The OpenMP 4.0 specification is moving quickly to implementation through the GNU toolchain and Clang. TechEnablement reported that GNU 4.9.1 now supports OpenMP in C/C++ and Fortran plus we now have confirmation that OpenMP will run on ARM64 as well, or as Jakub Jelinek wrote, "All architectures where libgomp is supported (which is essentially all which have pthreads)." The … [Read more...]
Part 1: Load-Balanced, Strong-Scaling Task-Based Parallelism on GPUs
Achieve a 7.4x speedup with 8 GPUs over the performance of a single GPU through the use of task-based parallelism and concurrent kernels! Traditional GPU programming typically views the GPU as a monolithic device that runs a single parallel kernel across the entire device. This approach is fantastic when one kernel can provide enough work to keep the GPU busy. The conundrum is … [Read more...]
Call for Papers: Women in HPC at Supercomputing 2014 due July 31
Awareness of the need for diversity in computing is growing. The Women in High Performance Computing (WHPC) is welcoming submissions from female early career researchers and post doctoral students to present a talk or poster on their work in any field of HPC at the workshop. Submission are due by July 31, 2014. Click here for more details. The WHPC SC14 call is the … [Read more...]
GCC likely to support both OpenACC and Intel Xeon Phi Offload Pragmas in 2015
It looks like GCC will be supporting both OpenACC and Intel Xeon Phi offload pragmas in future releases. Perhaps the GNU compiler chain will become the melting pot where OpenACC and OpenMP 4.0 pragmas merge to become a single unified syntax. According to Nathan Sidwell, Director of Sourcery Services at Mentor Embedded, their OpenACC effort is working to “make the underlying … [Read more...]
South Africa Team Wins Their Second Student Supercomputing Competition At ISC14
Congratulations to the South African students who won their second ISC14 Student Supercomputing Competition! In 2013 the South African students were considered the underdog due to their youth and lack of competitive experience. This year the team from the South African Centre for High Performance Computing won the overall 2014 competition. To win, students have to build a … [Read more...]
Farber to Teach All-Day Tutorial At Supercomputing Nov 16 2014
Supercomputing 2014 recently approved my proposal for an all-day class "From 'Hello World' to Exascale Using x86, GPUs and Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessors" (tut106s1), at The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC14). I hope to see you on Sunday November 16, 2014 in New Orleans,! Abstract Both GPUs and Intel Xeon Phi … [Read more...]
Intel Knights Landing: Claimed 4x An NVIDIA K40 (on some applications)
Joe Curley (Director of Marketing in the Technical Computing Group at Intel Corporation) just completed his webinar on BrightTalk, "The Faster Path to Discovery: New Details on the Intel® Xeon Phi™ Product Family" that disclosed new details on the upcoming Knights Landing massively=parallel chip including a claimed 4x performance improvement over the NVIDIA K40 on some … [Read more...]
Assessing ROI in the Cloud For HPC and Enterprise
Just in time for ISC 2014! My latest Scientific Computing article, "Assessing ROI in the Cloud For HPC and Enterprise" that addresses the complicated decision, "to purchase infrastructure or run remotely in the cloud?" … [Read more...]
ARM64 with CUDA Early Access Boards Now Available
The X-Gene™ ARM64 and CUDA Development Platform for High Performance Computing (HPC) is now available to order from Cirrascale, the US Applied Micro (APM) integration partner. This board represents an entry point for ARM64 + CUDA into the enterprise markets as well. The X-Gene™ board features custom high-performance ARM v8 processor based on an advanced 64-bit ARM … [Read more...]
Women Who Code – Google’s $50M Program Kicks Off
Just weeks after releasing its first diversity report, Google is backing a new effort with $50M to bring more women into computer science. The new program is called Made with Code, which includes a mix of coding projects, partnerships with youth organizations to get more females involved in creating and writing computer software. This is just the latest effort by … [Read more...]









