II-NEW: A Heterogeneous Testbed for Exploring Emerging HPC Tools, Programming Languages, and Applications

University Of Houston, Houston TX

Investigators

Abstract

Parallel computing is in the midst of exciting changes. Virtually all new processors have multiple cores exposing all applications to parallelism. GPUs are processors of choice for many compute intensive applications, making heterogeneity another reality of the HPC landscape. These characteristics pose tough challenges to application developers as well as system level software architects. This project plans to develop the infrastructure to support research into programming models, tools and runtime systems for emerging HPC systems. The project creates a heterogeneous compute cluster with core aspects of emerging high-end systems. The system will have a high degree of parallelism distributed on a modest number of nodes by maximizing the cores per node up to 32. It utilizes multiple heterogeneous CPU architectures and deploy compute accelerators. The storage system is based on solid-state disks (SSDs), an emerging technology that allows two orders of magnitude lower latencies than magnetic hard drives. The research conducted on this system focuses on various aspects of the execution tool chain. Specific research projects supported include: OpenMP compiler and run-time system for multi-core architectures and accelerators; automatic optimization of compute and communication operations in heterogeneous environments; highly fault-tolerant execution in heterogeneous and volunteer environments; and optimization of parallel I/O operations for low latency storage devices. Furthermore, collaborative work with applications scientists is expected to lead to the development of advanced parallelization strategies for various application domains.