IT4Innovations part of initiative to boost productivity of supercomputing applications

In today's world of science and technology, supercomputers are a fundamental pillar of innovation. From simulating climate change to developing new materials, these machines offer incomparable computing power. However, their full utilisation still faces significant obstacles. Developers usually need to be experts in a particular scientific discipline and computer scientists to understand and exploit the system's complexity for which their code is being designed to produce correct and efficient code. In addition, access to parallelism is usually provided through low-level interfaces that are hard to learn, and their performance behavior is difficult to predict. The stagnation of progress in high-performance computing programming techniques limits developer productivity and often delays scientific results.

This productivity gap led to the creation of the Virtual Institute – High Productivity Supercomputing (VI-HPS) in 2007, an initiative that brings together developers of tools for debugging and optimising the performance of supercomputing applications. 

The VI-HPS initiative aims to raise awareness of the need to optimise scientific software, mainly through the organisation of regular training sessions, conference workshops, and user support.

Thanks to the long-term development of the MERIC software package, IT4Innovations has become a new member of this initiative. A key tool is the MERIC runtime system, one of the EuroHPC Performance Optimisation and Productivity Centre of Excellence (POP) flagship tools. It allows users to analyse and optimise parallel applications in terms of power consumption.

At present, the VI-HPS brings together experts from 16 leading institutions worldwide. These partners, located in Europe and the United States, include Forschungszentrum Jülich, Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Linaro, and US partners Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee Knoxville.