We are pleased to inform that GPU Hackathon is coming back to Australia during the last week of March 2019. The event will be organised at the CORE Innovation Hub hackathon space in Perth’s CBD.
- The call for team proposals is now open: https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/gpu-hackathons/
- Team proposal deadline: 4th February 2019
- Notification of acceptance: 11th February 2019
Background
General-purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs) potentially offer exceptionally high memory bandwidth and performance for a wide range of applications. The challenge in utilizing such accelerators has been the difficulty in programming them. Today, these devices can be programmed with various available extensions to C++ and Fortran programming languages, like CUDA, OpenACC or OpenMP. There is also a wide range of numerical libraries which can make use of GPU acceleration.
Hackathons are five day intensive hands-on mentoring sessions. They are designed to help computational scientists port their applications to GPUs using libraries, OpenACC, CUDA and other tools. They are currently lead by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).
Hackathon goal
The goal of each hackathon is for current or prospective user groups of large hybrid CPU-GPU systems to send teams of at least 3 developers along with either (1) a (potentially) scalable application that could benefit from GPU accelerators, or (2) an application running on accelerators that need optimization. There will be intensive mentoring during this 5-day hands-on workshop, with the goal that the teams leave with applications running on GPUs, or at least with a clear roadmap of how to get there. Our mentors come from national laboratories, supercomputing centres, universities and vendors, and besides having extensive experience in programming GPUs, many of them develop the GPU-capable compilers and help define standards such as OpenACC and OpenMP.
Target audience and format
We are looking for teams of 3-5 developers with a scalable** application to port to or optimize on a GPU accelerator. Collectively the team should know the application intimately. If application is a suite of apps, no more than two per team is allowed and a minimum of 2 people per app must attend. Space will be limited to 8 teams.
(** by scalable we really mean node-to-node communication implemented, but don’t be discouraged to apply if your application is less than scalable. We are also looking for breadth of application areas.)
Ok, so how can I attend?
The entry period will stay open for only 4 weeks, per event! See events below for deadlines. Selected teams will be notified approximately a week after deadline closes.
For the full schedule and registration details please visit:
https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/gpu-hackathons/
What applications are you targeting?
No application domain specifically. We hope to have open-source community codes in need of porting individual modules. This is a great opportunity for grad students and post-docs.
What will we use to program the GPUs?
For beginners, we recommend starting with OpenACC, but we are open to other GPU programming paradigms for those that have apps that already have some partial GPU port.
Participation Costs
Participation in the training event is free of charge. The meeting room and lunches, as well as access to the supercomputers throughout the event are offered by participating sites. Mentors and learning materials introduced by the instructors are sponsored by organising institutions.
Participants are responsible for their travels to the meeting venue, their accommodation, meals (other than lunch) during the week, and personal expenses.
Who can I contact for more information or questions?
Please contact Maciej Cytowski (maciej.cytowski@pawsey.org.au) for questions related to the GPU Hackathon content.
Venue
We have chosen CORE Innovation Hub (https://www.corehub.com.au) located in Perth CBD.
Learn about outcomes of 2018 GPU Hackathon
A timeline of the OpenACC Hackathons for 2019
