Past Projects

Project duration: January 2017 - June 2020
Funding: DFG Performance Engineering for Scientific Software

The aim of the ProPE project was to develop a blueprint for a sustainable, structured and process-oriented service infrastructure in the field of performance engineering (PE) of application codes in high-performance computing with a focus on German Tier-2 and Tier-3 HPC centers. This should enable application scientists to use HPC systems with demonstrably optimal hardware resource utilization and thus reduce IT-related costs. To this end, the HPC centers in Aachen, Erlangen and Dresden have jointly evaluated, developed, and implemented processes, methods, and tools.

The project and the Pro-PE initiatives coordinated by Aachen were reported on several times in the IT Center Blog: On the one hand, information was provided about the supra-regional support for HPC users, which enables enquiries from HPC users to be answered in a structured manner and according to expertise across all centers. Furthermore, the idea and implementation of the HPC- WIKI created in ProPE was explained. In addition, an HPC performance monitoring system was set up at all centers as part of the project. The automatic monitoring at the IT Center shows, for example, the flop/s and memory bandwidth of a computing node and thus enables a low-threshold analysis of the performance data of all HPC jobs. Since August 2023, this data has not only been available to the HPC experts at the IT Center but can also be viewed by all HPC users themselves. Information on this can be found on IT Center Help.

The experiences from the ProPE project were published in a white paper, which also serves as a blueprint for the German Council of Science and Humanities for nationwide use. The IT Center also reported on the project results and their further applicability in its 2021-22 annual report. (only in german)

The mechanical behavior of semi-crystalline thermoplastic parts is greatly influenced by the microstructure. Therefore the accurate prediction of microstructure is important for part design. Today, simulation programs like the microstructure simulation software SphäroSim which has been developed at the RWTH Institute of Plastics Processing (IKV) restrict the simulation to small areas of the part. In order to develop algorithms that can predict finer structures and to simulate the microstructure in an entire injection moulded part, it is necessary to make use of the compute power from supercomputers.
In this project that was carried out in the period of May 2012 to April 2013, the software SphäroSim was parallelized with the Message Passing Interface (MPI) and an additional multithreading layer in order to leverage the compute power of a compute cluster for the first time. As Intel’s Xeon Phi architecture was promising with respect to further performance gain, the parallel application was further ported to this Many Integrated Core (MIC) processor. Overall, this project enables the improvement in scaling from original few threads of a desktop computer to over 1000 cores of today’s supercomputers. This allows calculating almost the entire morphology of complex parts.

Bull Germany and the IT Center have joined forces to optimize HPC standard applications, such as OpenFOAM, for hybrid cluster architectures. Furthermore, the collaboration seeks to investigate methods and approaches to make high-performance computers more energy-efficient. In this context, the researchers focus on methods such as the application-dependent control of the CPU frequency, but also optimizations on the level of applications.

The IT Center actively supports the design of the digitization processes at RWTH Aachen University. Against this background, the IT Center has been dealing with the topic of "Cloud" in the university environment at the RWTH for some time now. more

In conjunction with the introduction of Claix-2018 a joint technical collaboration was established between RWTH and NEC to evaluate porting and the performance of different production codes to the vector architecture SX-Aurora Tsubasa. In this context investigations of XNS, ZFS, VASP, CIAO, Quantum ESPRESSO and CP2K were realized. Furthermore an OpenMP Device Offloading Infrastructure was developed and evaluated with the SPEC-hpc and SPEC-Accel Benchmarks. This effort was complemented with a dissemination of this knowledge at different Workshops.

Cooperation between the High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory in Kingston, Ontario, Canada (HPCVL) and the IT Center at RWTH Aachen University
 

The long-standing partnership within the framework of the Center of Excellence Program of Sun Microsystems is to lead to closer cooperation between the HPCVL and the IT Center of RWTH Aachen University. A cooperation agreement creates the framework for the exchange of experience and joint research in high-performance computing. The HPCVL is a joint high-performance computing center of five universities and two colleges in the province of Ontario, Canada. The IT Center is the central IT provider of RWTH Aachen University with a focus on high-performance computing and virtual reality.

The intensification of agriculture causes a high loss of species-rich grasslands. In Central Europe, these semi-natural grasslands belong to the landscapes with the highest biodiversity. Only a well-directed management will maintain these valuable areas. The GraS-Model (Grassland-Succession-Model) was developed as decision support system for the grassland areas of the Eifel National Park. This dynamic, process based, spatially-explicit (raster-based) simulation model predicts the development of grassland areas over 100 years.

A highly detailed spatial resolution is necessary to ensure a realistic simulation, as even small landscape elements are often crucial for the development. Due to its high complexity and the large-scale landscape modeled, the GraS-Model already exceeds the available computer main memory when applied to the Eifel National Park. The Parallelization of the model allows running simulations on a cluster. This high-performance-computing is essential to ensure realistic simulations with a high predictive power, thus allowing the application and refinement of the GraS-Model as decision support system for the landscape management. 

Copyright: ;© JARA-HPC

The intensification of agriculture causes a high loss of species-rich grasslands. In Central Europe, these semi-natural grasslands belong to the landscapes with the highest biodiversity. Only a well-directed management will maintain these valuable areas. The GraS-Model (Grassland-Succession-Model) was developed as decision support system for the grassland areas of the Eifel National Park. This dynamic, process based, spatially-explicit (raster-based) simulation model predicts the development of grassland areas over 100 years.

A highly detailed spatial resolution is necessary to ensure a realistic simulation, as even small landscape elements are often crucial for the development. Due to its high complexity and the large-scale landscape modeled, the GraS-Model already exceeds the available computer main memory when applied to the Eifel National Park. The Parallelization of the model allows running simulations on a cluster. This high-performance-computing is essential to ensure realistic simulations with a high predictive power, thus allowing the application and refinement of the GraS-Model as decision support system for the landscape management. 

The time-dependent behavior of parallel simulation codes -- in particular when adaptive algorithms are employed -- is often irregular, making the understanding of performance dynamics an essential prerequisite for program optimization. While existing performance analysis tools typically provide detailed information along spatial dimensions like processes and nodes, performance dynamics has so far been a neglected aspect.

To support developers of parallel simulation codes with optimizing their codes, the LMAC project aims to extend the established performance analysis tools Vampir, Scalasca and Periscope with new functionality to automatically examine performance dynamics. In addition, the University of Oregon, associated partner, complements the project with corresponding extensions to the performance tool TAU. Further information on the project can be found on the VI-HPS website.

Copyright: ;© JARA-HPC

The continuous simulation of process chains on a macroscopic and microscopic scale enables the optimization of production processes for the manufacture of metallic components and the fast adaptation of processes to changing framework conditions. The interdisciplinary cooperation of the research center Access e.V., the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) and the IT Center of RWTH Aachen University in the framework of the Excellence Cluster "Integrative Production Technology for High-Wage Countries" aims at reducing the time that is needed to simulate the microscopic structure within a process chain based on the phase-field method. For this purpose, the software MICRESS®, developed by Access e.V., is parallelized for shared-memory systems by employing the OpenMP programming paradigm. We attach particular importance to the acceleration of the used numerical solvers for partial differential equations and to the handling of dynamic data structures for the description of moving boundary surfaces. 

Using performance analysis tools and optimizing code for HPC architectures is a cumbersome task which often requires in depth expert knowledge in HPC. Because of current trends of computing architectures to use accelerators, more cores and deeper memory hierarchies, this complexity is going to increase further in the foreseeable future. Therefore, the POP (Performance, Optimization and Productivity) project offers services in performance analysis and performance optimization to code developers in industry and academia to connect code developers and HPC experts. This shall allow to integrate performance optimization in the software development process of HPC applications. The POP project gathers experts from the Barcelona Supercomputer Center (BSC), the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), the Numerical Algebra Group (NAG), TERATEC und the IT Center of RWTH Aachen University.

POP is one of the eight Centers of Excellence in HPC that have been promoted by the European Commission within Horizon 2020.

Further information on the project and how you can engage the services of POP can be found on the POP website.

SILC - Scalable Infrastructure for the Automated Performance Analysis Nowadays applications in the field of high performance computing have to utilize hundreds or thousands of compute cores to make efficient use of modern compute architectures. A variety of performance analysis tools can be used to assist programmers in the process of application tuning to utilize the cores in a good way. These different analysis tools all collect performance data which is then analyzed and presented to the programmer in a different way. For a programmer this means that similar data is collected with different tools using different options. Within the SILC project a uniform measurement infrastructure (Score-P) was developed to support multiple different performance tools. This eliminates the need to measure performance data several times with different tools, but it still allows using all different analysis tools to interpret the data. Tools which can use the data generated by Score-P are Vampir , Scalasca, Periscope and TAU.

Partners of the SILC project, which was funded by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), are the RWTH Aachen University, TU Dresden, TU Munich, GNS Gesellschaft für numerische Simmulation mbH, Forschungszentrum Jülich and the associated partners University of Oregon and German Research School for Simulation Science. Further information on the project can be found on the VI-HPS website.

High-performance clusters often provide multiple MPI libraries and compiler suites for parallel programming. This means that parallel programming tools which often depend on a specific MPI library, and sometimes on a specific compiler, need to be installed multiple times, once for each combination of MPI library and compiler which has to be supported. In addition, over time, newer versions of the tools also get released and installed. One way to manage many different versions of software packages, used by many computing centers all over the world, is the "module" software. However, each center provides a different set of tools, has a different policy on how and where to install different software packages, and how to name the different versions. UNITE tries to improve this situation for debugging and performance tools. 

RWTH Aachen University has entered into a cooperation treaty with Microsoft with the intention of developing here in the IT Center the application of Windows operating system in the range of High Performance Computing (HPC). Engineering should be supported by the use of a highly productive infrastructure under Windows HPC server 2008, as well as by the know-how under OpenMP or with MPI. Microsoft has established the IT Center of the RWTH Aachen University as a european Cluster Competence Center with the focus on Windows High Performance Server 2008. The achieved results should be opened to the public.