ZIH-Kolloquium: "The Manycore Revolution: An Eyewitness Account"

When CUDA was released in 2006, allowing for general purpose programming of graphics processing units, it wasn't obvious that it is a harbinger of things to come. In hindsight however it marks the start of an unprecedented explosion in computer architecture innovation, which does not appear to stop anytime soon. This talk retraces one part of that computational revolution: how a statistical physics student from as small German university ended up leading Kokkos, one of the central software technology projects at the US National Labs dealing with that computational revolution.
This Kokkos EcoSystem is a software stack which enables comprehensive performance portability for high performance computing applications. Developed by a team from five US National Laboratories as well as other partners, it is now used by an estimated 200 projects from around the world. Within the US Exascale Computing Project, nearly as many applications have a dependency on Kokkos now as on Fortran. The talk  will dive into what makes the Kokkos project special, will discuss how Kokkos became successful and how CoDesign efforts with the hardware vendors was a crucial part of that. Additionally some thoughts about the future of the HPC computing landscape will be presented: what kind of changes we might expect in the next decade, and how Kokkos fits into that future.

Christian Trott is a high performance computing expert with extensive experience designing and implementing software for modern HPC systems. He is a principal member of staff at Sandia National Laboratories, where he leads the Kokkos core team developing the performance portability programming model for C++ and heads Sandia's delegation to the ISO C++ standards committee. He also serves as adviser to numerous application teams, helping them redesign their codes using Kokkos and achieve performance portability for the next generation of supercomputers. Christian earned a doctorate from the University of Technology Ilmenau in theoretical physics with a focus on computational material research.

The colloquium is free of charge. Language: English
For joining this lecture please click here:

• Participants with ZIH login: https://selfservice.zih.tu-dresden.de/l/link.php?m=145392&p=7e9d34f4
• Participants without university login: https://selfservice.zih.tu-dresden.de/link.php?m=145392&p=e75207d1