HOPSA project launched

June 20, 2011: Experts from Russia and the EU are collaborating in a new project to boost the performance of supercomputer

Whether analysing complex molecules, searching for new medically active substances, calculating the global climate or modelling astronomical events ? computer simulations are becoming an indispensable tool in an increasing number of scientific fields. New more powerful supercomputers enable more realistic and more detailed simulations of complex global processes, whereas at the same time it is becoming more and more difficult for researchers to monitor program execution and to identify sources of error or performance bottlenecks. Today the fastest supercomputers have tens or hundreds of thousands of processors working in parallel which, if possible, have to be utilized uniformly during the course of a simulation. In order to help users optimize performance more easily, Russian and European experts have established a new project which will for the first time consider all aspects in a performance analysis ? ranging from run also expects increased efficiency: ?The HOPSA Project will help scientists to find faster and more efficient solutions to their problems.?

The HOPSA Project brings together all the leading experts from Russia and the EU in the field of optimizing parallel programs. The Russian systems vendor T-Platforms, producer of the MSU RCC supercomputers, will integrate its HPC cluster monitoring software ClustrX with the European application optimization tools. Scientists at Moscow State University are developing the system-wide analysis software that will in future process the collected data both for system administrators and also for application programmers. The team at the Joint Supercomputer Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences is responsible for testing and validating the HOPSA software. The Scientific Research Institute of Multiprocessor Computer Systems at the Southern Federal University is contributing its experience with field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), which are programmable chips ideal for the requirements of parallel computing.

The EU partners are integrating their world-class tools for optimizing parallel application software into the HOPSA software environment. Rogue Wave Software AB (formerly Acumem) is providing the performance optimization product, ThreadSpotter. The graphical analysis frameworks for representing performance data, Vampir from Dresden University of Technology and Paraver from Barcelona Supercomputing Center are also being used, as well as Scalasca, a software tool for scalable performance optimization developed at J?lich Supercomputing Centre in cooperation with the German Research School for Simulation Sciences in Aachen.

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