Computing Insight UK 2023
8 December 2023
We will be part of Computing Insight UK (CIUK 2023), to be held in Manchester from 7-8 December 2023.
The theme for this year's conference is "Productive Supercomputing (Accessible and diverse large scale computing)". Topics will include the UKRI Digital Research Infrastructure and the ExCALIBUR UK research programme. ExCALIBUR is based around five themes that were identified as crucial for the UK’s progress towards Exascale computing, and we are involved in a number of projects to address these themes.
EPCC colleagues will participate in events across the programme.
Research Zone
EPCC will host a joint ARCHER2 and Cirrus stand in the Research Zone at CIUK. To find out more about these national supercomputing services at EPCC, please come along and talk to our team.
There will also be an ExCALIBUR booth in the Research Zone, which will display posters highlighting the programme's projects and a video showing some of the key achievements and current activities. There will be some ExCALIBUR merchandise too!
Day Zero
James Richings will be part of the team delivering the course "Using ReFrame for reproducible and portable performance benchmarking".
Framework repository.
Day One
ExCALIBUR Project Overview and Update
EPCC's Nick Brown has recently taken over the role of coordinating Knowledge Exchange (KE) for the ExCALIBUR programme. Working with collaborators from York and Cambridge, he has been organising several activities that will run through the conference.
The most notable of these will be the ExCALIBUR focus session on Day One, running from 9:30 to 12:30. This breakout session will enable projects to dive deeply into specific technical aspects of their work and drive collaborative discussions with other ExCALIBUR projects and UK activities. The session will comprise short talks from 15 projects, including the xDSL project in which EPCC is involved.
Read more on the ExCALIBUR at CIUK webpage.
Day Two
Session 5: Co-Design of Supercomputing Services and Systems
Between 12:30 and 13:00 on the Friday, Nick Brown will give a presentation about the xDSL ExCALIBUR project entitled "Making HPC more accessible: Effective HPC programming via domain specific abstractions". In it he will explore the huge potential of Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) for HPC but also consider the significant challenges raised by the siloed nature of their compiler ecosystems.
xDSL is leveraging and enhancing the MLIR and LLVM ecosystems to provide a common, popular, and well supported, compiler foundation that DSL developers can then build upon in an easy to use manner. Effectively, DSLs then become a thin abstraction layer atop all this mature and well maintained infrastructure. Nick will consider how this can be achieved, relate some of the success stories to date, and share some of the project's exciting plans for the technology in 2024.
Session 6: Supercomputing into the future
At 3pm EPCC Director Mark Parsons will deliver a talk entitled "The UK's Exascale Supercomputer" as part of the Supercomputing into the future session.