The RISC2 project was also represented, having made it possible, through monetary support, for some students from Latin America to take part – thus continuing its work in the social field. In total, 60 students from 25 different nationalities took part in the initiative.

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As the utility and usage of HPC infrastructures increases, more computational and storage power is required to efficiently handle the amount of targeted applications. In fact, many HPC centers are now aiming at exascale supercomputers supporting at least one exaFLOPs (1018 operations per second), which represents a thousandfold increase in processing power over the first petascale computer deployed in 2008 [RD+15]. Although this is a necessary requirement for handling the increasing number of HPC applications, there are several outstanding challenges that still need to be tackled so that this extra computational power can be fully leveraged. 

Management of large infrastructures and heterogeneous workloads: By adding more compute and storage nodes, one is also increasing the complexity of the overall HPC distributed infrastructure and making it harder to monitor and manage. This complexity is increased due to the need of supporting highly heterogeneous applications that translate into different workloads with specific data storage and processing needs [ECS+17]. For example, on the one hand, traditional scientific modeling and simulation tasks require large slices of computational time, are CPU-bound, and rely on iterative approaches (parametric/stochastic modeling). On the other hand, data-driven Big Data applications contemplate shorter computational tasks, that are I/O bound and, in some cases, have real-time response requirements (i.e., latency-oriented). Also, many of the applications leverage AI and machine learning tools that require specific hardware (e.g., GPUs) in order to be efficient.

Support for general-purpose analytics: The increased heterogeneity also demands that HPC infrastructures are now able to support general-purpose AI and BigData applications that were not designed explicitly to run on specialised HPC hardware [KWG+13]. Therefore, developers are not required to significantly change their applications so that they can execute efficiently at HPC clusters.

Avoiding the storage bottleneck: By only increasing the computational power and improving the management of HPC infrastructures it may still not be possible to fully harmed the capabilities of these infrastructures. In fact, Big Data and AI applications are data-driven and require efficient data storage and retrieval from HPC clusters. With an increasing number of applications and heterogeneous workloads, the storage systems supporting HPC may easily become a bottleneck [YDI+16, ECS+17]. Indeed, as pointed out by several studies, the storage access time is one of the major bottlenecks limiting the efficiency of current and next-generation HPC infrastructures. 

In order to address these challenges, RISC2 partners are exploring: New monitoring and debugging tools that can aid in the analysis of complex AI and Big Data workloads in order to pinpoint potential performance and efficiency bottlenecks, while helping system administrators and developers on troubleshooting these [ENO+21].

Emerging virtualization technologies, such as containers, that enable users to efficiently deploy and execute traditional AI and BigData applications in an HPC environment, without requiring any changes to their source-code [FMP21].  

The Software-Defined Storage paradigm in order to improve the Quality-of-Service (QoS) for HPC’s storage services when supporting hundreds to thousands of data-intensive AI and Big Data applications [DLC+22, MTH+22].  

To sum up, these three research goals, and respective contributions, will enable the next generation of HPC infrastructures and services that can efficiently meet the demands of Big Data and AI workloads. 

References

[DLC+22] Dantas, M., Leitão, D., Cui, P., Macedo, R., Liu, X., Xu, W., Paulo, J., 2022. Accelerating Deep Learning Training Through Transparent Storage Tiering. IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing (CCGrid)  

[ECS+17] Joseph, E., Conway, S., Sorensen, B., Thorp, M., 2017. Trends in the Worldwide HPC Market (Hyperion Presentation). HPC User Forum at HLRS.  

[FMP21] Faria, A., Macedo, R., Paulo, J., 2021. Pods-as-Volumes: Effortlessly Integrating Storage Systems and Middleware into Kubernetes. Workshop on Container Technologies and Container Clouds (WoC’21). 

[KWG+13] Katal, A., Wazid, M. and Goudar, R.H., 2013. Big data: issues, challenges, tools and good practices. International conference on contemporary computing (IC3). 

[NCR+18] Netto, M.A., Calheiros, R.N., Rodrigues, E.R., Cunha, R.L. and Buyya, R., 2018. HPC cloud for scientific and business applications: Taxonomy, vision, and research challenges. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR). 

[MTH+22] Macedo, R., Tanimura, Y., Haga, J., Chidambaram, V., Pereira, J., Paulo, J., 2022. PAIO: General, Portable I/O Optimizations With Minor Application Modifications. USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST). 

[OG+15] Osseyran, A. and Giles, M. eds., 2015. Industrial applications of high-performance computing: best global practices. 

[RD+15] Reed, D.A. and Dongarra, J., 2015. Exascale computing and big data. Communications of the ACM. 

[ENO+21] Esteves, T., Neves, F., Oliveira, R., Paulo, J., 2021. CaT: Content-aware Tracing and Analysis for Distributed Systems. ACM/IFIP Middleware conference (Middleware). 

[YDI+16] Yildiz, O., Dorier, M., Ibrahim, S., Ross, R. and Antoniu, G., 2016, May. On the root causes of cross-application I/O interference in HPC storage systems. IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS). 

By INESC TEC

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The RISC2 project supported the participation of five Latin American students, boosting the exchange of experience and knowledge between Europe and Latin America on the HPC fields. After the Summer School, the students whose participation supported by RISC2 wrote on a blog post: “We have brought home a new vision of the world of computing, new contacts, and many new perspectives that we can apply in our studies and share with our colleagues in the research groups and, perhaps, start a new foci of study”.

Distinguished scientists in the HPC field gave lectures and tutorials addressing architecture, software stack and applications for HPC and AI, invited talks, a panel on The Future of HPC and a final keynote by Prof Mateo Valero. On the last day of the week, the ACM School merged with MATEO2022 (“Multicore Architectures and Their Effective Operation 2022”), attended by world-class experts in computer architecture in the HPC field.

The ACM Europe Summer School joined 50 participants, from 28 different countries, from young computer science researchers and engineers, outstanding MSC students, and senior undergraduate students.

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The BCS-CNS hosted the ACM Summer School 2022. From 29 August to 2 September 2022, students, researchers, and professors from all over the world gathered to discuss High-Performance Computing (HPC), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning.

The RISC2 project supported the participation of Latin American students. We had the opportunity to travel from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Costa Rica to connect with leading researchers in HPC at the ACM Summer School and boost our professional careers. For some of us, it was our first time in Europe. For others, it was the first time we had the chance to visit a research centre that hosts a TOP500 supercomputer such as Mare Nostrum. We shared our latent curiosity to learn, meet, and relate to people from all over the world.

We were welcomed to the ACM School by a legend in the world of HPC, Professor Mateo Valero, director of the BSC. World-class lecturers and researchers introduced us to topics that we had only read about in scientific articles, like specialized processors for machine learning, neuromorphic engineering, technical software development for new architectures, and vector accelerators. We could delve into the state-of-the-art of many lines of study, opening our minds in countless ways. We faced new challenges and found new perspectives that would allow us to advance our research projects and complete our graduate degrees.

Throughout the week, we met colleagues from all over the world with different lines of research, projects, and fields of study. This opportunity allowed us to create new relationships, nurtured us at a cultural level, and built new ties of friendship and possible professional contributions in the future, connecting Europe with Latin America. Likewise, we strengthened relations between Latin Americans, usually separated despite being neighbours. Conversations that initially arose with academic topics ended with more trivial issues, all accompanied by a cup of coffee or even a mate brought directly from Argentina. These conversations go hand in hand with great minds and unique people.

Professors like Valerie Taylor from the Argonne National Laboratory, Charlotte Frenkel from the Delft University of Technology, Luca Benini from the Università di Bologna and ETHZ, and Jordi Torres from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, among many others, allowed us to be part of a world that, in many cases, is hard to reach for many students in Latin America. Thanks to the RISC2 project, we had the opportunity to be part of this process, learn and bring back to our countries the knowledge about state of the art in HPC architectural trends and a new vision of the world of computing.

At the end of an intense week of study and conversations, of new knowledge and new friends, we returned to our countries of origin. Together, we have brought a new vision of the world of computing, new contacts, and many new perspectives that we can apply in our studies and share with our colleagues in the research groups and, perhaps, start new foci of study.

Finally, we hope to return and meet again, make new friends, share the knowledge acquired and our experiences, and further deepen the ties within Latin America and between Europe and Latin America. We hope that other fellow Latin Americans will also benefit from similar opportunities and that they can live these kinds of experiences. The RISC2 project gave us a unique opportunity, so we want to thank them and all of those who made it possible.

By:

• Claudio Aracena, University of Chile
• Christian Asch, CeNAT, Costa Rica
• Luis Alejandro Torres Niño, UIS, Colombia
• Matías Mazzanti, UBA, Argentina
• Matheus Borges Seidel, UFRJ, Brazil

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“Jack Dongarra’s contributions to the fields of computational science and high-performance computing are fundamental for the advancement of advanced computing in the exascale era”, says Alvaro Coutinho.

This initiative took place under a Seminar Cycle, promoted by PESC/Coppe, which aims to bring accessible lectures given by experienced researchers and professors to a wider audience who works in the HPC field in Brazil. The talk is in Portuguese, and it is available in YouTube at the link: https://youtu.be/zGbZic4c21o.

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