The introduction of heterogeneous computing via GPUs from the Sierra architecture represented a significant shift in direction for computational science at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), and therefore required significant preparation. The Sierra Center of Excellence (COE) brought employees with specific expertise from IBM and NVIDIA together with LLNL in a concentrated effort to prepare applications, system software, and tools for the Sierra supercomputer. To prepare for El Capitan, a new COE is currently operating in collaboration with HPE and AMD. This webinar will describe the operation of these COEs and document lessons learned, with the hope that others will be able to learn from both our success and intermediate setbacks. We describe what we have found to be best practices for managing the vendor collaborations, migrating algorithms and source code, working with the system software stack and tools, and optimizing application performance.

Presenter

• David Richards (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)

Presenter Bio

David Richards is a computational physicist in the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). He received a B.S. in Physics from Harvey Mudd College and a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. David joined LLNL in 2006 and has over 20 years of experience in scientific computing as both a user and application developer in academic, industrial, and national lab settings. David currently leads the El Capitan Center of Excellence and the Advanced Architecture and Portability Specialists (AAPS) team at LLNL. He is also the PI for the ECP Proxy App Project. David has served as PI of successful LDRD, CRADA, and LLNL Institutional Center of Excellence projects.