Oak Ridge Lab preps code for supercomputer transition

As the Oak Ridge National Laboratory prepares for the installation of its new Summit supercomputer, engineers are working to standardize application development tools that will work on both the lab’s current Titan supercomputer and the new Summit.

With tools capable of running across the current, staging and future platforms, users can continue improving their codes and analyses with minimal interruption, even as supercomputers are regularly replaced.

Although both systems use a hybrid architecture, Titan uses AMD Opteron processors and NVIDIA Kepler graphics processing units. Summit will run on IBM Power9 CPUs and NVIDIA Volta GPUs. In preparation for the 2018 transition, the Oak Ridge team is using Allinea’s MAP as portable performance analysis tool to ensure applications that run on present and future platforms alike.

MAP provides in depth analysis and bottleneck pinpointing for parallel, multithreaded or single threaded C, C++, Fortran and F90 codes. It checks memory usage, floating-point calculations and power usage at a glance so that users can easily see the performance of their code, Allinea officials said.

"MAP is user-friendly, and allows even users who may not have extensive experience with performance analysis to easily and quickly begin to understand and improve their codes," said David Bernholdt, distinguished research staff member at ORNL. "The ability to offer a common set of tools on Titan, the new development platforms for Summit, and Summit itself will also be a major benefit to users," he added.