MAX and The Exascale Frontier
Harnessing the potential of the exascale revolution requires a major collaborative effort between governments, academia, and industries. MAX stands at the forefront of this journey, ensuring that the materials science community is equipped and empowered for the exascale future.
The Vision:
MAX is at the frontier of designing, optimizing, and modernising simulation software for materials science, keeping it up to speed with the challenges and opportunities that the exascale era brings. With the continuous development of its lighthouse codes, MAX is set to unlock new potentials in the materials science field, ensuring that it can reap the benefits of exascale systems.
Challenge & Strategy:
The evolution of hardware is staggering. The peta- and exascale platforms offer vast computational possibilities but also introduce complexities. MAX addresses these by:
- Porting the open-source codes.
- Scaling for maximum efficiency.
- Optimising for top-tier performance on these new architectures.
Using a hands-on approach, MAX delves deep into understanding exascale-related challenges, running prototypes, and fine-tuning solutions. This learning is then crystallized into public code releases, fostering wider community development.
The Four Pillars of Exascale Transition:
- Profiling: A key process of identifying and understanding bottlenecks, gauging the exploitation of machine architecture and assessing energy efficiencies.
- Programming Paradigms: Boosting code performances via enhanced parallelization methods, utilizing standard paradigms for CPUs and exploring new ones for GPUs.
- Libraries: Demonstrating cross-technology performance portability through Domain Specific Libraries and Kernel libraries modules.
- Co-design: An interchange of data and knowledge between hardware manufacturers and software developers to ensure that hardware and software grow in connection, considering each other’s constraints and potentials.