The IDEAS Productivity project, in partnership with the DOE Computing Facilities of the ALCF, OLCF, and NERSC, and the DOE Exascale Computing Project (ECP), organizes the webinar series on Best Practices for HPC Software Developers.

As part of this series, we offer one-hour webinars on topics in scientific software development and high-performance computing, approximately once a month. The January webinar is titled Wrong Way: Lessons Learned and Possibilities for Using the “Wrong” Programming Approach on Leadership Computing Facility Systems; and will be presented by Philip C. Roth (Oak Ridge National Laboratory). The webinar will take place on Wednesday, January 12, 2022 at 12:00 pm CT.

Abstract:

Large scale computing systems such as those deployed and being deployed at U.S. Department of Energy computing facilities rely greatly on compute accelerators (currently graphics processing units, GPUs) for their performance potential. Each of these systems has a small number of natural approaches for representing the code that runs on these accelerators. For instance, for the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s Frontier system, the natural approaches include the Heterogeneous-Compute Interface for Portability (HIP) and OpenMP with target offload. But it is often interesting, and sometimes even useful, to consider the impact of using a “wrong” programming approach for a given system. In this webinar, the speaker will present a few of these “wrong” programming approaches for current and near-term future systems, including a discussion of the specific software packages that enable the approach, and lessons learned in cases where the approach has been attempted.