Various notes from the Accelerating Devices Lab (X-Dev) of Jülich Supercomputing Centre

Chelsea John

The Supercomputing Conference 2023 took place in Denver, Colorado, from November 12th to 17th. For the

 Women in HPC

workshop, we submitted a paper, which focused on benchmarking different accelerators for AI. The paper was accepted and I was invited to hold a lightning talk to show the work, spun off our OpenGPT-X project.

SC23 WHPC Workshop Paper: OpenGPT-X – Novel Architecture Exploration

Stepan Nassyr

** Poster in institute repository:** http://dx.doi.org/10.34734/FZJ-2023-03437 During the RISC-V Summit Europe 2023


in Barcelona we presented our work generating highly optimized RISC-V and ARM GEMM microkernels for BLIS using a custom software tool.

 1

We presented results on the Fujitsu A64FX processor, the in-development RISC-V

 VEC

processor from the EUPILOT project using an FPGA SDV (RVV 0.7.1, later RVV

Poster: GEMMERATOR – GEMM Kernel Generator

Andreas Herten

Together with our colleagues from Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) and in collaboration with HIDA and OpenHackathons, we hosted the

 Helmholtz GPU Hackathon 2023

in Jülich in May.

 I’ve blogged about the event for the
 
 Zweikommazwei
 
 blog of Forschungszentrum;

Helmholtz GPU Hackathon 2023

At the end of May, Forschungszentrum Jülich got a new website. Finally, the group also has a dedicated page there, listing the things we do, the project we are part of, and all the members in the group. And thanks to a photo shooting by Sebastian, we have great portraits and an amazing group picture.

X-Dev Website at fz-juelich.de

Jayesh Badwaik

** Poster in institute repository:** http://dx.doi.org/10.34734/FZJ-2023-04519  At the ISC High Performance Conference 2023 a little while ago, we presented a project poster on the SCALABLE project, embedded at the end of this post. The work was also presented as a paper at the the Computing Frontiers 2023 conference previously.

ISC23 Project Poster: SCALABLE: Scalable Lattice-Boltzmann Leaps to Exascale

Sebastian Achilles

MSA Concept MSA Software Building Blocks Workshop Exercises 1: Hello World! 2. GPU Hello World! 3: CPU-GPU Ping Pong Slides  On May 29, we held a workshop about using the Modular Supercomputing Architecture (MSA) together with project partners from ParTec.

MSA Introduction Workshop

** Poster publication:** http://hdl.handle.net/2128/34532  The ISC High Performance Conference 2023 was held at Hamburg, Germany from 21st May to 25th May. At the conference, we presented a project poster on the OpenGPT-X project, outlining the progress and initial exploration results. The poster was even featured in HPCWire’s May 24 recap of ISC within the AI segment!

ISC23 Project Poster: OpenGPT-X – Training Large Language Models on HPC Systems

For a recent talk at DKRZ in the scope of the natESM project, I created a table summarizing the current state of using a certain programming model on a GPU of a certain vendor, for C++ and Fortran. Since it lead to quite a discussion in the session, I made a standalone version of it with some updates and elaborations here and there.

GPU Vendor/Programming Model Compatibility Table

TL;DR: I held a HPC intro talk. Slides are below.

In MAELSTROM, we connect three areas of science:

 🌍Weather and climate simulation

with

 🤖Machine Learning methods and workflows

using

 📈HPC techniques and resources

. Halfway into the project, we held a boot camp at JSC to teach this Venn diagram to a group of students a few days ago. Some were ML experts, but had never used a HPC system.

Talk: Introduction to HPC

Albert Kahira

A few days ago, OPTIMA announced the release of deliverable 3.5, to which I contributed. This deliverable is part of a set of five deliverables under work package 3. But first, let’s talk about

 OPTIMA

. OPTIMA is an EU-funded project whose goal is to prove that several HPC applications can take advantage of the future highly heterogeneous FPGA-populated HPC systems.

OOPS Version 1 Release

On June 21 and 22, we held a workshop looking back on the last ten years of our lab together with NVIDIA – the NVIDIA Application Lab at Jülich (or

 NVLab

, as I sometimes abbreviate it). The material can be found in the agenda at Indico. We invited a set of application owners with which we worked together during that time to present past developments, recent challenges, and future plans.

10 Year Anniversary Workshop of NVIDIA Application Lab at Jülich

In November of 2022, I created a table comparing GPU programming models and their  support on GPUs of the three vendors (AMD, Intel, NVIDIA) for a talk. The audience liked it, so I beefed it up a little and posted it in this very blog.

Paper: Many Cores, Many Models – GPU Programming Model vs. Vendor Compatibility Overview

Environment Setup Enabling UCC in OpenMPI Enabling NCCL in UCC (Team Layer Selection) All The Variables Results 1. Plain OpenMPI 2. OpenMPI with UCC 3. OpenMPI with UCC+NCCL Scaling Plots Average Latency Bus Bandwidth Comparing MPI, UCC, UCC+NCCL Comparing UCC+NCCL, NCCL Summary Technical Details  This post showcases how to use the highly optimized, GPU-based collectives of Nvidia’s (NCCL library) by using it as a UCC backend through MPI.

MPI as API: Using UCC’s NCCL Backend for MPI’s Allreduce

A few months ago, we extended the JURECA Evaluation Platform

 1

at JSC by two nodes with AMD Instinct MI250 GPUs (four GPUs each). The nodes are Gigabyte G262-ZO0 servers, each with a dual socket AMD EPYC 7443 processor (24 cores per socket, SMT-2) and with four MI250 GPUs (128 GB memory). OSU Bandwidth Micro-Benchmark A100 Comparison GPU STREAM Variant Data Size Scan Threads and Data Sizes Conclusion Technical Details OSU

First Benchmarks with AMD Instinct MI250 GPUs at JSC

Carolin Penke

** Poster publication:** http://hdl.handle.net/2128/32006  The 14th JLESC workshop (JLESC: Joint Laboratory for Extreme-Scale Computing) was hosted by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Urbana, Illinois from 28th September to 30th September. We had the opportunity to present the OpenGPT-X project in form of a poster.

Poster: OpenGPT-X - Training Large Language Models on HPC Systems

About    This blog post is based on a presentation I held at the “New Trends in Computational Science in Engineering and Industrial Mathematics” workshop in Magdeburg on 01/07/2022. My goal is to give a brief introduction to the state of current large language models, the OpenGPT-X project, and the transformer neural network architecture for people unfamiliar with the subject. About What is a language model?

A mathematician’s introduction to transformers and large language models

1

This blog is an experiment. We want to share bits and pieces of our work; the reports we write, the presentations we hold, or the little discoveries we make, or even some first, water-testing investigations; and all the rest. It’s a

 documentation

of what we do. Little bits of science, collected in the open, and sometimes even not that little.

DOIng it Right! (DOIs for This Blog)

JSC Accelerating Devices Lab

[![Group of Hackathon participants jumping in front of JUWELS Cluster in
the machine
hall](/assets/img/posts/2023-07-03-gpu-hackathon-23/machine-hall-hackathon23.tn.4x.jpg "Group picture of some GPU Hackathon 2023 participants in JSC machine hall; link to FZJ Blogpost about Hackathon"){srcset="/assets/img/posts/2023-07-03-gpu-hackathon-23/machine-hall-hackathon23.tn.4x.jpg 1x, /assets/img/posts/2023-07-03-gpu-hackathon-23/machine-hall-hackathon23.tn.8x.jpg 2x"}](https://blogs.fz-juelich.de/zweikommazwei/2023/06/30/2023-helmholtz-gpu-hackathon/)
Together with our colleagues from Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf
(HZDR) and in collaboration with HIDA and OpenHackathons, we hosted the
*Helmholtz GPU Hackathon 2023* in Jülich in May.

**I've blogged about the event for the [*Zweikommazwei* blog of
Forschungszentrum](https://blogs.fz-juelich.de/zweikommazwei/2023/06/30/2023-helmholtz-gpu-hackathon/);
it even includes some video statements we filmed with a few
participants!**

It was the first Hackathon we held in meat space again after the start
of the Pandemic. It was great to see so many excited scientists digging
through their code, the LAN party feeling was strong! This year, we
couldn't use our precious *Rotunda* room at JSC and needed to go to
another building on the campus. That meant hauling tables and chairs,
not only between rooms, but also between
buildings.^[1](#fn:otti){.footnote rel="footnote"}^ But: That allowed us
to accept a few more people!  
Through the support by HIDA, we were able to provide catering to the
event. The attendees appreciated that this allowed them to focus even
more on their GPU hacking. Great!

Despite some Wi-Fi struggles at the beginning of the first day, the
teams were able to make great progress on their respective applications.
Of course, *progress* is very relative. For some, it meant finding a
place to hook in OpenACC statements or even compile with the NVHPC
compiler for a first time. For others, it meant refactoring their
already full-fledged GPU application and squeezing just a little more
juice out of the GPU. In any case, the team of HPC and GPU experts
available helped as much as they could and guided the teams
individually.

We already started planning the Helmholtz Hackathon 2024, most likely
for April. This time, HZDR is responsible for hosting!

::: {.footnotes role="doc-endnotes"}
1.  ::: {#fn:otti}
    Thanks to everyone helping out with logistics and especially, thank
    you, Otti! [↩](#fnref:otti){.reversefootnote role="doc-backlink"}
    :::
:::
