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June 26, 2013

Programming model for supercomputers of the future

Filed under: HPC,Supercomputing — Patrick Durusau @ 8:51 am

Programming model for supercomputers of the future

From the post:

The demand for even faster, more effective, and also energy-saving computer clusters is growing in every sector. The new asynchronous programming model GPI might become a key building block towards realizing the next generation of supercomputers.

The demand for even faster, more effective, and also energy-saving computer clusters is growing in every sector. The new asynchronous programming model GPI from Fraunhofer ITWM might become a key building block towards realizing the next generation of supercomputers.

High-performance computing is one of the key technologies for numerous applications that we have come to take for granted – everything from Google searches to weather forecasting and climate simulation to bioinformatics requires an ever increasing amount of computing ressources. Big data analysis additionally is driving the demand for even faster, more effective, and also energy-saving computer clusters. The number of processors per system has now reached the millions and looks set to grow even faster in the future. Yet something has remained largely unchanged over the past 20 years and that is the programming model for these supercomputers. The Message Passing Interface (MPI) ensures that the microprocessors in the distributed systems can communicate. For some time now, however, it has been reaching the limits of its capability.

“I was trying to solve a calculation and simulation problem related to seismic data,” says Dr. Carsten Lojewski from the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM. “But existing methods weren’t working. The problems were a lack of scalability, the restriction to bulk-synchronous, two-sided communication, and the lack of fault tolerance. So out of my own curiosity I began to develop a new programming model.” This development work ultimately resulted in the Global Address Space Programming Interface – or GPI – which uses the parallel architecture of high-performance computers with maximum efficiency.

GPI is based on a completely new approach: an asynchronous communication model, which is based on remote completion. With this approach, each processor can directly access all data – regardless of which memory it is on and without affecting other parallel processes. Together with Rui Machado, also from Fraunhofer ITWM, and Dr. Christian Simmendinger from T-Systems Solutions for Research, Dr. Carsten Lojewski is receiving a Joseph von Fraunhofer prize this year.

The post concludes with the observation that “…GPI is a tool for specialists….”

Rather surprising since it hasn’t been that many years ago that Hadoop was a tool for specialists. Or that “data mining” was a tool for specialists.

In the last year both Hadoop and “data mining” have come within reach of nearly average users.

GPI if successful for a broad range of problems, a few years will find it under the hood of any nearby cluster.

Perhaps sooner if you take an interest in it.

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