As we embrace the era of exascale computing, scalable performance and fast development on extremely heterogeneous hardware have become ever more important aspects for high-performance computing (HPC). Scientists and developers with interest in Julia for HPC need to know how to leverage the capabilities of the language and ecosystem to address these issues and which tools and best practices can help them to achieve their performance goals.
What do we mean by HPC? While HPC can be mainly associated with running large-scale physical simulations like computational fluid dynamics, molecular dynamics, high-energy physics, climate models etc., we use a more inclusive definition beyond the scope of computational science and engineering. More recently, rapid prototyping with high-productivity languages like Julia, machine learning training, data management, computer science research, research software engineering, large scale data visualization and in-situ analysis have expanded the scope for defining HPC. For us, the core of HPC is not to run simple test problems faster but involves everything that enables solving challenging problems in simulation or data science, on heterogeneous hardware platforms, from a high-end workstation to the world's largest supercomputers powered with different vendors CPUs and accelerators (e.g. GPUs).
In this minisymposium, we will review the current state of affairs of Julia for HPC in a series of talks. The focus of these overview talks is to introduce and highlight the aspects that make the Julia language beneficial for scientific HPC workflows such as scalable deployments, compute accelerator support, user support, and HPC applications. In addition, we have reserved some time for participants to interact, discuss and share the current landscape of their investments in Julia HPC, while encouraging networking with their colleagues over topics of common interest.
The minisymposium will include presentations of the following confirmed speakers and topics (exact titles and schedule will be finalized later):
Giacomo Aloisi (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) “SeismicWaves.jl: a Julia package for Full-Waveform Inversion on multi-xPUs”
Tim Besard (JuliaHub) “Update on CUDA.jl and oneAPI.jl changes”
Sriharsha Kandala (California Institute of Technology, USA) “Juggling GPUs: handling multiple devices for distributed computing”
Bernat Font and Gabriel Weymouth (TU Delft) “WaterLily.jl: A fast and flexible CFD solver with heterogeneous execution”
Benedict Geihe (University of Cologne, Germany) “libtrixi: serving legacy codes in earth system modeling with fresh Julia CFD”
Boris Kaus (JGU Mainz, Germany) & Ludovic Räss (University Lausanne, Switzerland) "Developing Supercomputing Geoscience Applications using Composable Julia Tools"
Samuel Omlin (CSCS, Switzerland) "Seamless transition from single-core Python to Julia Multi-GPU"
Julian Samaroo (MIT, USA) "Applications of Distributed Task Parallelism"
You Wu (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) "Ginkgo.jl: Harnessing GPU Power for Solving Sparse Linear Systems"
The overall goal of the minisymposium is to identify and summarize current practices, limitations, and future developments as Julia experiences growth and positions itself in the larger HPC community due to its appeal in scientific computing. It also exemplifies the strength of the existing Julia HPC community that collaboratively prepared this event. We are an international, multi institutional, and multi disciplinary group interested in advancing Julia for HPC applications in our academic and national laboratory environments. We welcome new people from diverse backgrounds sharing our interest and would like to bring them together in this minisymposium.
With this being the third installment of the Julia for HPC miniysmposium at JuliaCon, this minisymposium has become a gathering place for all HPC enthusiasts at JuliaCon. In this spirit, the minisymposium will also serve as a starting point for further Julia HPC activities at JuliaCon 2024 such as a hands-on workshop on Julia for high-performance computing. Furthermore, a number of talks will be dedicated to topics relevant for HPC developers and users alike.
