Related papers: Portage: Bringing Hackers' Wisdom to Science
Package managers are a very important part of Linux distributions but we have noticed two weaknesses in them: They use pre-built packages that are not optimised for specific hardware and often they are too heavy for a specific need, or…
Building and deploying software on high-end computing systems is a challenging task. High performance applications have to reliably run across multiple platforms and environments, and make use of site-specific resources while resolving…
Hardware heterogeneity is here to stay for high-performance computing. Large-scale systems are currently equipped with multiple GPU accelerators per compute node and are expected to incorporate more specialized hardware in the future. This…
We have developed GPU versions for two major high-performance-computing (HPC) applications originating from two different scientific domains. GENE is a plasma microturbulence code which is employed for simulations of nuclear fusion plasmas.…
The use of reconfigurable computing, and FPGAs in particular, has strong potential in the field of High Performance Computing (HPC). However the traditionally high barrier to entry when it comes to programming this technology has, until…
A considerable amount of research and engineering went into designing proxy applications, which represent common high-performance computing workloads, to co-design and evaluate the current generation of supercomputers, e.g., RIKEN's…
Containers are an emerging technology that hold promise for improving productivity and code portability in scientific computing. We examine Linux container technology for the distribution of a non-trivial scientific computing software stack…
Performance has always been a hot topic in computing. However, the viable ways to achieve it have taken many forms in the different moments of computing history. Today, technological limits have pushed the adoption of increasingly parallel…
HPC-based applications often have complex workflows with many software dependencies that hinder their portability on contemporary HPC architectures. In addition, these applications often require extraordinary efforts to deploy and execute…
Edge computing has emerged as a paradigm to bring low-latency and bandwidth-intensive applications close to end-users. However, edge computing platforms still face challenges related to resource constraints, connectivity, and security. We…
Research processes often rely on high-performance computing (HPC), but HPC is often seen as antithetical to "reproducibility": one would have to choose between software that achieves high performance, and software that can be deployed in a…
Computational grids typically consist of nodes utilizing ordinary processors such as the Intel Pentium. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are able to perform certain compute-intensive tasks very well due to their inherent parallel…
Hardware technological advances are struggling to match scientific ambition, and a key question is how we can use the transistors that we already have more effectively. This is especially true for HPC, where the tendency is often to throw…
In recent years, heterogeneous computing has emerged as the vital way to increase computers? performance and energy efficiency by combining diverse hardware devices, such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and Field Programmable Gate…
Open-source software is increasingly reused, complicating the process of patching to repair bugs. In the case of Linux, a distinct ecosystem has formed, with Linux mainline serving as the upstream, stable or long-term-support (LTS) systems…
Support teams of high-performance computing (HPC) systems often find themselves between a rock and a hard place: on one hand, they understandably administrate these large systems in a conservative way, but on the other hand, they try to…
In this paper, we present the computational task-management tool Ganga, which allows for the specification, submission, bookkeeping and post-processing of computational tasks on a wide set of distributed resources. Ganga has been developed…
Next generation High-Energy Physics (HEP) experiments are presented with significant computational challenges, both in terms of data volume and processing power. Using compute accelerators, such as GPUs, is one of the promising ways to…
GNU Prolog is a general-purpose implementation of the Prolog language, which distinguishes itself from most other systems by being, above all else, a native-code compiler which produces standalone executables which don't rely on any…
The path to exascale computational capabilities in high-performance computing (HPC) systems is challenged by the inadequacy of present software technologies to adapt to the rapid evolution of architectures of supercomputing systems. The…