5.1 Special Day on "Embedded Meets Hyperscale and HPC" Session: Heterogeneous Computing in the Datacenter and in HPC

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Date: Wednesday 27 March 2019
Time: 08:30 - 10:00
Location / Room: Room 1

Chair:
Christian Plessl, Paderborn University, DE

Co-Chair:
Christoph Hagleitner, IBM Research, CH

Heterogeneous computing systems with accelerators are claiming the top ranks in the TOP500 list of the largest HPC computing systems and find increasing adoption in hyperscale cloud datacenters. Accelerators offer performance and efficiency gains despite the diminishing returns from traditional technology scaling. The talks in this session will set the stage for this special day and analyze the value proposition of accelerators for traditional and emerging workloads. An overview of this vibrant environment will be followed by more detailed presentations on systems using GPUs and FPGAs

TimeLabelPresentation Title
Authors
08:305.1.1SILICON HETEROGENEITY IN THE CLOUD
Speaker and Author:
Babak Falsafi, EPFL, CH
Abstract
Cloud providers are building infrastructure at unprecedented speeds. We have witnessed the emergence of data-centric information technology in almost every aspect of our life from commerce, healthcare, entertainment, governance to scientific discovery. The demand for processing, communicating and storing data has grown faster than conventional growth in digital platforms. Meanwhile the conventional silicon technologies we have relied on for the past several decades leading to the exponential growth in IT have slowed down (the conventional 40%/year increase in density has dropped to 17%/year in recent years) . In light of this increase in demand on data-centric IT and the diminishing returns in platform scalability, our future increasingly relies on emerging technologies that introduce heterogeneity in both logic and memory. In this talk, I will motivate the grand challenges in scaling digital platforms and data-centric technologies, then present opportunities for pushing the envelope on server architecture in the post-Moore era.
09:005.1.2GPU ACCELERATED COMPUTING IN HPC AND IN THE DATA CENTER
Speaker and Author:
Peter Messmer, NVidia, US
Abstract
Since the introduction of CUDA a bit over a decade ago, heterogeneous computing with GPUs has become increasingly popular in HPC. While the initial applications were mostly exploratory in nature, the processing power, the relatively intuitive programming model and a rapidly growing software ecosystem comprised of tools, libraries and training material helped a broad user community to adopt heterogeneous computing. Today, most of the top HPC applications are therefore GPU accelerated, covering all areas of computational science and engineering, including quantum chemistry, structural mechanics or weather simulation. This trend got an extra boost with the increasing computing demand of machine learning, specifically for training deep neural networks, where the processing power of GPUs was suddenly in demand from non-traditional HPC applications in the datacenter. Today, we therefore find GPUs not only in the fastest supercomputers in the world, but also in the largest datacenters. In this presentation, I will discuss the current impact of GPU in HPC and the data center, look at the challenges still faced by developers and how we are working on mitigating them.
09:305.1.3HETEROGENEOUS COMPUTE ARCHITECTURES FOR DEEP LEARNING IN THE CLOUD
Speaker and Author:
Ken O'Brien, Xilinx Research, IE
Abstract
Accuracy of deep learning algorithms continues to outpace many traditional algorithms, while requiring little domain expertise and no explicit programming. However, they are typically associated with astronomical computational and memory requirements which push the limits of projected performance scalability with future technology nodes. This has led to a surge in innovative computer architectures and chips. Within this talk, we'll take a deeper look at compute and memory requirements for a range of popular neural networks and discuss how emerging architectures, fuelled by cloud dynamics, are trying to overcome this through architectural innovation.
10:00End of session
Coffee Break in Exhibition Area



Coffee Breaks in the Exhibition Area

On all conference days (Tuesday to Thursday), coffee and tea will be served during the coffee breaks at the below-mentioned times in the exhibition area.

Lunch Breaks (Lunch Area)

On all conference days (Tuesday to Thursday), a seated lunch (lunch buffet) will be offered in the Lunch Area to fully registered conference delegates only. There will be badge control at the entrance to the lunch break area.

Tuesday, March 26, 2019

Wednesday, March 27, 2019

Thursday, March 28, 2019