TUM Informatics Colloquium: Computing at a million laptops per second

21 May 2012, 3.30 pm, Seminar Room 1, LRZ, Boltzmannstrasse 1, Garching

Exascale computing brings new challenges to the high performance playing 

field but also creates new research opportunities. In this talk, Dr Baden

describes current work in his research group aimed at solving two

outstanding challenges: reducing the opportunity cost of communication

costs and curbing the overheads of abstraction in application libraries.

While both challenges are relevant to current technology,  the quest for

Exascale performance increases the urgency of solving them.

To reduce communication costs Dr Baden´s reserach group overlaps

communication with computation by constructing a custom translator that

converts MPI source into a dataflow form that tolerates latency automatically.

Running on up to 96K processors of a Cray XE-6, their translator meets or

exceeds hand coded overlap variants of two important HPC application motifs:

a 3D stencil method and dense matrix multiplication.

To reduce library abstraction overheads, Dr Baden´s group built a custom

translator for an array class library they developed for turbulent flow data

discovery. The translator flattens library abstractions, reducing overheads by over

an order of magnitude in some cases.

Scott B. Baden is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the

University of California, San Diego, where he has been a member of the

faculty since 1990. He received the Ph.D. in Computer Science from the

University of California, Berkeley in 1987. Dr. Baden's research is in

high performance and parallel computation and focuses on

programming abstractions, domain-specific translation, performance

programming, adaptive and data centric applications and algorithm

design.