Science Node, a free online publication developed in collaboration with organizations in the US and Europe, has featured an article with and about Moritz Kreutzer, our recent PhD graduate and SPPEXA PhD Award winner, focusing on his work with performance engineering for sparse linear algebra: https://sciencenode.org/feature/Another%20step.php.

We are proud to announce that Moritz Kreutzer, who recently defended his PhD thesis titled “Performance Engineering for Exascale-Enabled Sparse Linear Algebra Building Blocks,” was awarded the 2017 SPPEXABest PhD Award. Congratulations!

During the SPPEXA annual Plenary Meeting on March 20, Christie Louis Alappat received the SPPEXA undergraduate thesis award for his master thesis about “Implementation and Performance Engineering of the Kaczmarz Method for Parallel Systems.” Christie is now continuing his work as a PhD student within the ESSEX project at the University of Erlangen.

Jeffrey Vetter (ORNL/GATech) presenting at the Performance Modeling workshop.

Our workshop at ISC High Performance 2015 in Frankfurt on July 16, 2015, was well attended, and was considered by all speakers a great success. Performance modeling experts from different groups across the world presented their view of this important field, and interesting (and sometimes heated) discussions emerged. We saw a broad spectrum of methods, from analytical modeling to frameworks and from scaling analysis to machine learning approaches. Power and energy consumption also received due attention. In his keynote, Bill Gropp (UIUC) emphasized the importance of knowing the inherent hardware bottlenecks of numerical software in order to be able to put performance figures into perspective – a scalable application can nevertheless be extremely inefficient (in fact, there is a high probability that it is).

All slides can be found on the workshop page.

The Workshop takes place in  Greifswald, Germany, March 23-25, 2015. It focuses on sparse linear solvers for eigenvalue problems with applications in mathematics and natural sciences, and it highlights important aspects in designing and implementing numerical methods and software building blocks for future exascale systems. Performance engineering, advanced parallel programming techniques and fault-tolerance strategies crossing the traditional boundaries of software layers will be addressed. The workshop website has additional information.

The workshop is organized by the Institute of Physics of the University of Greifswald (IfP), and held in the Alfried-Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald.

The workshop is supported by the Stiftung Alfried-Krupp-Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald, by the German Research Foundation (DFG) through Priority Programme “Software for Exascale Computing” (SPPEXA), and by the Intel corporation.

The popular tutorial “Node-Level Performance Engineering” was presented to SPPEXA PhD students at the “Second SPPEXA Doctoral Retreat” at Sarntal, South Tyrol, from September 24-26, 2014.

During the summer term 2014, PIs of the SPPEXA projects ESSEX, TerraNeo, and ExaStencils, together with the Central Institute for Scientific Computing (ZISC)  have joined forces to organize a PhD seminar. The seminar gave PhD students from these SPPEXA-funded projects an opportunity to speak about the current state of their work. Link: http://www.zisc.uni-erlangen.de/veranstaltungen/sppexa.shtml

G. Hager and G. Wellein are going to present a two-day short course on “Node-Level Performance Engineering” at DLR Köln on March 13-14, 2013. The course may be attended by all SPPEXA project investigators and involved students. Registration is mandatory. Details can be found in the agenda: SPPEXA-ESSEX-PE-Tutorial-announce.pdf