Blog

What EPICURE can do for you?

 

EPICURE offers a wide range of support services for all the EuroHPC users who apply for it.

 

Once your EuroHPC JU application has been granted and you have filled in the EPICURE support form, our team will contact you to assess how we will be able to support you. Our main goal is to help you getting the most out of the resources you have at your disposal to fully exploit the EuroHPC JU supercomputers’ potential.

 

What is Level 2 support?

 

If you need support regarding code porting and project enabling, our experts will help in improving the installation process. This includes a proper selection of compiler flags and other libraries. Minor code changes may include adding compiler pragmas at selected places in the code to improve vectorization, or to lower the optimization level for a particular routine, should the optimizer introduce bugs – all without affecting the optimization level for the main part of the code.

 

Moreover, support regarding performance improvements, benchmarking and performance analysis is available. Thanks to this service, we will be able to improve the performance and scalability of the codes executed on the EuroHPC systems. The focus is on architecture-specific or system level improvements for the EuroHPC supercomputers, e.g., by improving the vectorization of selected applications, including small improvements in terms of parallelization, or by selecting the best MPI implementation and set-up for each application. During the performance and scalability work, performance analysis and benchmarking tasks will be required to understand the weaknesses and strengths of the applications, and the different options to improve their scalability and performance.

 

The modifications included in these services are limited to rather specific changes in the code. More comprehensive modifications will be handled by the Level 3 support team.

What is Level 3 support?

 

Level 3 support focuses on code optimization.Working on the basis of the information provided by the Level 2 team, the target for the intra-node optimization support is the improvement of the performance by utilizing the features of the CPU in an optimized way to get most out of its computing power. A typical example includes the use of multithreading approaches. A special attention is reserved to the vectorization of the code. For memory-bound applications, the focus will be on the proper memory usage, exploiting data locality and high-bandwidth memory.

 

If you need support for using larger scale facilities, the inter-node optimization and scaling-out support will help you. Again, based on the analysis provided by the Level 2 team, this service improves the parallel efficiency through the optimization of the communication patterns, aiming at removing causes of network congestion or inefficiency by using the asynchronous messages and the RMA.

 

Finally, a huge fraction of the current HPC infrastructures is accelerated with GPUs. The accelerator porting and optimization support optimizes the usage of GPU based devices by the application, and when needed helps with porting their kernels. Different approaches are adopted for the diversity of the GPU architecture. A particular focus is put on the communication pattern between host (CPU) and devices (GPU), also leveraging on the device-to-device routing.

 

That’s not all. Best Practices Guidelines for EuroHPC supercomputers and technical reports will be developed for the various architectures or specific systems of the EuroHPC supercomputers. The first guidelines will be published in early 2025.

 

How this benefits the users?

 

There is no need to worry about the difference between Level 2 and Level 3 support: it is only a categorization to help us understand where we start with the support work. When you submit the form with your project information and support wishes, we will handle and transfer your request internally at EPICURE as needed!

 

The main goal of EPICURE is to support the users of the EuroHPC JU supercomputer to fully exploit their capabilities. The wide range of support services gives to the researchers and users the possibility to fully focus on their tasks and get the best possible result out of their work. The porting support enables the users to use HPC as a service over a large range of systems and architectures. Optimization work will not only enable the users to achieve their results faster or run larger models, but it contributes to energy use efficiency.

 

EPICURE contributes to attract less represented science fields to use HPC, and benefit the whole European ecosystem with the delivery of cutting-edge research.

 

An example of how EPICURE support has facilitated a collaboration project between academy and industry to utilize EuroHPC supercomputer resources can be found in this blog.

 

How to apply?

 

When submitting your EuroHPC JU application for resources, you will have the chance to also submit the EPICURE support form: just follow the instructions and provide the needed information. More information here.

 

If you have already started your project on one of the EuroHPC supercomputer and you realize you need the EPICURE specialized support, you can contact us by fillin in the form at this link.