New Entries to the High-Q Club
In June, JSC established the High-Q Club, a showcase for codes able to utilize the entire 28-rack BlueGene/Q machine at JSC. The aim of this club is to encourage developers to invest in tuning and scaling their codes. We also want to promote the idea of exascale computing with its many-core machines and lead the way to millions of threads that will become state of the art. The club has recently attracted increasing attention as shown by five new entries, doubling the number of members to a total of ten.
The new members of the High-Q Club are: JuSPIC, the Jülich scalable Particle-in-Cell code developed at JSC; MP2C, the Massively Parallel Multi-Particle Collision Dynamics code, also from JSC; muPhi, a code for simulating the flow and transport in porous media from the University of Heidelberg; NEST, the Neural Network Simulation Tool by the NEST Initiative; and PMG-PFASST, a space-time parallel multilevel solver where JSC and the Institute of Computational Science of the Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano have combined the PMG and PFASST codes, developed at the University of Wuppertal and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, respectively.
With respect to the current members of the High-Q Club, the majority use hybrid programming models to achieve good scaling to the full JUQUEEN and can easily run with more than a million parallel threads. Some of the codes also make use of SIONlib, a scalable library for the parallel I/O to task-local data with a resulting I/O performance well above 50 GB/s when all I/O nodes are used.
To qualify for High-Q Club status, application developers should submit evidence of scalability across all available cores on JUQUEEN, preferably including multi-threading capability. A workshop will be offered in February to give more JUQUEEN users the chance to optimize their codes (see below). More information on the High-Q Club is available at http://www.fz-juelich.de/ias/jsc/high-q-club.
(Contact: Dr. Dirk Brömmel, d.broemmel@fz-juelich.de)
from JSC News No. 218, 13 December 2013