IBM, JSC, and NVIDIA Inaugurate the POWER Acceleration and Design Center

The POWER Acceleration and Design Center (PADC) is a new joint undertaking between JSC as well as IBM and NVIDIA. The centre will work together with scientists to enable their applications for future supercomputing architectures on the path towards exascale computing. So far, JSC has offered scientists the opportunity to exploit the performance of several generations of Blue Gene to address challenges that required scalable compute resources to solve complex numerical problems. To reach the next performance levels, significant architectural changes are ahead of us. The PADC has linked itself to OpenPOWER, a new vendor-driven collaboration that includes vendors working on promising technologies and architectures, which may be used for future supercomputers at JSC.

The two-day workshop marking the opening of the centre attracted more than 50 attendees. Almost 20 speakers presented their technologies, applications, and early results using OpenPOWER technologies. IBM's vice-presidents Dave Turek and Alessandro Curioni outlined the ongoing transformations towards future HPC architectures and new HPC use cases involving data-intensive applications. NVIDIA's vice-presidents Scott Baker and Marc Hamilton talked about the role of GPUs as enabling technology and their application in deep learning. Application developers from different research areas, ranging from plasma and condensed matter physics to climate and brain research, gave an impression of current and future challenges. The presentations on programming models and performance analysis tools showed that they are already at an advanced stage and are being refined for applications on future architectures, such as those based on OpenPOWER technologies. For more information, see http://www.fz-juelich.de/ias/jsc/padc.
(Contact: Prof. Dirk Pleiter)

JSC News, 30 October 2015

Last Modified: 14.08.2022