QUB Researchers unlock the potential of Exascale technology through H2020 funded AllScale project
Researchers at The Institute of Electronics, Communications and Information Technology (ECIT) at Queen's University Belfast (QUB) have recently completed the AllScale project, a collaboration funded by the European Commission under the Future and Emerging Technologies strand of the Horizon 2020 Programme.
AllScale was co-ordinated by The University of Innsbruck and included academic partners KTH in Sweden and Frederick Alexander Universitaet in Germany and industrial partners IBM (Dublin) and NUMECA (Brussels).
AllScale has delivered a new programming interface and compilation toolchain which frees developers from the onerous requirement of current state of the art parallelisation technologies. By embracing advanced templating features in the widely used C++ language, AllScale allows developers to focus on performing calculations on their data rather than refactoring their code to use different parallel processing harnesses. The AllScale toolchain maps these domain specific programs to the underlying parallel hardware available. The name implies that this can be systems at any scale, from desktop to exascale.
We are now entering the exascale era of High Performance Computing (HPC), in which large systems will perform a billion billion calculations per second. In order to unlock the potential of exascale systems to perform deeper scientific investigations, engineering modelling and ultimately product development, scientists and engineers need new programming paradigms and toolsets to exploit the massive parallelism available in exascale systems.
QUB researchers are among the leaders in creating exascale ready technology. At exascale, the attributes of energy efficiency of the computations and resilience against node failures become significant. These are aspects to which scientific programmers have not previously needed to give much consideration. The AllScale runtime system enables these features without intervention from developers.
The AllScale partners have demonstrated their toolchain and runtime system using three distinct applications. FINE/Open (NUMECA) models gas flow in a high bypass turbofan engine, iPIC3D (KTH) computes properties of the solar wind and AMDADOS is an oceanographic modelling code from IBM Dublin.
Dr Charles Gillan, Principal Engineer at ECIT, commented: “We were delighted to be selected to partner on the AllScale project and explore new science on the next generation of supercomputers. During the project we worked with our academic and industry partners to test three pilot schemes; Behaviour of oil spills in oceans; Modelling of solar wind relevant to astronomy and satellite communications technology; Making more efficient airplane jet engines. The toolsets we have developed and tested can be applied to many other physical modelling problems to enable new science for future generations.”
Dr Charles Gillan
Media
For more information contact Helen McCrory - H.McCrory@qub.ac.uk