Through generous funding from Intel® Corporation, Indiana University Bloomington will become the newest Intel® Parallel Computing Center (Intel® PCC) this September. Intel® PCCs are universities, institutions, and labs identified as leaders in their fields, focusing on modernizing applications to increase parallelism and scalability through optimizations that leverage cores, caches, threads, and vector capabilities of microprocessors and coprocessors.
This latest interdisciplinary center will be led by Judy Qiu, an Assistant Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing. The work of Steven Gottlieb, a Distinguished Professor of Physics, will also be supported by the center. Qiu's research will focus on novel parallel systems supporting data analytics, while Gottlieb will focus on adapting the physics simulation code of the MILC Collaboration to the Intel® Xeon Phi™ Processor Family.
“The Intel® Parallel Computing Center highlights IU’s leadership and strength in high performance computing. It represents collaboration between industry and higher education, and across schools and departments within IU, that will benefit the research community and the private sector in a variety of important ways,” said School of Informatics and Computing Dean Bobby Schnabel.
The center tackles challenges in high performance simulation and data analytics with innovative applications and software development. Its goal will be to advance the research of the participants by taking advantage of the Intel® architecture, including addressing programmer productivity and performance portability.
Steven Gottlieb is a founding member of the MILC Collaboration which studies Quantum Chromodynamics, one of nature's four fundamental forces. The open source MILC code is part of the SPEC benchmark and has been used as a performance benchmark for a number of supercomputer acquisitions. Gottlieb will be working on restructuring the MILC code to make optimal use of the SIMD vector units and many-core architecture of the Intel® Xeon Phi™ Processor Family. These will be used in upcoming supercomputers at the National Energy Research Supercomputing Center (NERSC) and the Argonne Leadership Computing Center (ALCC). The MILC code currently is used for hundreds of millions of core-hours at NSF and DOE supercomputer centers.
Analysis plays an important role in data-driven scientific discovery and commercial services. Qiu's earlier research has shown that previous complicated versions of MapReduce can be replaced by Harp (a Hadoop plug-in) that offers both data abstractions useful for high performance iterative computation on HPC and Cloud systems. Harp is used to drive data analytics libraries like Mahout and MLlib from the Apache Foundation and Intel's DAAL. A subset of machine learning algorithms has been chosen to implement with optimized performance on Intel’s Haswell and Xeon Phi™ architectures.
Indiana University will benefit from its role as an Intel® PCC by having access to Intel expertise, software tools, and advanced technologies. Qiu and Gottlieb also look forward to sharing the results of their work in collaboration with Intel at conferences such as the International Supercomputing Conference held in Europe, the SC conference held in the US and the Intel® Xeon Phi™ User Group meetings. This initial work could be followed by further projects with other IU faculty funded by this Intel® PCC.
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