SPPEXA Doctoral Retreat & Coding Week 2014
Topic & Venue
The second Doctoral Retreat & Coding Week on "The Fast and the Curious: Exploring Efficient Algorithms on Fast Hardware" is held September 21 - October 3, 2014 at Ferienakademie, Sarntal. All PhD students within SPPEXA are invited to participate.
The workshop is coordinated by P. Neumann, J. Weidendorfer and K. Fürlinger.
Goal
The goal of this year's doctoral retreat is the analysis and optimisation of algorithms to solve a given problem on heterogeneous hardware. Based on a teamwork approach (2-3 PhD students form a single team), each team develops a hardware-aware program which solves the PDE problem as efficient as possible. The advisors introduce the problem description, algorithmic approaches to solve it, respective hardware and various programming models to exploit this hardware. They further accompany and support the teams in their code development throughout the course. The teams' software which perform best will be awarded prizes at the end of the retreat.
Method
The PhD students shortly present their projects. After 1-2 days of introduction to the topic, the students form teams (2-3 students/team) and work together on the respective project task.Besides, there will be 2 tutorials given by G. Wellein/G. Hager and C. Bischof.
A brief sketch of the main course program is given in the following (the tutorials are to be added to and integrated into that timeline):
Day 1 | The PhD students shortly present their contributions and SPPEXA-related projects in a 5-minute rodeo. Afterwards the PDE-based problem is shortly presented. |
Day 2 | Algorithmic approaches to solve the PDE are reviewed and available hardware is presented. Besides classical multicore architectures, particular emphasis is put on heterogeneous hardware such as NVidia Kepler or Xeon Phi systems, and their simultaneous exploitation with matching programming models such as OpenMP/MPI/CUDA/OpenCL. At the end of the day, students form teams. The teams are created based on the individual “needs” of the students, i.e. each PhD student looks for partners who complement the overall team knowledge on algorithmics and hardware-aware code optimisation. |
Day 3 | The teams get familiar with the different algorithmic approaches and hardware. In team discussions, an approach and a target platform are chosen. First coding sessions yield prototype implementations. |
Day 4 | Coding Day: the prototype is extended and validated. Code optimisation techniques are employed to tune the code with particular regard to the underlying hardware. |
Day 5/6 | Coding Day: the code is tuned with particular regard to the underlying hardware. Profiling techniques and tools are employed. |
Day 7 | Scaling tests, “time-to-solution” and “energy-to-solution” experiments are carried out. In the afternoon, the awarding ceremony takes place. Each team presents their results in a 10-minute rodeo and the winning teams are selected. |
Registration
Registration is required and currently opened for SPPEXA PhD students only. There are roughly 20 places available, priority will be given to those students who have not attended a doctoral retreat yet. However, you are definitely also welcome to apply if you already joined last year's doctoral retreat.
Please register via the Ferienakademie online system and provide
- Personal Data
- Educational Data
- a selection of this particular course as first choice. You may need to add another 2 courses as secondary choices. These are only required by the Ferienakademie system, but are not taken into consideration in the selection process from SPPEXA side.
- a short letter of motivation (5-10 lines), which briefly illustrates your scientific background and SPPEXA project that you work on. This letter of motivation is required for us to "tune" the course to the individual needs and prerequisites of the participants.
All other fields/ uploads in the registration process can be left blank or filled with dummy data.
Hiking
Embedded into the Ferienakademie, the doctoral retreat also offers enough free time for discussions, sharing experiences on programming and project work etc., as well as leisure time. Hiking tours are offered, so please take hiking material with you (see Ferienakademie website for information on hiking).