ISC is the HPC community’s largest European conference, held each year in the early summer in Germany, the event this year was once again in Hamburg. With approximately 5000 attendees in total, there were a wide range of topics throughout the week and something for everyone.
Numerous ExCALIBUR projects were involved in events at ISC, firstly with several posters displayed throughout the event. Not only did we have an ExCALIBUR wide project poster on display, which generated plenty of interest and discussion, but furthermore there was a poster from ExaBioSim entitled Establishing the Accessible Computational Regimes for Biomolecular Simulations at Exascale, one about targetDart which was in collaboration with the ExCALIBUR tasking project, and one from PAX-HPC entitled Towards Exascale Ab Initio Materials Modelling. Not only was there a busy poster reception, but furthermore these posters were displayed throughout the conference resulting in plenty of opportunity for participants to discuss with authors.
The PETSc on Cerebras H&ES testbed hosted a birds of a feather session (BoF) entitled Democratizing AI Accelerators for HPC Applications: Challenges, Success, and Support where they invited key participants from the community to discuss experiences of leveraging hardware accelerators that were first designed for AI workloads, for more traditional HPC simulation. Led by EPCC’s Joseph Lee, given that we are seeing a large number of AI accelerators becoming available, this is an important and hot topic, and to a packed room much of the discussion was given over to the benefits around energy efficiency that this can deliver.
A major theme of ExCALIBUR is around the training of Research Software Engineers (RSEs) and how to ensure that the next generation are enthused about HPC and have the correct skills to be able to fully exploit exascale supercomputers. The ExaBioSim project was involved in the HPC and You v4.0 – a Student BoF on Enjoying a Career and Community in HPC BoF session, which explored diverse pathways for aspiring HPC professionals, aimed to highlight study programs, shared free resources, and identified essential training opportunities. This was a great success, with students of those involved in ExCALIBUR projects acting as case studies to highlight some of the wider impact that the programme has delivered.
RISC-V is an open Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) standard, and is growing phenomenally both in terms of technical output but also awareness and interest by the wider community. A key question is the role that RISC-V can play in HPC, and the ExCALIBUR RISC-V H&ES testbed has become key to many of the activities being undertaken. The testbed organised a couple of events at ISC, firstly a BoF session HPC Next: The RISC-V Ecosystem which was chaired by EPCC’s Nick Brown and involved panellists from Codeplay, Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, Rivos and E4 computer engineering. Given the largest BoF room, which was packed, this hour long session explored numerous topics across the RISC-V and HPC space.
The RISC-V BoF was then followed the next day by a RISC-V workshop, again whose organisation was led by the ExCALIBUR RISC-V testbed. As ISC is a European conference we decided to have a European focus to the invited component of the workshop, with the leader of the European EU-Pilot project giving the keynote, four European RISC-V hardware vendors giving short invited talks and a representative of the RISE RISC-V software initiative describing their activities. Both the workshop and BoF were written up as a blog article and published on the RISC-V International website.
In addition to organising these sessions, the RISC-V testbed also presented a paper at the RISC-V workshop around benchmarking the 64-core SG2042 RISC-V CPU for CFD workloads. Leveraging NASA’s parallel benchmark suite (NPB), they were able to highlight where the hardware performs well against other CPUs and where there are still opportunities to embrace.
Lastly, the xDSL ExCALIBUR project were involved in co-organising the interactive and urgent HPC workshop. Driving workloads via technologies such as Jupyter notebooks, interactivity is becoming an increasingly important component of HPC and this workshop proved popular with several research and invited talks.
In all, ISC was a great success for ExCALIBUR and, in addition to the activities described here, both EPCC and STFC have booths in the main exhibition with plenty of ExCALIBUR branded merchandise. One of the most important aspects of these sorts of events is to make connections with other people, in the wider community, who are also working on similar areas and to identify where there is overlap and an opportunity to pool resources.