List of Cooperations

NEC Cooperation - Productive and Energy-Efficient Use of Hybrid HPC System and OpenMP Offload Programming Model for the Aurora Architecture High compute capabilities are one the key factors for many computational engineering research projects. In order to fulfill this requirement hardware vendors developed new heterogeneous parallel architectures over the last decades. On the one hand, these architectures improve the energy efficiency to lower the power consumption and thus to decrease the total cost of ownership (TCO) for the computing centers. On the other hand, new programming approaches and optimization techniques are required to benefit of these highly parallel systems. In 2016, RWTH Aachen University has chosen the company NEC as supplier for the new supercomputer CLAIX. As part of this procurement, NEC agreed to fund a scientific-technical collaboration, which has the goal to improve the efficiency, reliability and productivity of High Performance Computing on the NEC CLAIX system. This includes the identification of suitable codes within the user base of CLAIX with respect to the use of SIMD and vector programming models. Furthermore, the project evaluates an OpenMP-based offload programming model for the upcoming NEC Aurora architecture. A prototype implementation based on the LLVM compiler infrastructure is one of most important aspects of this part of the project, because this extends the use cases for the NEC Aurora architecture and enables all users of CLAIX to develop reliable standard-compliant applications. More information will be made available after the product launch of the NEC Aurora architecture.
SPEC ‑Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation Since 2013, the IT Center of RWTH Aachen University is part of SPEC and actively engaged in its High Performance Group (HPG). SPEC’s HPG is a forum for discussing and developing benchmark methodologies for High Performance Computing (HPC) systems. At the same time, the group releases production quality benchmark suites like SPEC MPI2007, SPEC OMP2012, and SPEC ACCEL, that can evaluate all dimensions of parallelism. These benchmark suites are used in academia and industry to conduct research in HPC systems, facilitate procurement, testing, and tuning of HPC systems. more