HPC Programming Guidelines

Once we begin to discuss high performance computing (HPC), we necessarily must begin to discuss not only the latest hardware technologies, but also the latest software technologies that make exploiting the capabilities of that hardware easier.

Hardware Developments

There are a number of different organisations and projects that are generating roadmaps about the current and future technologies that are (or may be in the future) available in the HPC space. Eurolab-4-HPC has summarised many of these in the Eurolab-4-HPC Long-Term Vision on High-Performance Computing. Here we focus on a small subset of the content of these roadmaps (primarily from Eurolab-4-HPC and ETP4HPC) that are most likely to impact the target community of E-CAM in the 3-5 year horizon.

• Currently Available Hardware
  • Intel Many-core
  • NVIDIA GPU
  • FPGA
  • Impact of Deep Learning
• Future HPC Hardware in Europe
  • Emerging hardware architectures relevant to exascale computing

Software Developments

It is clear that the hardware developments described above will greatly impact the software development practices of the E-CAM development community. For this reason, we highlight the the language standards, runtime environments, workflows and software tools that can help E-CAM developers to deliver high quality, resilient software for current and next generation machines.

• Programming for HPC
  • C++17
  • Fortran 2015
  • The (potential) role of Python
  • Open Standards
  • Runtime System Approaches
  • Feedback for software developers

Accessing Resources

All of the above is academic unless you have access to resources to develop and test new software. There are many potential ways to access HPC resources, we simply highlight a limited set of the possibilities here.

• Accessing HPC Resources in Europe