White Paper: The EXCELLERAT Best Practice Guide
The EXCELLERAT Best Practise Guide is an outcome of EXCELLERAT, the European Centre of Excellence for Engineering Applications. The project aimed at establishing the foundation of a central European knowledge and competence hub for all stakeholders in the usage and exploitation of high-performance computing (HPC) and high-performance data analytics (HPDA) in engineering. Having worked together throughout the 42 months of the initial funding phase, we are presenting this Best Practice Guide of ways and approaches to execute engineering applications on state of the art HPC-systems in preparation for the exascale era.
White Paper: FPGAs for accelerating HPC engineering workloads – the why and the how
Running high performance workloads on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) has been ex-plored but is yet to demonstrate widespread success. Software developers have traditionally felt a significant disconnect from the knowledge required to effectively exploit FPGAs, which included the esoteric programming technologies, long build times, and lack of familiar software tooling. Fur-thermore, for the few developers that invested time and effort into FPGAs, from a performance perspective the hardware historically struggled to compete against latest generation CPUs and GPUs when it came to Floating Point Operations per Second (FLOPS).
White Paper: Empowering Large-Scale Turbulent Flow Simulations With Uncertainty Quantification Techniques
An effective, robust simulation must account for potential sources of uncertainty. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD), in particular, has to deal with many uncertainties from various sources. The real world, after all, forces many kinds of uncertainties upon engineering components – everything from changes in numerical and computational parameters to uncertainty in initial and boundary conditions and geometry. No matter how expensive a flow simulation is, the uncertainties have to be assessed. In CFD, uncertainty is inevitable. But it presents us with a question: how do you know which uncertainties to expect and quantify without using an enormous amount of computing power?
EXCELLERAT Conference: Impressions, Takeaways, and How to Watch
Nearing the end of its 3.5 year run, EXCELLERAT hosted a two-day online conference last week to present the industrial and broader European perspective on the project’s first run. Called “EXCELLERAT: Enabling Exascale potentials for engineering applications,” it showcased the impact, innovations, and tools that resulted from the work of the European Centre of Excellence for Engineering Applications.
White Paper: Enabling High-Performance Collaboration – A Data exchange platform for high-performance computing
As part of the EXCELLERAT project, SSC is developing a secure data exchange and transfer platform to facilitate the use of High-Performance Computing (HPC) in industry and to make data transfer more efficient.
Success Story: In situ VR visualisation of Nek5000 simulations with Vistle
Nek5000 cases that use Exascale level performance compute data on very large grids. Writing this data to disk frequently becomes a major run time bottleneck, while handling all the data on disk comes with its own challenges. With increasing data sizes and complexity analysing the usually 3D data with conventional 2D methods becomes even harder. Running large simulations is also costly, therefore errors should better be identified rather sooner than later.
Data management workflow for HPC – SSC Data Management Workflow Portal
Organisations and smaller industry partners today face various problems in dealing with high performance computing (HPC) computations, HPC in general, or even access to HPC resources. Hence, the EXCELLERAT Data Management Service develops best practices and provides support for managing the large amounts of data generated and used in technical HPC applications.
Success Story: Running AVBP Industrial code on Arm architectures
With the diversification of the micro-processor catalogue for High-Performance systems, porting and evaluating software performance on Arm-based architectures has become an imperative step for code developers. For core performance to multi-node scalability, real application benchmarks remain elusive. Given the myriad of Arm flavours available, a comprehensive real case benchmark would give developers and users a first look for the future usage of the European Processor Initiative (EPI) and Arm-based leadership class systems.
In collaboration with Arm Ltd., CERFACS has performed a first benchmark using the AVBP code, a state-of-the-art Navier Stokes solver on unstructured grids for reactive compressible flows written in Fortran and based on MPI for parallelism.
Success Story: Transparent Integration of Emerging HPC Technologies into the Computational Fluid Dynamics Software CODA
Success Story: Transparent Integration of Emerging HPC Technologies into the Computational Fluid Dynamics Software CODA Success story # Highlights: Keywords: Computational Fluid Dynamics Aerospace High Performance Computing GPU linear equation systems aircraft aerodynamics Industry sector: Aerospace Key codes used: CODA, Spliss Title: Simulation of external aircraft aerodynamics. Credit and copyright: DLR (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) Organisations […]
On the technical debt of high-performance scientific software
High-performance scientific software must overcome two specific challenges: scientific validation, and performance on bleeding-edge and short-lived hardware. Success in each requires time, expertise, and cumulative experience over many failed attempts. Thus, engineering software developers are mostly experts in physical modelling or in high-performance computing (HPC) and rarely experts in the management of technical debt.