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Javier Fernández Muñoz was an HPC-Europa3 visitor from 1st June 2019–30th August 2019 hosted at EPCC by Rosa Filgueira. Here he tells us about his experiences.

Hi! My name Javier Fernández Muñoz, I am working as a Visiting Professor in the Computer Architecture and Technology Area of the Computer Science Department at the University Carlos III de Madrid (Spain). 

My research field includes the development of parallel programming frameworks that enhance usability and portability. In this regard, I have been working several years in the development of GrPPI (Generic Reusable Parallel Pattern Interface), an open source generic and reusable parallel pattern programming interface. Basically, GRPPI accommodates a layer between developers and existing parallel programming frameworks targeted at multi-core processor capabilities, such as ISO C++ Threads, OpenMP, Intel TBB, and FastFlow. To achieve this goal, the interface leverages modern C++ features, meta-programming concepts, and generic programming to act as a switch between those frameworks.

Marcos Maroñas was a visitor from BSC who, under the HPC-Europa3 Programme, was hosted here at EPCC from 1st Sep to 1st Dec 2019 by Dr Mark Bull. In this blog article he tell us about his visit.

Hi! My name is Marcos Maroñas. I am currently a PhD student at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) in the Programming Models group of the Computer Science department. I spent most of my time there doing research on runtime systems for parallel programming models such as OmpSs-2. 

The Met Office relies on some of the world’s most computationally intensive codes and works to very tight time constraints. It is important to explore and understand any technology that can potentially accelerate its codes, ultimately modelling the atmosphere and forecasting the weather more rapidly.

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) provide a large number of configurable logic blocks sitting within a sea of configurable interconnect. It has recently become easier for developers to convert their algorithms to configure these fundamental components and so execute their HPC codes in hardware rather than software. This has significant potential benefits for both performance and energy usage, but as FPGAs are so different from CPUs or GPUs, a key challenge is how we design our algorithms to leverage them.

MVAPICH is a high performance implementation of MPI. It is specialised for InfiniBand, Omni-Path, Ethernet/iWARP, and RoCE communication technologies, but people generally use the default module loaded on their system. This is important because, as HPC programmers, we often optimise our codes but overlook the potential performance gains of better choice of MPI implementation.