Joint project-team with the Research and Higher Education Cluster (PRES) of Bordeaux, CNRS (LaBRI UMR 5800) and Research Initiative of the joint Laboratory INRIA-CERFACS on High-Performance Computing
HIEPACS
High-End Parallel Algorithms for Challenging Numerical Simulations
An important force which has continued to drive HPC has been to focus
on frontier milestones which consist in technical goals that
symbolize the next stage of progress in the field. In the 1990s, the
HPC community sought to achieve computing at a teraflop rate and
currently we are able to compute on the first leading architectures at a
petaflop rate. Generalist petaflop supercomputers are likely to be available in
2010-2012 and some communities are already in the early stages of
thinking about what computing at the exaflop level would be like.
For application codes to sustain a petaflop and more in the next few years,
hundreds of thousands of processor cores or more will be needed, regardless
of processor technology. Currently, a few HPC simulation codes easily scale
to this regime and major code development efforts are critical to achieve
the potential of these new systems. Scaling to a petaflop and more will involve
improving physical models, mathematical modelling, super scalable algorithms
that will require paying particular attention to acquisition, management and vizualization of huge amounts of scientific data.
In this context, the purpose of the HiePACS project is to perform efficiently
frontier simulations arising from challenging research and industrial multiscale applications. The solution of these challenging problems require a multidisciplinary approach involving applied mathematics, computational and computer sciences. In applied mathematics, it essentially involves advanced numerical schemes. In computational science, it involves massively parallel computing and the design of highly scalable
algorithms and codes to be executed on future petaflop (and beyond)
platforms.
Through this approach, HiePACS intends to contribute to all steps that go from
the design of new high-performance more scalable, robust and more accurate numerical schemes to the optimized implementations of the associated algorithms and codes
on very high performance supercomputers.
In order to address these research challenges, some researchers of the former
ScAlApplix INRIA Project-Team and some researchers of the Parallel Algorithms
Project from CERFACS have joined HiePACS
in the framework of the joint INRIA - CERFACS Laboratory on High Performance
Computing.
HiePACS will be the first Research Initiative of this joint Laboratory.
Research themes
In order to tackle these large scale scientific challenges
the HiePACS activities are organized as a continuum of research
based on a multidisciplinary approach involving applied
mathematics, computational and computer sciences. The research topics
of HiePACS are the following.
Methodological and algorithmic research
High performance computing on next generation architectures
High performance solvers for linear algebra problems
Hybrid direct/iterative solvers based on algebraic decomposition domain
Hybrid solvers based on a combination of multigrid methods and of
direct solvers
Linear Krylov solvers
Eigensolvers
High performance Fast Multipole Method for N-body problems
Algorithmics for code coupling in complex simulations
Frontier simulations arising from challenging research and industrial multiscale applications
Material Physics
Application customers of high performance linear algebra solvers
