Eric Barton, CTO of Whamcloud will be giving a guest lecture as part of the 4th year HPC (CS402) module. The hour-long lecture will take place Friday 2nd March at 12pm in CS1.01.

The title of the talk is "HPC Filesystems". During his lecture Eric will address:

• I/O in HPC systems
• HPC Filesystems: the current state of the art
• Future challenges and research directions in this space

For more information regarding the event, please contact Andrew Mallinson acm@dcs.warwick.ac.uk or Oliver Perks o.perks@warwick.ac.uk 

A copy of the slides will be made available here.

Dr. David Lecomber of Allinea will be giving a guest lecture as part of the 4th year HPC (CS402) module. The hour long lecture will take place on Tuesday the 21st of February at 1pm in CS001.

The focus of the lecture will be parallel debugging, and will feature a hands on demo of their debugging software DDT, in addition to a presentation.

For more information please see the website Allinea - DDT.

For more information regarding the event, please contact Andrew Mallinson acm@dcs.warwick.ac.uk or Oliver Perks o.perks@warwick.ac.uk

Jim Cownie of Intel will be giving a guest lecture as part of the 4th year HPC (CS402) module. The hour-long lecture will take place Friday 17th February at 12pm in CS1.01.

The title of the talk is "Beyond threads: scalable composable parallelism with Cilk and TBB" where he will be discussing alternative programming models for new and future hardware. In particular Jim's talk will address:

• What’s happening in micro-electronics and what does it mean for architectures and HPC?
• What do we mean by “scalable” and “composable” parallelism?
• What’s wrong with threads and OpenMP?
• What isIntel® Cilk™ Plus?
• What is TBB?
• Why do they matter to HPC? (Where are we going withIntelMIC?)

For more information on these topic areas you might check out Intel Cilk or Intel TBB.

For more information regarding the event, please contact Andrew Mallinson acm at dcs dot warwick dot ac dot uk or Oliver Perks o dot perks at warwick dot ac dot uk

A copy of the slides has been made available Here.

Researchers from the Performance Computing and Visualisation group at the University of Warwick have used the UK Performance Engineering Workshop (UKPEW) 2011 to demonstrate four novel techniques for benchmarking, profiling and optimising the performance of parallel workloads.

The research covers four key areas: business computing transaction processing, high-performance computing workloads, parallel application memory requirements and the profiling of input/output activities such as parallel file writes/reads.

UKPEW is the leading UK forum for the presentation of all aspects of performance modelling and analysis of computer and telecommunication systems. This year's workshop will run from July 7-8th at the University of Bradford, UK.

For more details on the publications presented see the following papers:

• A Modular Failure-Aware Resource Allocation Architecture for Cloud Computing. (Business Transaction Processing and Data Centre Workloads)
  
• RIOT - A Parallel Input/Output Tracer. (Parallel Input/Output Profiling)
  
• WMTrace - A Lightweight Memory Allocation Tracker and Analysis Framework (Memory Usage/Profiling)
  
• The Effect of an Application Performance Modelling Tool. (Supercomputing Machine Workloads)
  

The EPSRC, as part of their recent HPC Software Development call, have announced that they are to fund a joint Warwick/Imperial project on the development of a new radiation hydrodynamics ALE code for laser fusion energy. The radiation hydrodynamics (rad-hydro) code will include the laser energy deposition, multiple material interface tracking, arbitrary equations of state (EoS) and energy transport. Stage-one, which will be completed within two years, will deliver the core rad-hydro, laser energy deposition and diffusive transport. More sophisticated models of radiation and energy transport and fusion physics will be added in stage-two. The code developed in stage-one will be of use for initial target design studies and for modeling experiments at the Central Laser Facility (CLF) at the UK Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL).