A Tale of Two Apps: Preparing XGC and HACC to run on Aurora

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ALCF Developer Session May Graphic

Join us on May 24 for a webinar that will cover the Aurora porting strategies for two applications: the XGC gyrokinetic plasma physics code and the HACC cosmology code. Argonne's Aaron Scheinberg & Esteban Rangel will discuss lessons learned and tools that were crucial in porting these applications to Argonne’s exascale machine.

  • For the XGC portion of the talk, Scheinberg will discuss the lessons learned from running on diverse new machines (Polaris, Sunspot, and recently Frontier), the unique challenges of Aurora, and how these inform our plans as Aurora becomes available.
  • For the HACC portion, Rangel will cover the tools and development strategies used to port HACC from CUDA to SYCL, the challenges of supporting multiple codebases (CUDA/HIP/SYCL) in HACC, and the optimizations made to improve performance for the Intel Xe GPUs.


Aaron Scheinberg is a computational scientist and consultant focusing on exascale computing, scientific application performance, particle-based methods, magnetic fusion simulations, and GPU programming.

Esteban Rangel joined the Computational Science (CPS) division at Argonne National Laboratory as a staff scientist in July 2021. He became a postdoc at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) after receiving his PhD in Computer Science from Northwestern University in 2018. He began contributing to the HACC codebase as a graduate student, where much of the work towards his PhD thesis was designing and implementing scalable analysis software for N-body cosmological simulations.

Presenter
Aaron Scheinberg
Esteban Rangel
Systems