APPLICATIONS

By Erika Strebel -- NCSA recently held the first in a series of workshops about Blue Waters, the sustained petaflop supercomputer that will come online in 2011. From Oct. 15 to 17 more than 40 researchers from around the country attended the workshop, which addressed issues researchers may face when modifying their codes for deployment on Blue Waters. "It's almost like looking underneath the hood of a car: It goes and you assume it's going to work most of the time," said Bob Wilhelmson, chief science officer at NCSA and the workshop organizer. "But when you look under the hood, it's a lot more complicated. That complexity means you have to be prepared to deal with issues that arise. This workshop is set up to talk about these issues." The workshop addressed topics such as challenges in efficiently scaling applications, strategies for debugging, and details on IBM hardware. Speakers working on different projects shared how they solved problems relating to those topics. Michigan State University astrophysicist Brian O'Shea said he found the workshop very helpful. "It seems that the climate modeling community is having similar problems to us when it comes to reducing memory overhead in their simulations," he said. "Seeing how they fixed the problem was actually very useful for me." O'Shea also said he had some interesting discussions with other workshop participants about challenges in scaling their codes. Shao-Ching Huang, a fluid mechanics researcher at the University of California at Los Angeles, said he came to the workshop to learn more about Blue Waters and to see if his group would need to change their code so it could be deployed on the machine. "It was great because I could see what other people are doing," he said. "Typically, in academic conferences, people don’t talk about their codes. They only talk about the results. It was good to have some communication with other people." Huang said he was relieved to find that his group's research is going in the right direction. "We're happy that our current work is along the same direction Blue Waters is going," he said. "We have to make some changes but not major changes." The workshop is part of a larger plan to prepare for Blue Waters before it comes online in 2011. According to Wilhelmson, it usually takes three to five years after the arrival of a machine for its user base to mature. He said it would be more practical to complete the porting or modification of codes in advance so applications are ready to run as soon as the machine is available. "Generically, we're trying to do something that's typically not done," Wilhelmson said. "Three years, four years before the arrival of the machine, we're looking at preparing applications for the machine." Those who attended the Blue Waters workshop can find presentation materials online at http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Conferences/BWworkshop/. Attendees will need their log in and password to access the site. The next workshop in the series will be in the fall of 2009.