HiPerSoft Software Activities with NCSA

Project: Compiler and Programming System Technologies for DTF

This site is under (re-) construction.
 
Principal Investigator:   Ken Kennedy
Project Technical Contact:   Rob Fowler
Other Participants:   John Mellor-Crummey ,  Guohua Jin , Richard Hanson.

Activities from the Recent Past:

From the NCSA FY02 PPP describing our FY01 activities:  In an exemplar of interdisciplinary collaboration, Kennedy (Rice) worked with Woodward (Minnesota) and Wilhelmson (UIUC/NCSA) to structure the latter’s NCOMMAS weather code to more efficiently exploit the NCSA IA-64 cluster. The initial project phases focus on restructuring the code to make it more amenable to optimization and on the “hands-on deployment” of Minnesota and Rice technologies, including performance analysis tools and communication libraries with the goal of producing near-term results in computational atmospheric science.

Woodward, Mellor-Crummey, and Fowler
Paul Woodward ( LCSE/UMN) Mellor-Crummey, and Fowler discussing automatic
optimization strategies.


Finding the usual workstation desktop to be overly constraining,
John and Paul  spread their code across LCSE's PowerWall.
 
 

Current Activities -- Our FY02 Statement of  work:


In FY02, the Rice team will continue and expand the collaboration with Woodward and Wilhelmson on the NCOMMAS weather code and extend this effort as an “expedition” by both automating some of the analyses and transformations and by combining a prototype “backfilled time-skewing” transformation with the LCSE SHMOD/SHMON library.  This is expected to
improve the performance of the latter at all scales and lower the minimum  problem size for which the techniques are profitable.

In the longer term, the enabling technologies must be successfully transferred to other application groups. The Rice team will continue to improve on  their recently released HPCView tool by porting it to new platforms and  reimplementing it as a stand alone Java application to both decrease the size of data sets it uses and increase its online analytic power.  New versions of HPCView and related tools will be released and deployed within the Alliance as they are ready.

To (at least partially) automate the optimization techniques used in large scalable programs such as PPM (directionally-split operations, aggressive techniques for aligning and fusing loops, replacing full size temporary arrays with smaller arrays, and scalarization to move temporaries into registers) requires industrial strength compiler tools. By the end of FY01, we will have completed our basic infrastructure for such tools based on the  SGI IA-64 compiler.  In FY02, this infrastructure will be used in our efforts with the NCOMMAS project to both implement aggressive transformations that are too difficult to do manually in a
maintainable way. These tools will be transferred to other application teams and made available for general use.
 

Publications

For now, see the publication lists on participants personal pages.
 

Activities

NCOMMAS Weather Project  (Link to be added.)

 Performance Tools

Compiler Infrastructure (Link to be added.)

Code Transformation (Link to be added.)
 
 

HiPerSoft


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