HPC-LAB gang fall 2008, Fall 2009 photo TBT

HPC LAB at IDI/NTNU

Rune Jensen and Lab Director Anne C. Elster

Current Research Interests: High-performance scientific computing, including: Supercomputing incl. Cluster and GRID computing Parallell algorithms for novel architectures including GPUs and Cell. Performance analysis and benchmarking of HPC platforms, Auto-tunable algorithms, Computational steering, Software environments for testing and developing parallel scientific codes, Linear Solvers, incl. parallel approaches, and PIC particle codes. Algorithms for signal processing including: Fast linear bit-reversal algorithms and algorithms for ADSL & VDSL. Hardware info. (incl. donations from NVIDIA) Current HPC-lab Members (PostDoc(TBA), 2 PhD, 5+ Master) HPC group/HPC-Lab alumni -- incl. over 30 master students HPC-LAB Publications Publications -- authored and co-authored by Dr. Anne C. Elster HPC group alumni Masters thesese CERN Collaborations (incl. link to articles re. CERN students from Elster's class)

HPC-Lab News: Vistit us at Booth #3090 at SC'09! HPC-Lab graduate Rune E. Jensen receives 2008/2009 Norwegian Computing Center Master Thesis Awards. Link. Elster gave two talks at EU COST meeting in Lisbon on ComplexHPC. List of talks with links to presentation slides. NVIDIA HPC-Lab Mini Workshop, Oct 24, 2009 Program Dr. Elster gave invited GPU talk at PPAM 2009, in Poland, Sept.13-16, 2009. link to Abstract and PDF of slides. Dr. Elster organized GPU Minisymposium at ParCo'09 in Lyon, France, Sept. 1-4, 2009. 12 talks + panel incl. Tim Lanfear (NVIDIA) and Rune Jensen (CERN). 3 talks by HPC-Lab members (Elster, Aksnes and Spampinato), plus mini-talk by Rune Jensen on his CERN work. 9 Masters students have graduated from HPC lab so far in 2009. See below for current members including several new incomming master students -- including students from Mathematical Sciences and Applied Cybernetics! Two HPC/Lab students to receive IBM Award -- Congratulations to Eirik Ola Aksnes and Daniele Spampinato June 3, 2009: Zotac ION board donated by NVIDIA arrives. Two IDI students joined the CERN OpenLab program this summer on Dr. Elster's recommendation. Congratualtions to Rune Erlend Jensen and TDT 4200 student Martin Tverdal . News article in Norwegian: "Med kurs for webbens vugge" , Universitetsavisa, May 28, 2009 HPC-Lab project student Åsumund Eldhuset gave this year's IME graduation speech. Dr. Elster gave invited HPC-Lab talk at NOTUR 2009 May 19, 2009 Elster and HPC-Lab student presented 6 posters at NOTUR 2009 May 19, 2009 More highlights

Hardware:

June 3, 2009: HPC-Lab receives a Zotac ION board donated by NVIDIA. The system is one of 10 donated through their Professor Partnership program.

The Dept. of Computer and Info. Science also recently purchased a 9-node dual quad-core HP cluster which is used by Elster's TDT 4200 Parallel Computing course and by HPC-Lab members.

Spring 2009: Tesla S1070 and i7 Extreme Front end Elster opening the s1070 and Ph.D. student Thorvald Natvig building and configuring our new high-end front-end for our new NVIDIA s1070. In addtion to the i7 extreme processor, the system has 12GB of RAM, two SSD disks are extra "cache" in addition to two 1.5TB disks ++ Home built i7 extreme with 12GB RAM and a stylized photo by Kai T. Dragland of our i7 extreme front end for the NVIDIA Tesla s1070

Photos from HPC-lab -- October 2008 The images are "clickable" and all taken by Dr. Elster and IDI photographer Kai T. Dragland. Link to interesting article: "CUDA, Supercomputing for the Masses:Part 1" by Rob Faber, April 2008. CUDA is now available on NVIDIA graphics cards.

Dr. Elster's HPC Research Group:

	Dr. Anne C. Elster -- Group Leader and Assoc. Prof. of Computer Science at NTNU Dr. Elster finished her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at Cornell University in 1994. She joined NTNU in January 2001. See Dr. Elster's bio for further details. Elster's Professional Interests and Activities Elster's CV and Publication list: see links on Dr. Elster's Home Page
	Jan Christian Meyer -- PhD Student PhD topic: Heterogenous computing Master Thesis title: "Load-Balancing Visualization Servers" co-supervized with Dan Vasaru, Schlumberger VoxelVision. Master project: Auto-tunable bit-reversal Mr. Meyer was on exchange to Estonia in 2001/2002. He was during fall 2003 doing work for the NOTUR Cluster project on emerging technologies. He finished his MS thesis Summer 2004 and was working (until Feb. 2006) as a staff member at NTNUs HPC facility as well as the Dept of Computer and Info. Science. He joined Elster's research group as a Ph.D.-track student Feb 1, 2006, and had booth duties at SC'07. He was the TA for TDT4205 Compiler technologies taught by Elster in fall 2006, 2007 and again this fall (2008), and was the TA for Elster's TDT 4200 Parallel Computing course, spring 2006 through spring (2008). Papers with Elster at PARA'06 and PARA'08 Paper at MUCOCUS'08 Paper with Elster at MTAAP'09 at IPDPS'09. Poster "http://www.notur.no/notur2009/programme.html"> "Modelling Overlapping Communication and Computation" at NOTUR 2009 Jan Christian is teaching assistant (vit.ass.) for TDT 4200 Parallel, Fall 2009
	Thorvald Natvig -- PhD Student Thesis topic: Auto-optimizing MPI programs. MS pre-project: "Simplified Mesh Generation from Rendors" Mr. Natvig contributed a lot to the FAQs for our deparmental compute cluster (ClustIS). His MS pre-project was featured as a Poster at NOTUR 2005. He was the TA for TDT 24 Parallel Environments and Numerical Methods and and programming duties for TDT 4200 in spring 2007. He worked at the Center for Intergrated Operations in the Petroleum Indistry last academic year (2007-2008) to help them set up their new computer and visiualization labs as well as get students from our group set up with contacts and common projects. SC'07 and SC'08 HPC-Lab booth duties Papers at PARA'06, NIK2007 and PARA'08 related to his MS/PhD work with Elster. Poster "Dynamic Optimization of MPI Communication" at NOTUR 2009 Thorvald is currently T.A. for TDT 4200 (sping 2009)
	Rune Erlend Jensen -- Master of Infomatics student, IDI, NTNU Masters thesis title: "Techniques and Tools for Optimizing Codes on Modern Architectures: A Low-Level Approach" Poster at NOTUR 2008 Gave Code Optimization Tutorial at PARA'08 Joining CERN's OpenLab this summer (2009) At CERN until Sept 2009 and may be joining the HPC group again as a PhD student.
	Eirik Ola Aksnes -- Master of Science student, IDI, NTNU Master project: "GPU Techniques for Porous Rock Visualization" joint with Henrik Hesland in collaboration Center for Intergrated Operations in the Petroleum Industry Masters thesis title:"Computational and Visualizational Techniques for Flows Through Porous Rocks on GPUs" SC'08 HPC-Lab booth duties TA for TDT 4200 Parallell Computing, spring 2009 Poster "Processing of Porous Rocks on Modern GPUs" at NOTUR 2009 "IBM 2009 EMEA Best Student Recognition Award" recipient (one of 3 from Norway) There is a hope Eirik Ola will continue with his PhD at NTNU later this fall. or in 2010.
	Ahmed Aqrawi -- Master of Science student, IDI, NTNU Master project topic: HPC on GPU project in collaboration with Schlumberger Ahmed is student assistant (und.ass.) for TDT 4200, fall 2009
	Gaojie He -- Master of Science student, IDI, NTNU Master project topic: Parallel games
	Øystein Krog -- Master of Technology student, IDI, NTNU Master project topic: Terrain modelling on GPUs
	Holger Ludvigsen -- Master of Technology student, IDI, NTNU Master project: Ray tracing using NVIDIA Opitix on GPU Holger is student assistant (und.ass.) for TDT 4200 Parallel
	Aleksander Gjermundsen -- Master of Technology student, IDI, NTNU Master project topic: Lattice Boltzman and Snow simulation on GPU
	Daniele Spampinato -- Master of Technology student, IDI, NTNU Master project: Linear Optimizations with CUDA Master thesis topic: Numerical Methods Accellerated Across Multiple GPUs SC'08 HPC-Lab booth duties paper w/ Elster accepted to MTAAS'09 at IPDPS'09 Poster "Communication Challenges on Multi-GPU Systems" at NOTUR 2009 "IBM 2009 EMEA Best Student Recognition Award" recipient (one of 3 from Norway) may continue to PhD at HPC-Lab spring 2010 after finishing his degree in Italy

Affliated HPC-Lab Members

	Dr. Jørn Amundsen -- Adjunct Associate Professor Dr. Amundsen holds a Ph.D. in Mathematical Sciences with Prof. Syvert Nørsett as his advisor. In addition to his duties as an adjunct faculty member of Computer Science, he is a staff member in the HPC groupt at NTNU's Computing Center. He taught "Intro to Computer Science" (IT grunnkurs) to 800 students in Fall 2006. In addition, he served as Dr. Elster's replacement while she was on maternity and research leaves Fall 2004 thru 2005. As part of those duties, he helped chair the organization of the SIMS 2005 conference that was held at NTNU in October 2005 and is the co-editor of its proceedings.
	Dr. Henrik R. Nagel -- Researcher Dr. Nagel finished his Ph.D. in Electronic Engineering, Laboratory of Computer Vision and Media Technology, Aalborg University, Denmark in 2005. He has an M.S. in Physics with a minor in Computer Science from University of Aarhus, Denmark in 1994. While at Allborg he worked as an Assistant Professor, and has also been an HPC student and teacher at Dept. of Supercomputing, DGSCA, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Mexico (1997-1999) and a Programmer at SynergiData, Denmark (Dec. 1996- Aug 1997) He was a Post Doc with Dr. Elster 2005-2007 and is currently a Researcher at NNTNU's Computing Center (IT-drift) in their HPC-group. His research focus is on using grid technology to integrate visualization and computations. Dr. Nagel also helped out with the organization of the SIMS 2005 conference that was held at NTNU in October 2005 and is the co-editor of its proceedings.
	Roald Fernandez -- Master of Technology student, Cybernetics, NTNU Master project topic: The GPU as a co-processor Advisors: Øyvind Stavdal and Sverre Henset
	Runar Refsnæs -- Master of Technology student, Mathematical Sciences (IMF), NTNU Master project topic: Numerics on GPU Advisors: Prof. Trond Kvamsdal (IMF) and Knut Andreas Lie (SINTEF)
	Gagandeep Singh -- Master of Technology student, Mathmatical Sciences (IMF), NTNU Master project topic: Numerics on GPU Advisors: Prof. Trond Kvamsdal (IMF) and Knut Andreas Lie (SINTEF)
	Peter Sveistrup -- Master of Technology student, Cybernetics, NTNU Master project topic: The GPU as a co-processor Advisors: Øyvind Stavdal and Sverre Henset

More Highlights and News -- Some Accomplishments and Projects:

• Two papers from HPC-Lab accepted to MTAAS'09 at IPDPS'09

• HPC-Lab's Elster and Aksnes on IDI recuitment video

• Elster quoted in "GPU Computing is about massive data parallelism", InfoWorld, Jan 22, 2009.

• January 2009: NVIDIA donates more equipment to our lab including two Quadro FX 5800 and a Tesla s1070!

• Dr. Elster gave a presentation the NVIDIA event in London Dec 4.

• "Imponerten NVIDIA med snøsimulering" on digi.no, Thursday Dec 4, 2008. Article includes photo from our HPC-Lab booth at SC'08

• Robin Eidissen and Elster gave poster at SC'08: "Comparing Cg and CUDA Implementations of Selected Transform Algorithms"

• Eidissen and Elster interviewed by NVIDIA on YouTube at SC'08

  HPC-LAB SC'08 Booth

• HPC-LAB had a nice booth at SC'08. The event drew a record 11 000+ attendees! 8 master students and 1 PhD student attended in addition to Dr. Elster, who was Co-Chair for Posters. NOTUR and the IO Center also had booths this year.

  HPC-Lab at SC'08	Skeleton & Snow simulation at SC'08
  Robin interviewed by NVIDIA at SC'08	Åsmund Eldhuset showing his Line finding algorithm (project w/ Elster in colaborations with Schlumberger)

  Link to more SC'08 photos

• Oct. 28, 2008 Opening Program
  • Link to opening photos on Flikr
  • digi.no article re. opening

• Erik Axel Nielsen's MS Thesis work on using the GPU to speed up image processing (filtering) is making it into the next generation cardio ultrasound equipment from GE Healthcare.

  Erik Axel Nielsen's Master thesis work with Elster on using GPUs for the Wavelet transform for processing cardiac ultrasound images sped these up by a factor of 40 making real-time processing possible. This work has already made it into GE Healthcare's high-end cardiac ultrasound scanner product.

• Christian Larsen's GPU work

  HPC Master student Christian Larsen gave poster presentation at Stanford 50: State of the Art and Future Directions of Computational Mathematic s and Numerical Computing , March 29-31, Stanford, California, USA, and seminar talk at ECE, The Univ. of Texas at Austin, USA the following week

  

  Øystein Borg at his poster at NOTUR 2006 in Bergen which received honorable mention

• NOTUR 2004 Compentency projects on GRID, Cluster and Storage Technologies

  This project was a joint effort by NTNU, U of Bergen, U of Oslo, U of Tromsø and UNINETT. Statoil, Norwegian Meteorogical Institute (met.no) and UNINETT will also be participating.

  Elster helped raise NOK 1 million at NTNU for these projects, which made us the largest partner. These funds were mached by the Research Council of Norway (RCN) which also added in NOK 450K for expanded storage Harware that was installed at NTNUs HPC facilty for the use of Met.no.
  Total 2004 budget at NTNU: NOK 2.45 million

  The projects ran through 2004. Several of her students were involved in the GRID and cluster subprojects. Elster also got some of her colleagues at IDI involved in the storage subproject.

• Link to NTNU's activities on this project

  

  Part of NTNUs NOTUR ET-gang on March 25, 2004

  Row1: Arne Sødal(ITEA), Jørn Amundsen, Tor Arvid Lund ,Morten Rodal, Per Holager
  Row2: Lars Eilertsen(ITEA/stud), Martin Eian(ITEA/stud), Frode Nilsen, Peter Hughes, Arve Dispen(ITEA);
  Row3: Anne Elster, Robin Holtet, Gunnar Brattås, Kjetil Nørvåg, Trond Kandal; Taking photo: Martin Grannæs
  

• NOTUR Emerging Technologies: Cluster Technologies
  Look at emerging cluster technologies for Norwegian HPC users.
  Project leader. Budget 2003: NOK 1 million

  

  Our stand at NOTUR 2003, Oslo

Masters Projects and Theses Topics