Rogers

University of California, San Diego (UCSD), USA Cloud computing and applications

Trinity College Dublin (TCD), Ireland 3D visualisation techniques to study the output of the Met Éireann forecast model, Harmonie

University of Málaga, Spain Automated job analysis on HPC systems

National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Ireland Web services and workflows for automated protein-protein interaction discovery

Recent and upcoming events July 11-15: July 19-20: August 7-12:

‘Introduction to HPC/OpenMP/MPI’ – courses and mini MPI workshop Dublin City University.

‘Software Design & Carpentry’ – course NUI Galway.

‘DEISA/PRACE Second EU-US Summer School on HPC Challenges in Computational Sciences’ Lake Tahoe, California, USA. August 29 to September 1: ‘PRACE Summer School – Taking the Most Out of Supercomputers’ Espoo, Finland.

Courses New course – Introduction to CUDA As we make major inroads in advancing GPU computing for the benefit of Irish researchers (see page 4), ICHEC has always been acutely aware that the skills required to maximise efficient use of this emerging technology need to be disseminated to the community. Hence we have developed a course entitled ‘Introduction to CUDA’. This course provides an overview of the ‘Compute Unified Device Architecture’, a parallel programming paradigm developed by NVIDIA for GPGPUs. It is a three-day course that presents the CUDA programming model, and how it deals with computation and data storage, memory issues and the underlying hardware.

It is important to recognise that this is an official NVIDIA-approved course and the ICHEC instructors are fully certified as ‘CUDA Certified Programmers’ by NVIDIA. The course is available to Irish academics free of charge, whereas a fee will apply for commercial clients. Full details of the course, including its prerequisites, syllabus and learning outcome, are all available from our website: http://www.ichec.ie/education_training/ training_courses/introduction_to_cuda.

Please note that, unlike some of our other courses, there is a steep learning curve to CUDA for newcomers to HPC. Hence, it is important that attendees on the course meet the prerequisites before coming to the CUDA course (e.g., some knowledge of C and parallel programming). Some students will benefit from attending our core HPC courses in HPC/OpenMP/MPI in advance of registering for the CUDA course.

Courses on demand We would like to re-emphasise that all of our courses are free to academic researchers, and available on an on-demand basis. They are usually delivered on site at the institution where the request originated. To arrange a course, or to discuss any matter related to education/training at ICHEC, please contact our Education & Training Co-ordinator, Email: training@ichec.ie.

Dr Simon Wong Computational Scientist and Training Co-ordinator

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Technology transfer

Cloud solutions ICHEC is helping Irish companies to grow their business by tackling real operational problems.

Leveraging scalability and performance for the design and migration of applications ICHEC’s approach to porting and optimising software for high-performance computing is well established. However, cloud infrastructures present new challenges in terms of scaling, communications and efficient computational processing. ICHEC has significant expertise in using high-performance libraries to ensure optimal application performance. Furthermore, our methodology encompasses compiler optimisations, specific hardware features and I/O analysis to identify and reduce potential bottlenecks.

Dr Eoin Brazil participating in the round table at the CloudArena conference.

ICHEC staff at the CloudArena conference, April 20, NCI, Dublin.

Cloud computing is one key area where ICHEC’s technology transfer activities are ensuring that Irish companies can use the latest cutting-edge techniques to improve their product and service offerings. Cloud computing has received particular attention as a driver of economic recovery in Ireland with the Microsoftsponsored Goodbody Economic Consultants report, ‘Ireland’s Competitiveness & Jobs Opportunity: Cloud Computing’, published in January 2011.1

Exploiting accelerators on cloud platforms An emerging trend in cluster and large-scale high-performance computer systems is the use of graphical processing units (GPUs) to accelerate processing.

This technology can provide significant speedups for computationally intensive tasks and for bandwidth-intensive tasks with good data locality. ICHEC has substantial expertise in this area. It has ported several scientific and commercial applications to GPU platforms. Clusters using these accelerators are now being offered using a cloud-based model by the market leaders in the production of GPU-based systems, NVIDIA. ICHEC, as an CUDA Research Centre and with its certified training courses on NVIDIA’s CUDA GPU technology, enables companies to leverage both cloud computing and GPU acceleration without needing to purchase an expensive hardware infrastructure.

Cloud computing is a key component of ICHEC’s technology transfer programme and in future newsletters we will present a deeper view of how ICHEC is tackling real business problems using this technology.

Addressing competitive issues using the cloud ICHEC staff engage with industrial partners in four areas in order to improve their competitiveness: n effective multi-core and parallel programming; n acceleration of computations; n on-demand hardware infrastructures; and, n how to calculate the total cost of ownership for cloud solutions.

The cloud computing model The simplest view of the cloud is ‘everything-as-a-service’ (EAAS), where software, platform and infrastructure are dynamically provisioned using a range of deployment and service models. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology defines cloud computing as “a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction”. At ICHEC we are focused on models where computing power is provided through the use of externally provided computational resources rather than via in-house systems. This has a major advantage as the associated cost of computing moves from capital expenditure to operating expenditure through the dynamic usage of externally provided computational resources. The resultant lower costs and dynamic flexibility provide a strong business case for cloud computing, but this can be dependent upon the types and variability of computational workloads.

Reference 1.

http://www.idaireland.com/news-media/publications/librarypublications/external-publications/Cloud%20Computing.pdf.

Dr Eoin Brazil ICHEC Senior Software Developer and Technology Transfer Consultant

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OIDEACHAIS AGUS EOLAÍOCHTA

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DEPARTMENT OF

EDUCATION AND SCIENCE