Topic of the Workshop

In recent years, programming high performance computing systems has shifted from single layer programming models to multiple layers of massively parallel systems. Widely used message-passing or thread programming models do not longer map efficiently to upcoming heterogeneous systems. Further, different brands of graphics cards (GPU) and other accelerators, as well as large numbers of processor (CPU) cores, each with increasing vector computing capability require dedicated computational kernels. With the introduction of programming language extensions like Cuda (GPU) or TBB (threading) and more general frameworks like OpenCL, this power has been made accessible to general applications. However, topics like code optimization and portable code development remain challenging.

Today many computer system are heterogeneous, meaning that they consists of several layers of parallelism. This is especially true for parallel cluster computer using GPUs, Cell processor or FPGA accelerators and fat shared memory nodes. Programming such system is different from programming a single core CPU. While it is relatively easy to get a running code, it is much harder getting a optimized fast code.
This workshop focuses on the programming of heterogeneous system, especially GPUs.
On the first day is dedicated to an introduction to the programming of GPUs. A tutorial including a hands-on session will give the opportunity for less experienced participants to learn about GPU computing.
The next two days of the workshop will discuss how physics applications, especially in relativity and quantum field theory, may benefit from the use of GPUs. The topics covered by this workshops are:

  • An introduction to the programming of GPUs with OpenCL/Cuda.
  • Solving partial differential equations efficiently on the heterogeneous computing systems. There is some emphasis on GPU computing, but other accelerators and the efficient use of large multi-core cluster nodes are considered as well.
  • Optimization of computational kernels coming from finite differences, spectral methods and lattice gauge theory on accelerators.

Organizers

The workshop is organized by

  • G. Zumbusch (Chair, University Jena)

  • B. Brügmann (University Jena)

  • L. Rezzolla (AEI Potsdam)

  • A. Weyhausen (University Jena)

  • B. Zink (University Tübingen)

Contact

For further details, please write to:

GPUWorkshop2011 AT uni-jena.de