ParMA project successfully completed
The European research project ParMA (Parallel Programming for Multicore Architectures) was concluded at the end of May with a very successful review meeting at Aranjuez, Spain. Seventeen academic and industrial partners from France, Germany, Spain, and the UK, funded by national ministries in the context of the European ITEA2 programme, worked for three years on developments and enhancements of programming and optimization tools for large-scale industrial applications with a special focus on supporting modern multicore architectures. Parallel debugging, verification, and performance analysis tools were enhanced to be able to handle hybrid programming paradigms (e.g., MPI with OpenMP) and their ease-of-use and robustness was greatly improved.
JSC main contributions centred around its very portable and scalable performance analysis toolset Scalasca. Besides improving the various tools, the project also worked on integrating all the tools into a common "UNiform Integrated Tool Environment" (UNITE) to enable a more efficient analysis and tuning process for application programmers. All tools integrated in UNITE can be downloaded, configured,built, and installed as a single package from http://apps.fz-juelich.de/unite/. UNITE is already in use on the production machines of JSC, RWTH Aachen, ZIH, and HLRN and it is planned to employ it on other systems of the GAUSS alliance in the near future.
During the project, the industrial partners very successfullyused the tools to optimize their applications which resulted in a (sometimes dramatic) reduction of computation time and a much better scalability. The optimized algorithms are now already being used in the latest products available to customers of the participating companies.
This very successful early exploitation of project results, together with the extensive dissemination at a multitude of workshops, conferences, tutorials and exhibitions, was regarded very favourably by the reviewers. Rudolf Haggenmüller, Chairman of ITEA2, explained that ParMA is the first and only ITEA project ever to receive a "++" (best score) in exploitation and called it "a milestone in the history of ITEA". More information can be found on the project website http://www.parma-itea2.org/.
(Contact: Dr. Bernd Mohr, ext. 3218)
from JSC News No. 186, 24 June 2010