Efficiently exploiting distributed large many-core systems

27 January 2020

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

Our team has developed some novel features in OmpSs-2 which we want to evaluate and compare to the state of the art. I applied to the HPC-Europa3 programme to collaborate closely with Dr Mark Bull, a leading expert in benchmarking of parallel programming models at EPCC. 

During my visit, I worked mainly on porting applications from other programming models (OpenMP) to OmpSs-2. As well as this, I did some performance analysis to identify bottlenecks and tune the applications to deliver good performance. I also spent time comparing the performance between our approach and OpenMP, MPI and hybrid OpenMPI applications.

At the end of my visit, we had very promising preliminary results on Cirrus. From this work, we are planning to write a scientific paper based on this work done thanks to the HPC-Europa3 funding.

However, my time in Edinburgh was not only devoted to work! Edinburgh is magical, trust me. The Old Town, the New Town, the castle, the parliament, the parks, the museums, the Botanical Garden... There are a lot of things to visit and discover! Don't forget Arthur's Seat, where you have one of the best views of the city. Portobello also deserves a visit as well. All these, and probably many more things I missed, are in Edinburgh waiting for you.

But if you go, you should not spend all your time only in Edinburgh! Scotland has many more beautiful and interesting places to visit. If you like the sea, give North Berwick a try, it's a small but wonderful village half an hour away from the city. I also enjoyed my time in Glasgow, especially a football game in Celtic Park. I still feel the emotion of listening to 60 thousand people singing "You'll never walk alone" before the game. 

I also had the chance to visit the Highlands and try to earn my million-pound reward, but I was unable to find Nessie. Nevertheless, I enjoyed visiting Loch Ness a lot and some other gems in the Highlands such as Glencoe.

Now I am looking forward to going back to Edinburgh and feeling the magic again, and you should go there too!