-------------------------------------------------------------------- COLLOQUIUM OF THE COMPUTATIONAL MATERIALS SCIENCE CENTER AND THE SCHOOL OF PHYSICS, ASTRONOMY, & COMPUTATIONAL SCIENCES (CSI 898-Sec 001) -------------------------------------------------------------------- Embracing Heterogeneity in High-Performance Computing Tarek El-Ghazawi Electrical and Computer ENgineering Department The George Washington University, Washington DC In recent years, the top supercomputers in the world were built around the use of heterogeneous architectures where conventional microprocessors are accelerated using specialized processors such as gaming processors, general purpose graphics processors (GPGPUs) and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Such heterogeneous high-performance computing (HPC) systems have achieved unprecedented successes. In June of 2008, the Road Runner, a system at Los Alamos National Labs, using the Cell processor which was originally built by IBM/Sony/Toshiba for the Sony PlayStation 3, was able to reach the PetaFLOPs performance range for the first time. The Road Runner system used 6,912 dual-core AMD Opteron® chips and 12,960 Cell chips. In November of 2010, China was able to build, also for the first time in history, a supercomputer, Tianhe-1A, that ranks as the top supercomputer in the world. Tianhe-1A major speed boost came from 7000 NVIDIA graphical processing units (GPUs). There are, therefore, obvious performance advantages for such systems. However, there are enormous productivity challenges and developing applications for such systems requires heroic programming efforts, often using proprietary tools. Portability is yet another major problem for such systems and such complex codes may not readily run on other systems. In this talk, we systematically examine the productivity challenges for such heterogeneous parallel computers. Research directions and potential solutions are identified along with early promising efforts aiming towards making heterogeneity a first-class citizen in the HPC realm. These issues and potential solutions are particularly examined in the lights of the needs of domain scientists who wish to focus on their science and develop efficient applications without relying on specialized architectural knowledge. Bio- Tarek El-Ghazawi is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The George Washington University, where he leads the university-wide Strategic Program in High-Performance Computing. He is the founding director of The GW Institute for Massively Parallel Applications and Computing Technologies (IMPACT) and a founding Co-Director of the NSF Industry/University Center for High-Performance Reconfigurable Computing (CHREC). El-Ghazawi’s research interests include high-performance computing, computer architectures, reconfigurable computing and parallel programming. He is one of the principal co-authors of the UPC parallel programming language and the first author of the UPC book from John Wiley and Sons. He has received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from New Mexico State University in 1988. El-Ghazawi has published about 200 refereed research publications in this area. Dr. El-Ghazawi has served in many editorial roles and is currently an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Computers. He has chaired and co-chaired many international conferences and symposia. Most recently he served as a General Chair for the 2010 IEEE Conference for Scalable Computing and Communications, the 2011 International Symposium on Applied Reconfigurable Computing, and the 2011 International Conference on New Technology, Mobility and Security to name a few. His research has been frequently supported by Federal Agencies and industry including the NSF, DARPA, and NASA. El-Ghazawi was awarded an IBM Faculty Partnership Award and is serving as a Faculty Fellow for the IBM Center for Advanced Studies. He has also served as a visiting Scientist at NASA GSFC and NASA ARC and is on the Science Advisory Panel for the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center. Professor El-Ghazawi was elected a Fellow of the IEEE, a member of the IFIP WG10.3, and a member of the Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society. He has also served as a Senior U.S. Fulbright Scholar. Monday, March 19, 2012 4:30 pm Room 301, Research I, Fairfax Campus Refreshments will be served at 4:15 PM. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Find the schedule at http://www.cmasc.gmu.edu/seminar/schedule.html