OpenACC Blog

In this blog article I describe the recent work in optimizing the computational performance of structural analysis software with OpenACC directives. Structural analysis of buildings with high-fidelity is computationally expensive in terms of required memory and time. As designers and “hazard engineers” sacrifice some accuracy by moving to low-fidelity simulations, the need for faster computing has risen in the construction industry and for regional structural assessment.

When OpenACC 3.0 was released in November 2019 the most exciting feature, in my opinion at least, is actually one that might easily be overlooked: updating our base languages. If you’re not familiar with this term, the base languages are the programming languages we, as a directive-based parallel programming model, support, namely C, C++, and Fortran. When we released OpenACC 1.0 in November of 2011 the most important programming languages in scientific and high performance computing were C99, C++98, and Fortran 2003.

Something that started as a preliminary investigation for an undergraduate class project has become the cover of a prestigious journal publication.

Discover the OpenACC talks, training and posters featured at GTC Digital

Accelerated computing is fueling some of the most exciting scientific discoveries today. For scientists and researchers seeking faster application performance, OpenACC’s directive-based programming model provides a simple yet powerful approach to accelerators without significant programming effort. With OpenACC, a single version of the source code will deliver performance portability across platforms.

The ever-increasing heterogeneity in supercomputing applications has given rise to complex compute node architectures offering multiple, heterogeneous levels of massive parallelism. Exploiting the maximum available parallelism out of such systems necessitates sophisticated programming approaches that can provide scalable and portable solutions without compromising on performance.

At SC19, we announced the latest update to the OpenACC language specification, version 3.0.  This includes a number of minor updates in response to user requests, in addition to some clarifications.  We'll start here talking about the process we use to develop the language, then talk about what's new in 3.0 and what else we're working on for subsequent versions. 

First GPU Hackathon at Sheffield brings together researchers across Ireland and the UK

The University of Sheffield partnered with NVIDIA and Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) to hold its first GPU hackathon where seven applications teams worked alongside mentors with GPU-programming expertise to accelerate their scientific codes using GPUs.
 

GPU Hackathon Participants Tackle Code Optimization for Increased Performance   
 

In today’s competitive research environment, the compute capabilities of scientific applications are critical to the success of many academic research programs. To enable new advances, institutions are turning to specialized teams that help researchers create the most efficient, scalable, and sustainable research codes possible by applying cross-disciplinary computational techniques to new and emerging areas of science.

European teams across scientific disciplines come together to advance their work with GPU acceleration
 

In this blog article I describe recent work to optimize an OpenACC code provided by the UK Met Office. This relatively small computational section has been developed as part of preparations to move to the new LFRic Weather Simulation Model.