CoE RAISE partners serve as mentors at the BSC-NVIDIA GPU Hackathons for HPC and AI

 

 

 

CoE RAISE, along with other Centers of Excellence in Exascale Computing, played an active role in the BSC-NVIDIA GPU Hackathons for HPC and AI by guiding participants in testing their applications. 

This online event, which took place on October 25 and from November 2 to 4, 2021, was designed to help eleven teams accelerate their own code on GPUs using a programming model or machine learning framework of their choice. Each team was assigned mentors for the duration of the event. Through the partnership with NVIDIA and OpenACC.org, this event provided exciting opportunities for scientists to test their applications under the guidance of expert mentors from national labs, universities, and industry leaders in a collaborative environment. The IBM Power9 cluster of the Barcelona Supercomputer Center (BSC) was used during these days, with dedicated resources for the participants.

Mentors and mentees expressed their satisfaction with the hackathon, with one participant saying, “The event was very well organized since the beginning, and the mentors that you asked to attend were all extremely helpful to make our work more productive”.

Guillaume Houzeaux, CoE RAISE task leader for AI for wind farm layout optimization and senior researcher from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, shared his positive experience in mentoring at the event: “Although face-to-face hackathons are for sure the best option, the online format proposed by NVIDIA was very dynamic and I think was a very positive outcome for participants. The use of different communication schemes enabled fluid communication and scientific exchanges between mentors and programmers: Zoom for general meetings and technical sessions; Slack for continuous support and information exchange, and gather.town for dynamic meetings. The availability of the support team also helped in solving computer-related issues quickly”.