Annual Report 2010 - Fachgruppe Informatik an der RWTH Aachen ...

Overview
Anchored at the German Research School for Simulation Sciences in Aachen and with part of
the staff located at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre as members of a Helmholtz young
investigators group, the objective of the Laboratory for Parallel Programming is to develop
tools that support simulation scientists in exploiting parallelism at massive scales. Driven by
the increasing demand for computing power and accelerated by current trends in
microprocessor design, the number of processor cores on modern supercomputers is growing
from generation to generation. For example, the IBM Blue Gene/P system at the nearby Jülich
Supercomputing Centre already features almost 300,000 cores. To efficiently utilize such
expensive devices and to advance the potential of numerical simulations running on them, we
design programming tools for the optimization of parallel codes. These tools must be both (i)
effective so that performance expectations can be met and (ii) easy to use so that programmer
productivity is maximized. A specific challenge to be addressed is the extreme scalability
requirements imposed on software tools when deployed on very large processor
configurations. Moreover, as a complement to our research activities, we teach the skills
required to write correct and efficient parallel programs in science and engineering. Students
will be introduced to this domain with the goal of subsequently applying their knowledge in a
variety of simulation projects or even of contributing to the software tools we develop
ourselves.
Acknowledgement. We would like to thank the following staff members of the Jülich
Supercomputing Centre for their contributions to the work of our group: Wolfgang Frings,
Michael Knobloch, Dr. Bernd Mohr, Peter Philippen, Morris Riedel, and Marc Schlütter.
University Courses
• SiSc Lab (WS 2010/2011)
• Parallel Programming I (SS 2010, WS 2010/2011))
• Seminar Parallel Programming (WS 2010/20112)
• Behandlung großer Datenmengen (WS 2009/2010)
• Simulation Software Engineering (WS 2009/2010)
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