High-Level Support Initiative of the JSC Simulation Laboratories 2011

Gibbon, P.; Grießbach, S.; Halver, R.; Zimmermann, O.; Schiller, A.; Mohanty, S.; Arnold, L.; Sutmann, G.; Hoffmann, L.; Brömmel, D.; Meinke, J.; Karmakar, A.; Chihaia, V.; Müller, T.

Report

High-Level Support Initiative of the JSC Simulation Laboratories 2011

Gibbon, P.FZJ* ; Arnold, L.FZJ* ; Brömmel, D.FZJ* ; Chihaia, V.FZJ* ; Grießbach, S.FZJ* ; Halver, R.FZJ* ; Hoffmann, L.FZJ* ; Karmakar, A.FZJ* ; Meinke, J.FZJ* ; Mohanty, S.FZJ* ; Müller, T.FZJ* ; Schiller, A.FZJ* ; Sutmann, G.FZJ* ; Zimmermann, O.FZJ*

2012
Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH Zentralbibliothek, Verlag Jülich

Jülich : Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH Zentralbibliothek, Verlag, Berichte des Forschungszentrums Jülich 30 p. (2012)

Please use a persistent id in citations: http://hdl.handle.net/2128/4593

Report No.: Juel-4351

Note: Record converted from VDB: 12.11.2012; A central component of the Helmholtz Programme Supercomputing (Topic 1: Computational Science and Mathematical Methods) is the development of advanced software support through the recently established Simulation Laboratories (SimLabs) at JSC. This was motivated by the realisation that application software is lagging behind HPC hardware developments, which are now at the Petaflopscale and beyond: it is becoming increasingly difficult to fully exploit the potential of these machines with single applications. Four such units have now been established at JSC in the fields of Computational Biology, Molecular Systems, Plasma Physics and Climate Science, which came on stream in early 2011. All four labs have been actively engaged with user groups from their respective communities over the past two years, through various workshops, informal cooperations and 3rd-party projects. To channel these activities into a more formal structure, a „Support Call“ was issued in September 2010, inviting current and potential users of the supercomputers in Jülich from these four research communities to apply for high-level support from the Simulation Labs (see Appendix A). Expertise offered by SimLab staff included: 1. (Re)design of computational methods needed to exploit highly parallel architectures 2. Performance analysis and scaling improvement of application codes and workflows 3. Porting of new codes to the JUROPA and JUGENE systems In this pilot phase, proposed work packages were permitted to take up to two person-months of SimLab staff resources. The applicant or members of his/her group were also expected to contribute an equivalent amount of manpower to the project, particularly where the work involved substantial code and algorithm redevelopment. Altogether 21 proposals were received, five of which were either postponed for lack of manpower (the Climate Science Lab comprised only 1 member at that time), or rejected as being outside the scope of the SimLabs’ expertise or mandate. Selection decisions were taken in a plenary session involving all four SimLabs, which ensured that proposals which fell outside the expertise of the lab to which it was directed could potentially be transferred to another SimLab, or passed on to one of the cross-sectional teams at JSC. Due to the relatively low number of proposals per staff member (on average each lab had two full-time staff members as of January 2011), it was decided not to request external reviews and ranking for this round. A summary of all proposals can be found in the table on page 5. After the proposal assignment, there followed a series of face-to-face consultations between the SimLabs and principle investigators of each proposal (PIs) to establish a work plan and time-frame for each project. This was largely completed by December 2010 so that work could begin in earnest in early 2011.

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