In late August 2014 we entered the next step of our HPC systems installation phase: the new Cray XC40 super computer is installed. It delivers a peak performance of 4 Petaflops, outperforming the maximum performance of the previous system, Hermit, by a factor of about 4! This new HPC system provides 500 TB of Main Memory and about 6 PB of disc space. It is equipped with about 100,000 computing cores and features Intel’s next generation of micro processors, which are designed to optimize power savings and promise significant performance enhancements.

 

The three day optimization course covering the main topics of porting applications for the Cray XC40 system-Hornet, application profiling, application debugging, and parallel IO. Tools provided on the system are presented in talks and live demos. Furthermore a series of Hands-on sessions give the opportunity to exercise also with own applications.  

An increasing issue in parallel computing is the efficient handling of reading and writing files. The one day workshop "Efficient parallel IO" offers users the ability to gain insight on how to optimize the IO of an application. It shows methods and tools for parallel IO including MPI-IO, HDF5, NetCDF. Thus the time spend in reading and writing files can be significantly reduced, increasing the total efficiency of application.

 

The workshop does include some Cray specific information about tools but is still useful for IO on other systems as well.

https://events.prace-ri.eu/event/335/