Student Travel Support for MVAPICH User Group (MUG) Meeting

Ohio State University, The, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

Modern High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems are rapidly evolving in response to and in anticipation of underlying computing and networking technology advances. In such a rapidly changing environment it is critical that next-generation engineers and scientists are familiar with modern HPC architectural and technology trends. This knowledge and expertise allows the next generation of scientists and engineers to design HPC software stacks, learn about the process of open-source software development and to improve software sustainability. Since 2000, the MVAPICH project has been providing open-source, high performance, scalable software libraries used by a significant part of the science and engineering community. The annual MVAPICH User Group (MUG) meeting provides an open forum to exchange information on the design and usage of MVAPICH2 libraries. Travel funding from this project will enable a set of students (both undergraduates and graduates) to attend the MUG meeting. Student participation will help prepare them to enter the next-generation HPC workforce with increased expertise on software design, reuse, and sustainability. The MVAPICH project focuses on the design of high-performance MPI and PGAS runtimes for HPC systems. Over the years, this project has been able to incorporate new designs to leverage novel multi-/many-core platforms like Intel Xeon Phis, NVIDIA GPGPUs, and Open POWER architectures coupled with Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) enabled commodity networking technologies like InfiniBand, RoCE, Omni-Path, and 10/40GigE with iWARP. An annual MVAPICH User Group (MUG) meeting was created three years back to provide an open forum to exchange information on MVAPICH2 libraries. The funding under this grant aims to achieve increased participation of undergraduate and graduate students working in the HPC area (systems and applications) in the annual MUG event. The requested student travel fund will help in attracting a set of students from a range of US institutions. The participation in an international event such as MUG will enable the students to get a global picture of the developments happening in the rapidly evolving HPC domain and open-source software design. The selection committee will stress broad and diverse student participation.