The outlook on software from STFC
Software Outlook is a part of the EPSRC-funded SLA that focuses on software technologies that are vitally important to the development and optimisation of world-leading scientific software. In this bulletin, they highlight their recent work and invite you to inform the Software Outlook workplan for 2016/2017.
2016/2017 Workplan
In order to ensure that Software Outlook targets topics that are of the greatest interest to SLA partners we invite you to complete a short survey to help inform our 2016/2017 workplan. Select the topics of greatest interest and tell us if your software could be used to examine the benefits of emerging technologies.
Research Highlights
Jacobi Test Code
The Jacobi Test Code is an evolving benchmarking tool developed as part of the CCP-ASEArch project and continued as part of Software Outlook. The tool has recently been updated to support mixed-mode MPI/OpenMP, CUDA, OpenACC and OpenCL. The accompanying report includes benchmark results for these implementations on Hartree Centre systems and the Emerald GPU machine, and source code is available on CCPForge.
Improved Mixed-mode Scalability for Code_Saturne
Work performed in collaboration with EDF and IBM on optimising OpenMP in Code_Saturne has been presented at the PARENG15 conference in March.
Based on the native sparse matrix format in Code_Saturne, we proposed and implemented a new blocked format and corresponding matrix vector product algorithms. These have improved the OpenMP scalability by reducing synchronisation points between threads and also by improving load balance.
(V. Szeremi, L. Anton, C. Evangelinos, C. Moulinec, Y. Fournier, "Parallel Sparse Matrix Vector Product with OpenMP for SMPs in Code_Saturne”, PARENG15)
Energy Profiling
On the Software Outlook website Sue Thorne presents a report on energy profiling using EMONSimple on BlueGene machines.
More information
Find out more about Software Outlook by via their website or Twitter.