EU Exascale Project TEXT Launched

The EU FP7-funded project "Towards EXascale applicaTions" (TEXT) started on 1 June 2010. For two years, nine partners from France, Germany, Greece, Spain, Switzerland and the UK aim to demonstrate the benefits of the hybrid MPI/SMPSs programming model on a rich set of real-world applications. SMPSs, developed by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, is a new task-based programming model which can be seen as an extension to the latest OpenMP 3.0 standard. By taking data dependencies into account, the SMPSs runtime can schedule the tasks more efficiently, which results in a more scalable execution of the application program. This also reduces the burden on the application programmer making this new programming model easier to use.

JSC is involved in two aspects of the project: it will investigate how SMPSs allow the scalability of the plasma physics applications PEPC and PSC to be increased, and it will enhance its well-known performance analysis toolset Scalasca to support measurement and analysis of hybrid MPI/SMPSs. The project website can be found at: http://www.project-text.eu/.

(Contact: Dr. Bernd Mohr, ext. 3218)

from JSC News No. 188, September 2010