Thomas C. Schulthess

Raffaele Solcà, Thomas C. Schulthess, Azzam Haidar et al.

The adoption of hybrid GPU-CPU nodes in traditional supercomputing platforms opens acceleration opportunities for electronic structure calculations in materials science and chemistry applications, where medium sized Hermitian generalized eigenvalue problems must be solved many times. The small size of the problems limits the scalability on a distributed memory system, hence they can benefit from the massive computational performance concentrated on a single node, hybrid GPU-CPU system. However, new algorithms that efficiently exploit heterogeneity and massive parallelism of not just GPUs, but of multi/many-core CPUs as well are required. Addressing these demands, we implemented a novel Hermitian general eigensolver algorithm. This algorithm is based on a standard eigenvalue solver, and existing algorithms can be used. The resulting eigensolvers are state-of-the-art in HPC, significantly outperforming existing libraries. We analyze their performance impact on applications of interest, when different fractions of eigenvectors are needed by the host electronic structure code.

Stefano Schuppli, Fawzi Mohamed, Henrique Mendonça et al.

The Alps Research Infrastructure leverages GH200 technology at scale, featuring 10,752 GPUs. Accessing Alps provides a significant computational advantage for researchers in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). While Alps serves a broad range of scientific communities, traditional HPC services alone are not sufficient to meet the dynamic needs of the ML community. This paper presents an initial investigation into extending HPC service capabilities to better support ML workloads. We identify key challenges and gaps we have observed since the early-access phase (2023) of Alps by the Swiss AI community and propose several technological enhancements. These include a user environment designed to facilitate the adoption of HPC for ML workloads, balancing performance with flexibility; a utility for rapid performance screening of ML applications during development; observability capabilities and data products for inspecting ongoing large-scale ML workloads; a utility to simplify the vetting of allocated nodes for compute readiness; a service plane infrastructure to deploy various types of workloads, including support and inference services; and a storage infrastructure tailored to the specific needs of ML workloads. These enhancements aim to facilitate the execution of ML workloads on HPC systems, increase system usability and resilience, and better align with the needs of the ML community. We also discuss our current approach to security aspects. This paper concludes by placing these proposals in the broader context of changes in the communities served by HPC infrastructure like ours.