LIT guest workshop in the Czech Republic

Education, 13 December 2018

On 26 – 27 November 2018, the HybriLIT team from the Laboratory of Information Technologies JINR held a workshop on parallel programming technologies within the HybriLIT computing platform at Pilsen and Prague on the invitation of the University of West Bohemia (Pilsen) and the Institute of Experimental and Applied Physics of the Czech Technical University jointly with colleagues from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics of the Technical University of Košice.

The programme of the course included lectures and practical lessons on parallel programming for calculations at the hybrid computational architectures on the basis of MPI+OpenMP, CUDA and OpenCL programming technologies that were held by LIT staff members Alexander Ayriyan, Elena Zemlyanaya, Maksim Zuev, and Jan Busa. Lessons dedicated to heterogeneous computational platform HybriLIT and work at it were provided by Margarita Kirakosyan and Shushanik Torosyan. Moreover, the programme of the workshop included review lectures on the use of parallel programming for solving a wide range of scientific tasks, in particular, for solving tasks of the mega-science project NICA. In the frames of this part of the guest workshop, Jan Broulim (the University of West Bohemia) made a report in which he demonstrated how a new method of error diagnostics and correcting in the data transport had been developed and tested at HybriLIT, which would allow increase in the effectiveness of decoding. Jointly with Alexander Ayriyan, he held practical lessons on introduction to programming at OpenCL. Stefan Berezny (the Technical University of Košice) devoted his lessons to programming algorithms in MATLAB.

Visit of the LIT staff was organized in the frames of cooperation of the Czech Republic with the Joint Institute in accordance with the programme of Plenipotentiary Representative of the Czech Republic at JINR in the framework of the project “3+3: Realization of heterogeneous distributed HPC complex for physical and mathematical applications”.

The heterogeneous platform “HybriLIT” is a part of the JINR Multifunctional Information and Computing Centre (MICC) of the Laboratory of Information Techologies JINR, Dubna. The heterogeneous platform consists of the supercomputer “Govorun” and the education and testing polygon“HybriLIT”.

The Govorun supercomputer is a two-component system: a CPU component based on the latest Intel architectures (Intel Xeon Phi and Intel Skylake processors) and GPU components based on NVIDIA DGX-1 Volta nodes.

The education and testing polygon has a heterogeneous structure of computational nodes and allows develop parallel applications for calculations on various computing architectures, such as multi-core processors, coprocessors Intel Xeon Phi and NVIDIA graphics processor line (Testla K20, K40, K80), as well as conduct training courses on parallel programming technologies, allowing students to master the work on the latest computing architectures.