This year’s Cray User Group meeting, an annual event that gives Cray users from around the world the opportunity to attend conferences and workshops and present papers relating to high-performance computing, was held this year in Montreal, Canada, from May 7 to 9. Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) team members participated in the meeting, which coincidentally coincided with the announcement of Frontier—the OLCF’s first exascale supercomputer and a Cray machine—scheduled for delivery in 2021. The OLCF is a US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).
ORNL researchers participated in the event through coauthored papers, panel sessions, and talks. One group, which included Veronica G. Vergara Larrea, Reuben Budiardja, Oscar Hernandez, and Wayne Joubert, received the Best Paper 1st Runner-Up award for their paper “Experiences Porting Mini-Applications to OpenACC and OpenMP on Heterogenous Systems.”
Larrea and Budiardja were also coauthors on “Large-Scale System Acceptance Testing: Procedures, Tests, and Automation.”
Cray User Group 2019
Matt Ezell and Chris Muzyn from ORNL also traveled to CUG2019 to attend the XTreme Special Interest Group (SIG) meeting, an invitation-only group that allows Cray XT, XE, and XK customers to work directly with Cray engineers to influence future developments in the product line to better serve users.
“XTreme SIG has a different set of interests than just normal Cray users because we’re worried about the scaling and facility issues that arise when you have a large system like Titan,” Muzyn said. “Basically, Cray presents to us their roadmap for their software stack or breaking changes that they think will affect us, and we can come to them and say if we have problems with a certain aspect of the stack that they’re planning.”
Other ORNL participants included Chris Fuson, who coauthored “Managing Effectively the User Software Ecosystem”; Jim Rogers, who authored “ORNL’s Frontier—Direction of Discovery” and “Statistical Analysis of Titan Reliability as it Reaches End of Life”; and Paul Peltz, who coauthored “Measuring and Mitigating Processor Performance Inconsistencies.”
A complete list of events, speakers, papers, and more from CUG2019 can be found here.
UT Battelle LLC manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit https://energy.gov/science.
