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High Performance Computing at EPCC Alan D Simpson Technical Director

High Performance Computing at EPCC Alan D Simpson Technical Director Telephone: +44 131 650 5120 Fax: +44 131 650 6555 Email: a.simpson@epcc.ed.ac.uk http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/. Overview. Background HPC Facilities at EPCC HPCx

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High Performance Computing at EPCC Alan D Simpson Technical Director

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  1. High Performance Computing at EPCC Alan D Simpson Technical Director Telephone: +44 131 650 5120 Fax: +44 131 650 6555 Email: a.simpson@epcc.ed.ac.uk http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/ HPC@EPCC

  2. Overview • Background • HPC Facilities at EPCC • HPCx • Current Status • HPCx and the Grid • Training and Research in HPC • Summary HPC@EPCC

  3. EPCC • Founded in 1990 as a focus for the University of Edinburgh activities in HPC • Mission “to accelerate the effective exploitation of novel computing in industry, academia, and commerce” • One of leading HPC Centres in Europe • 65 staff • 40 applications consultants + support staff • Income £2.7M per annum; 30% from Industry • Academic and industrial clients from UK, Europe and beyond HPC@EPCC

  4. Technology Transfer Industry: o Projects o Consultancy o Middleware Academic: o National HPC Facilities o Research o Support Training: o Academia o Industry o MSc Europe: o Visitor Programmes o Technology Transfer o Strategic Planning Technology Transfer HPC@EPCC

  5. Industrial Consultancy • Provide project-based consultancy to industry and commerce • Over 30 clients in 3 years • Large enterprises... • eg, UK Met Office, Sun, C&G, AEA, Cisco • ...to local SMEs • eg, Weidlinger, Quadstone, Jardine • 40% of technical staff • Funded by direct contracts with business, local government and European Commission HPC@EPCC

  6. UK: o AEA Technology o AlphaData Ltd o Applied Research & Technology Ltd o Avro International plc o British Aerospace plc o CN Software Ltd o Cray Research (UK) Ltd o Crown Office o DTI o Digital Equipment Corp o Edinburgh Old Town Renewal Trust o Edinburgh Petroleum Services Ltd o Enterpris Ltd o EPSRC o High Speed Productions Ltd o Integriti Solutions Ltd o Kwik-Fit Holdings plc o LEEL o MCS/Hampco o Peter Tilling Plastics Ltd o Quadstone Ltd o Rolls Royce plc o SCI Ltd o Scottish Enterprise o Scottish Office o SIAS Ltd o Silicon Graphics (UK) Ltd o UK Meteorological Office o Upstream Systems Ltd o 3L Ltd USA: o Cisco Systems o Cray Research Inc o Schlumberger Geoquest o Sun Microsystems Japan: o Fujitsu Research Laboratories o Hitachi Europe: o AGIP S.p.A, Italy o Digital Equipment BV, Ireland o European Commission o Hitachi Dublin Laboratory o Kjaergaard Industri Automatic o Statoil, Norway Industrial Clients HPC@EPCC

  7. European Programmes • Collaborative research • HPC-Europa: EPCC coordinates pan-European visitor programme • DEISA: connecting national centres across Europe • IST (industrial) projects • EUTIST-IMV: co-ordination of 80 machine vision organisations • Gridstart: co-ordination of all EU Grid development projects HPC@EPCC

  8. HPC Facilities at EPCC • 1982 ICL DAPs • 1986 Meiko T800 CS (400 processors) • 1988 AMT DAP608 • 1990 Meiko i860 CS (64 processors) • 1991 TMC CM-200 (16K processors) • 1992 Meiko i860 CS (16 processors) • 1994 Cray T3D (512 processors) • Cray Y-MP • 1995 Meiko CS-2 • 1997 Cray T3E (344 processors) • 1997 Hitachi SR2201 • 2000 Sun UltraSPARC III Cluster • 2002 Sun E15000 (54 processors) • 2002 IBM p690 Cluster (1280 processors) • 2004 QCDOC HPC@EPCC

  9. Funded by £400K JREI grant awarded to EPCC in 1998 freely available to local researchers Service based on Sun SMP clusters familiar software and easy porting recently upgraded to Sunfire E15K large memory and CPU with a single system image EPCC is a Sun Centre of Excellence in HPC and Grid Computing UoE HPC Service HPC@EPCC

  10. QCDOC • QCDOC is a collaborative project to develop a special-purpose computer for QCD • involving EPCC, Physics, Columbia University, IBM,… • QCD: Quantum ChromoDynamics • key part of Standard Model of particle physics • has very extreme computing requirements • Price-performance is critical • may be cheaper to design special purpose machines for particular problems • only pay for what you use • put extra effort into what is important to you HPC@EPCC

  11. QCDOC • Each node is small and consists of a single specially designed chip plus some memory • very large numbers of nodes are possible • Equivalent general purpose machine would be huge and expensive • Difficulty of chip design reduced by including components (eg, CPU) from IBM design library • 10TF machine to be installed at EPCC in 2004 HPC@EPCC

  12. HPCx Overview • UK’s major HPC facility, funded by EPSRC • £53M/6 year contact awarded to UoE HPCX Ltd • wholly-owned subsidiary of University of Edinburgh • work subcontracted to CCLRC (DL), EPCC and IBM • Largest academic supercomputer in Europe • doubling in performance every 2 years HPC@EPCC

  13. HPCx Objectives • Capability computing for world-leading science • Capability computing: jobs which use a significant fraction of the resource, eg, at least 512 CPUs • Maximise benefits to the UK’s computational science and engineering community • IBM technology roadmap: • 12/02: 40x32-way Regatta H frames + Colony Switch • initially #9 on Top 500 list • 07/04: 48x32-way Regatta H+ frames + Federation switch • 11/06: 96x32-way Regatta H+ frames + Federation switch • Science support is key for effective use HPC@EPCC

  14. Partnership • EPCC and CCLRC • are partners in C3ES (Consortium for Capability Computing and e-Science) • providing science support and systems management for HPCx • underpinned by MoU between UoE and CCLRC • combines Europe’s foremost academic HPC, e-Science and technology transfer centres • significant experience of: • operating national HPC services • developing capability applications • the strongest UK partnership ever to support scientific computing HPC@EPCC

  15. Users Outreach Applications Support Helpdesk Training Liaising with users Life sciences New applications Terascaling Capability applications Scalable algorithms Performance optimisation Software Engineering Underpinning technology Grid/e-Science Systems & Networking Flexible and responsive capability service Smooth transitions between phases Technology Virtual Organisation HPC@EPCC

  16. HPCx and the Grid • Key responsibility for Software Engineering team • HPCx is committed to support access via Grid • currently provided through Globus 2 • Globus 3 support when appropriate • HPCx is key part of UK collaboration with Extensible Teragrid Facility project in the US • focus is exploiting unique features of Grid + HPC systems for capability computing • initial experiment planned for SC2003 • RealityGrid computational steering • HPCx is major compute resource HPC@EPCC

  17. HPCx Status • HPCx builds on significant complementary experience at EPCC and DL • Very successful start • averaging >75% utilisation • …with capability usage already up to 35% • Committed to e-Science and the Grid • ETF experiment at SC2003 • HPCx is focussed on capability computing • world-class service for world-class research HPC@EPCC

  18. MSc in HPC • £400K grant from UK research council • runs for 5 years • just started year 3 • One of a very few such courses in the world • Each year an increasing number of students, especially overseas students HPC@EPCC

  19. Training in HPC • Courses include • Fundamental Concepts of HPC • Practical Software Development • Message Passing Programming • Shared Memory Programming • Parallel Decomposition • Applied Computer Science • Object Oriented Programming for HPC • Exploiting the Computational Grid • Applied Numerical Algorithms • Performance Optimisation • Scientific Visualisation • Remote runs at, eg, Cambridge, Daresbury, … HPC@EPCC

  20. HPC Research • Java Grande Forum • EPCC leads the benchmarking activity • including parallel benchmarks and language comparisons • have taught Java tutorials at Supercomputing • OpenMP • EPCC a full member of OpenMP Architecture Review Board • OpenMP microbenchmarks • tests quality of the compiler implementation • becoming a de-facto standard HPC@EPCC

  21. HPC Research • JOMP • an OpenMP-like standard for Java • research implementation available for download • Mixed Mode • combined OpenMP + MPI becoming popular • topic of investigation at EPCC for over 3 years • Single Sided MPI • EPCC produced implementations for Cray, Sun, … • Optimised Libraries • BLAS, FFTs, ScaLAPACK,… HPC@EPCC

  22. Summary • EPCC is multidisciplinary and multi-funded • ... supporting a large spectrum of activities ... • … and a critical mass of expertise • Proven track record in Technology Transfer • business-like approach benefits whole organisation • New initiatives • MSc in HPC • European programmes • Grid middleware • HPCx • EPCC has a unique breadth of expertise HPC@EPCC

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