Simulation / Modeling / Design

Scientists Gather at University of Delaware for OpenACC Hackathon

Oak Ridge National Lab, NVIDIA and PGI launched the OpenACC Hackathon initiative last year to help scientists accelerate applications on GPUs. OpenACC was selected as a primary tool since it offers acceleration without significant programming effort and works great with existing application codes.
University of Delaware (UDEL) hosted a five-day Hackathon last week. Selected teams of scientific application developers hacked away under close mentorship of GPU experts and others with extensive experience in programming with OpenACC.
Watch the recap video by Sunita Chandrasekaran, professor at UDEL and organizer of the Hackathon.

The Hackathon at UDEL brought together teams from NASA Langley Research Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health (NIH), Brookhaven National Laboratory and the UDEL College of Engineering to accelerate their codes across medical imaging, chemical and bio-molecular engineering, computational fluid dynamics, quantum physics and computer science.
Codes represented at the Hackathon:

  • FUN3D: Large-scale computational fluid dynamics solver for complex aerodynamic flows seen in a broad range of aerospace applications.
  • Lattice QCD: Numerical simulation to solve the high-dimensional non-linear problems in strong interactions for nuclear and particle physics.
  • Application that determines RNA structure using data from small angle x-ray scattering experiments.
  • Application that identifies malicious software based on graph analysis
  • Kinetic Model Builder application that builds models based on chemical engineering principles.
  • DARTS: Open-source dataflow based runtime system to support heterogeneous architectures.

The highlight from the Hackathon was by the team from the National Cancer Institute who achieved a 13x performance increase during the UDEL Hackathon.
Check out the 2016 Hackathons page if you want to be a mentor or to register your team.

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