On April 8th 2020, HAICGU cluster was officially opened in a ceremony at the Goethe University of Frankfurt. The cluster has been operational for more than a month and has been used by Open Edge and HPC Initiative (OEHI) members. The opening ceremony was organized as an onsite event and COVID regulations limited the participants to only 25. Prof. Thomas Lippert opened the event inviting guests and stressing the importance of ARM technology for computing and AI. Xiao Ran, the vice president at Standardization & Industry Development Dept at Huawei followed up by introducing Huawei computing solutions and emphasizing Huawei commitment to development of European computing and AI ecosystem through collaboration with Goethe University of Frankfurt (GUF) and OEHI. He further thanked the opportunity to donate HAICGU cluster to GUF to further such activities. The day was made interesting with keynote speeches, technical talks, cluster visit and a panel discussion. Here are some highlights from the day.
Assessing the state of affairs of Arm for HPC, Prof. Dirk Pleiter (KTH)highlighting that SVE is extremely important and how power efficiency depends on how much you have designed processor for vectorized FP operations. There is still a need to fill the gaps in ARM system software support and support for ISV applications. Prof. Volker Lindenstruth (GUF) provided an overview of the HPC resources and research activities at the Goethe University of Frankfurt and how ARM based HAICGU cluster will complement their work across different domains like Multiscale modeling in Life sciences, Seismology, AI and others. Gaofan (Jeff), is responsible for computing ecosystem development in Europe at Huawei gave an overview of the Huawei’s computing solution and how collaborative software-hardware innovation through Kunpeng (ARM), Ascend (AI), OpenHarmony, OpenEuler drives development of the digital economy in Europe.
Dominic Ulmer (ParTec) explained the changing landscape of HPC in Europe and ParTec provides excellence across the entire compute cluster environment, focusing on optimal software experiences for its users while keeping operation and support costs under control. Prof. Julian Kunkel (GWDG) narrated an A Tale of Requirements, Challenges and Nightmares Walking on a road of opportunity in HPC Storage. With HPC users not fully aware of their IO requirements and frequent misuse of file systems, there is a need for parallel file systems to be designed for usability, efficiency, performance portability and programmability. David Alvarez (BSC) gave an introduction of Programming with the Task-Aware Ascend Computing Language (TACL) on Huawei Atlas servers and how computation and communication can be overlapped by using OmpSs2 task for codes (Cholesky, HPL-AI). This resulted in more than 50% improvement in Half-precision FP efficiency for HPC-AI benchmark. Dr. Sarah Neuwirth (GUF) gave an overview of Modular Supercomputing Research at the Leading Edge at GUF how it can support Quantum and Neuromorphic computing in the future. She also highlighted other projects on automated benchmarks, PGAS benchmarks, simulation of I/O + network traces.
The panel discussion featured Prof. Dirk Pleiter, Prof. Julian Kunkel, David Alvarez and Dr. Sarah Neuwirth and they discussed what are the main challenges for Europe in achieving Exascale Computing and How Arm and RICS-V ecosystem can grow and catch up with x86. The panel stressed the need for applications that can benefit Exascale and the need for better communication on how HPC adds value to the society. While Arm ecosystem has taken 10 years to develop a strong ecosystem, RISC-V is still in its early stages but shows promise for research. The interesting panel debate had to be cut short due to time constraint. It was a very interesting day and the organisers would like to thank the host – Goethe University of Frankfurt, all speakers and participants for their contribution.
