EuroHack24: High Performance Computing Applications Programming Hackathon

Background

High Performance Computing utilizes more and more parallelism provided by modern supercomputers. One development is General-Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs), which offers exceptionally high memory bandwidth and performance for a wide range of applications together with many parallel programming units. Another development is more parallelism also for multicore processors. Today, these devices can be programmed with the CUDA/C++ programming platform, HIP or with OpenACC Directives for Accelerators, which offer straightforward extensions to C++ and Fortran to address this programming hurdle. Alternative programming paradigms such as OpenCL or Kokkos can also be employed.

This year special emphasis will be towards scientific applications that make use of artifical intelligence / deep learning methods.

Workshop Goal

EuroHack is a unique opportunity for current or prospective users groups of large hybrid CPU-GPU systems to either (1) port their (potentially) scalable application to GPU accelerators, (2) optimize an existing GPU-enabled application, on a state-of-the-art GPU system, or (3) optimize for the multicore. Focus should be in any case the parallelism of the application. The goal is that the development teams leave at the end of the week with applications executing faster, or at least with a clear roadmap of how to get there.

Target Audience and Format

This program is addressed to small teams of 3 to maximum 4 developers interested in porting or optimizing their application on a cluster of CPUs and GPU accelerators in a short but extremely intense time window. This is a great opportunity for graduate students and post-doctoral researchers.

Collectively the team should know the application intimately. There will be intensive mentoring during this 5-day hands-on workshop. Mentors come from universities, supercomputing centers and industry, and they bring their extensive experience in programming GPGPUs, many of them develop the GPU-capable compilers and help define the OpenACC standard.

The event will be limited to 6 teams of 3 to 4 developers with 2 mentors for each team.

Targeted Application

This program is not targeting a specific application. We invite teams to propose an application to be ported to or be optimized on GPU or other massive parallel architectures. We aim at collecting scientific non-commercial codes in need of porting individual modules, i.e., with a well-defined subset of 2-10K lines of code with a validation test. The latter is crucial for incremental development without introducing bugs. Successful selected teams will be joined by two mentors with extensive programming experience.

Application Process

Team coordinators are invited to submit their application  by May 31, 2024.

Applicants will be notified about acceptance or rejection of their application by July 5, 2024.

Groups whose application successfully passes the selection process will need to register for the event to confirm participation within two weeks from notification of acceptance. The notification of acceptance will include information on how to register.

Participation costs

Participation in the workshop is free of charge. The meeting room, lunches and one conference dinner, as well as access to the supercomputers throughout the event are offered by the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS). If participants prefer, they can use their own GPU resource. Mentors and learning materials are provided by CSCS, OpenACC organization and other partner organizations.

Participants are responsible for their travels to the meeting venue, their accommodation, four dinners during the week, and personal expenses. There are 30 rooms blocked for this event at the venue. Rooms range from CHF 159 (single) – 174 (double room for single use) per night per person with breakfast.

The room block will be released on September 1, 2024.

Venue

In order to offer a good atmosphere for a week of intense programming, we have chosen Hotel de la Paix in Lugano, Switzerland, only minutes by foot to the scenic Lake of Lugano. The region is served by Milan Malpensa airport (Italy) and by Zurich airport. The train timetable from either of these airports to Lugano main train station (“Lugano, stazione”) is available here. You should calculate a ride of approximately 3h from Zurich airport, and 2h from Milano Malpensa airport.

Inquiries

Please contact Andreas Jocksch (andreas.jocksch__AT__cscs.ch) for questions related to the EuroHack content, or Tatjana Ruefli (tatjana.ruefli__AT__cscs.ch) for questions related to the workshop logistics.