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. more

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

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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. more.

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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. more

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. more

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. more

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. more

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.