High Performance Computing
at EPCC
Alan D Simpson
Technical Director
Telephone:
+44 131 650 5120
Fax:
+44 131 650 6555
Email: a.simpson@epcc.ed.ac.uk
http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/
HPC@EPCC
October 2003
1
Overview
 Background
 HPC Facilities at EPCC
 HPCx
– Current Status
– HPCx and the Grid
 Training and Research in HPC
 Summary
HPC@EPCC
October 2003
2
EPCC
 Founded in 1990 as a focus for the University of
Edinburgh activities in HPC
 Mission
“to accelerate the effective exploitation of novel computing
in industry, academia, and commerce”
 One of leading HPC Centres in Europe
 65 staff
– 40 applications consultants + support staff
 Income £2.7M per annum; 30% from Industry
 Academic and industrial clients from UK, Europe and
beyond
HPC@EPCC
October 2003
3
Technology Transfer
Technology Transfer
Academic:
o National HPC Facilities
o Research
o Support
HPC@EPCC
Industry:
o Projects
o Consultancy
o Middleware
Training:
o Academia
o Industry
o MSc
Europe:
o Visitor Programmes
o Technology Transfer
o Strategic Planning
October 2003
4
Industrial Consultancy
 Provide project-based consultancy to industry and
commerce
 Over 30 clients in 3 years
 Large enterprises...
– eg, UK Met Office, Sun, C&G, AEA, Cisco
 ...to local SMEs
– eg, Weidlinger, Quadstone, Jardine
 40% of technical staff
 Funded by direct contracts with business, local
government and European Commission
HPC@EPCC
October 2003
5
Industrial Clients
USA:
o Cisco Systems
o Cray Research Inc
o Schlumberger Geoquest
o Sun Microsystems
HPC@EPCC
UK:
o AEA Technology
o AlphaData Ltd
o Applied Research & Technology Ltd
o Avro International plc
o British Aerospace plc
o CN Software Ltd
o Cray Research (UK) Ltd
o Crown Office
o DTI
o Digital Equipment Corp
o Edinburgh Old Town Renewal Trust
Japan:
o Edinburgh Petroleum Services Ltd
o Fujitsu Research Laboratories
o Enterpris Ltd
o Hitachi
o EPSRC
Europe:
o High Speed Productions Ltd o AGIP S.p.A, Italy
o Integriti Solutions Ltd
o Digital Equipment BV, Ireland
o Kwik-Fit Holdings plc
o European Commission
o LEEL
o Hitachi Dublin Laboratory
o MCS/Hampco
o Kjaergaard Industri Automatic
o Peter Tilling Plastics Ltd
o Statoil, Norway
o Quadstone Ltd
o Rolls Royce plc
o SCI Ltd
o Scottish Enterprise
o Scottish Office
o SIAS Ltd
o Silicon Graphics (UK) Ltd
o UK Meteorological Office
o Upstream Systems Ltd
o 3L Ltd
October 2003
6
European Programmes
 Collaborative research
– HPC-Europa: EPCC coordinates
pan-European visitor programme
– DEISA: connecting national centres across Europe
 IST (industrial) projects
– EUTIST-IMV: co-ordination of 80 machine vision
organisations
– Gridstart: co-ordination of all EU Grid development
projects
HPC@EPCC
October 2003
7
HPC Facilities at EPCC
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
1982 ICL DAPs
1986 Meiko T800 CS (400 processors)
1988 AMT DAP608
1990 Meiko i860 CS (64 processors)
1991 TMC CM-200 (16K processors)
1992 Meiko i860 CS (16 processors)
1994 Cray T3D (512 processors)
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Cray Y-MP
1995 Meiko CS-2
1997 Cray T3E (344 processors)
1997 Hitachi SR2201
2000 Sun UltraSPARC III Cluster
2002 Sun E15000 (54 processors)
2002 IBM p690 Cluster (1280 processors)
2004 QCDOC
HPC@EPCC
October 2003
8
UoE HPC Service
 Funded by £400K JREI grant
– awarded to EPCC in 1998
– freely available to local researchers
 Service based on Sun SMP clusters
– familiar software and easy porting
– recently upgraded to Sunfire E15K
– large memory and CPU with a single
system image
 EPCC is a Sun Centre of Excellence in
HPC and Grid Computing
HPC@EPCC
October 2003
9
QCDOC
 QCDOC is a collaborative project
to develop a special-purpose
computer for QCD
– involving EPCC, Physics,
Columbia University, IBM,…
 QCD: Quantum ChromoDynamics
– key part of Standard Model of particle physics
– has very extreme computing requirements
 Price-performance is critical
– may be cheaper to design special purpose machines for
particular problems
– only pay for what you use
– put extra effort into what is important to you
HPC@EPCC
October 2003
10
QCDOC
 Each node is small and
consists of a single
specially designed chip
plus some memory
– very large numbers of
nodes are possible
 Equivalent general purpose
machine would be huge and expensive
 Difficulty of chip design reduced by including
components (eg, CPU) from IBM design library
 10TF machine to be installed at EPCC in 2004
HPC@EPCC
October 2003
11
HPCx Overview
 UK’s major HPC facility, funded by EPSRC
 £53M/6 year contact awarded to UoE HPCX Ltd
– wholly-owned subsidiary of University of Edinburgh
– work subcontracted to CCLRC (DL), EPCC and IBM
 Largest academic supercomputer in Europe
– doubling in performance every 2 years
HPC@EPCC
October 2003
12
HPCx Objectives
 Capability computing for world-leading science
– Capability computing: jobs which use a significant
fraction of the resource, eg, at least 512 CPUs
 Maximise benefits to the UK’s computational
science and engineering community
 IBM technology roadmap:
– 12/02: 40x32-way Regatta H frames + Colony Switch
• initially #9 on Top 500 list
– 07/04: 48x32-way Regatta H+ frames + Federation switch
– 11/06: 96x32-way Regatta H+ frames + Federation switch
 Science support is key for effective use
HPC@EPCC
October 2003
13
Partnership
 EPCC and CCLRC
– are partners in C3ES (Consortium for Capability
Computing and e-Science)
– providing science support and systems management for
HPCx
– underpinned by MoU between UoE and CCLRC
– combines Europe’s foremost academic HPC, e-Science
and technology transfer centres
– significant experience of:
• operating national HPC services
• developing capability applications
– the strongest UK partnership ever to support scientific
computing
HPC@EPCC
October 2003
14
Virtual Organisation
Outreach
Applications Support
Life sciences
New applications
Users
Helpdesk
Training
Liaising with users
Terascaling
Capability applications
Scalable algorithms
Performance optimisation
Software Engineering
Underpinning technology
Grid/e-Science
Systems & Networking
Flexible and responsive capability service
Smooth transitions between phases
HPC@EPCC
October 2003
Technology
15
HPCx and the Grid
 Key responsibility for Software Engineering team
 HPCx is committed to support access via Grid
– currently provided through Globus 2
– Globus 3 support when appropriate
 HPCx is key part of UK collaboration with Extensible
Teragrid Facility project in the US
– focus is exploiting unique features of Grid + HPC systems
for capability computing
– initial experiment planned for SC2003
• RealityGrid computational steering
• HPCx is major compute resource
HPC@EPCC
October 2003
16
HPCx Status
 HPCx builds on significant complementary
experience at EPCC and DL
 Very successful start
– averaging >75% utilisation
– …with capability usage already up to 35%
 Committed to e-Science and the Grid
– ETF experiment at SC2003
 HPCx is focussed on capability computing
– world-class service for world-class research
HPC@EPCC
October 2003
17
MSc in HPC
 £400K grant from UK research council
– runs for 5 years
– just started year 3
 One of a very few such courses in the world
 Each year an increasing number of students,
especially overseas students
HPC@EPCC
October 2003
18
Training in HPC
 Courses include
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
–
Fundamental Concepts of HPC
Practical Software Development
Message Passing Programming
Shared Memory Programming
Parallel Decomposition
Applied Computer Science
Object Oriented Programming for HPC
Exploiting the Computational Grid
Applied Numerical Algorithms
Performance Optimisation
Scientific Visualisation
 Remote runs at, eg, Cambridge, Daresbury, …
HPC@EPCC
October 2003
19
HPC Research
 Java Grande Forum
– EPCC leads the benchmarking activity
– including parallel benchmarks and language comparisons
– have taught Java tutorials at Supercomputing
 OpenMP
– EPCC a full member of OpenMP
Architecture Review Board
– OpenMP microbenchmarks
• tests quality of the compiler implementation
• becoming a de-facto standard
HPC@EPCC
October 2003
20
HPC Research
 JOMP
– an OpenMP-like standard for Java
– research implementation available for download
 Mixed Mode
– combined OpenMP + MPI becoming popular
– topic of investigation at EPCC for over 3 years
 Single Sided MPI
– EPCC produced implementations for Cray, Sun, …
 Optimised Libraries
– BLAS, FFTs, ScaLAPACK,…
HPC@EPCC
October 2003
21
Summary
 EPCC is multidisciplinary and multi-funded
– ... supporting a large spectrum of activities ...
– … and a critical mass of expertise
 Proven track record in Technology Transfer
– business-like approach benefits whole organisation
 New initiatives
–
–
–
–
MSc in HPC
European programmes
Grid middleware
HPCx
 EPCC has a unique breadth of expertise
HPC@EPCC
October 2003
22