Pawsey Centre for Extreme-Scale Readiness
Christopher Harris1, Maciej Cytowski1 1Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre, Kensington, WA, Australia
Abstract
Modern supercomputing environments are typically built on heterogeneous node architectures based on accelerators, offering significant performance and energy efficiency. These systems introduce multiple levels of parallelism as well as complex memory architectures. As a result, research software engineers need to refactor scientific applications and adopt a programming approach that can make use of multi-level parallelism and accelerators.
Nearly 75% of the computational performance of Australia’s most powerful research supercomputer Setonix (ranked #17 on Top500 and #4 on Green500) comes from AMD MI250X GPUs. The Pawsey Centre for Extreme-Scale Readiness (PaCER) is a unique Australian program supporting researchers in developing and optimising codes on Australia’s flagship supercomputer. The focus of the PaCER program is on both extreme scale research (algorithms design, code optimisation, application and workflow readiness) and using the computational infrastructure to facilitate research for producing world-class scientific outcomes. PaCER supports research software engineers to optimise codes and workflows suitable for Australia’s most powerful research supercomputer Setonix.
PaCER is a partnership for collaboration with Pawsey and supercomputing vendors that provides early access to HPC tools and infrastructure, training, and exclusive hackathons focused on performance at scale. PaCER supports 10 projects gathering 18 international and national institutions, with more than 60 researchers and 10 research software engineers. The biggest success of the project is the creation of a supercomputing software developer community, unique and first of its kind in Australia. In this talk, we will describe the collaboration model created by PaCER and cover significant achievements of the project.
Biography
Christopher obtained a PhD in Computational Physics and a Bachelor of Science in Physics and Computer Science through the University of Western Australia. He joined Pawsey in 2012 and was promoted in 2016 to his current position of Team Lead – Senior Supercomputing Specialist. At Pawsey, Christopher has played a pivotal role in the coordination of merit allocation calls, project management of advanced technology procurements, managing Uptake Project calls, and was instrumental in the development and running of GPU training and Pawsey User Forums. He has recently led the migration of researchers to the new Setonix supercomputer.