News and Announcements
Nathan Garner
It is with a heavy heart that we had to say goodbye to ICL alumnus Nathan Garner on April 26th, 2015. As many of you already know, Nathan was battling Leukemia and recently passed away after suffering complications from chemotherapy. Below is some information provided by Nathan’s family, including details on his upcoming “Celebration of Life” in Cleveland, TN. Please continue to keep the family in your thoughts and prayers.
The “Celebration of Life” for Nathan Paul Garner in Cleveland, TN will be held on Saturday, May 9th from 3:30-5:30 PM at Morris Vineyard located at 346 Union Grove Rd NE, Charleston, TN 37310. Thank you so much to Alex Brumlow and Maria Esther Dyer who helped us arrange for this location and to the owners of the vineyard who were so accommodating in the rental fee. We ask that you bring a drink and snack to share and dress casually. In lieu of flowers, please donate to this fund. Any money left after paying for medical bills, travel expenses and the kid’s college visits will go toward Josh and Maddie’s college fund.
From Nathan’s Family: Details for Celebration of Life – I recorded Nathan while he told us what he wanted for this service, and he was very clear that he wanted this to be a celebration of his life and not a somber, serious event. He said he would like for people to just gather and tell stories and memories, dress in casual attire (shorts, jeans, t-shirts) and have a beer (or glass of Morris Vineyard wine!) and snack and celebrate his life. We will have a PA system so we can gather and tell stories – he said he would love people to tell stories so his children will get to hear different memories about him, but to please keep them non-religious, non-sad, and not serious. We may also bring a video camera to record people telling stories for Kelley and the kids to re-watch later. Feel free to arrive earlier to support the winery by sampling some wine and purchasing some if you choose or just walking the vineyards and enjoying the beautiful grounds.
Conference Reports
SpringSim 2015
On April 12th – 15th, the Westin Alexandria in Alexandria, VA hosted the 2015 Spring Simulation Multi-Conference (SpringSim’15). ICL’s Azzam Haidar, Hartwig Anzt, and Khairul Kabir all made the journey to present their recent work at the HPC Symposium. SpringSim’15, which brings together leading experts in various domains of Modeling and Simulation, garnered around 300 people, with about 30 people attending the HPC Symposium.
Hartwig took advantage of the little-known one day registration option and presented his work on “Accelerating the LOBPCG method on GPUs using a blocked Sparse Matrix Vector Product.” Azzam and Khairul were on hand to receive their “Best Paper” award for “Performance Analysis and Design of a Hessenberg Reduction using Stabilized Blocked Elementary Transformations for New Architectures.” Great work, gentlemen.
Recent Releases
MAGMA 1.6.2 Released
The MAGMA team has released 1.6.2 for public consumption. MAGMA (Matrix Algebra on GPU and Multicore Architectures) is a collection of next generation linear algebra (LA) libraries for heterogeneous architectures. The MAGMA package supports interfaces for current LA packages and standards, e.g., LAPACK and BLAS, to allow computational scientists to easily port any LA-reliant software components to heterogeneous architectures. MAGMA allows applications to fully exploit the power of current heterogeneous systems of multi/many-core CPUs and multi-GPUs/coprocessors to deliver the fastest possible time to accurate solution within given energy constraints.
MAGMA 1.6.2 was released primarily for bug fixes in MAGMA Sparse. Visit the MAGMA software page to download the tarball.
PAPI 5.4.1 Released
PAPI 5.4.1 is now available. PAPI (the Performance API) provides simultaneous access to performance counters on CPUs, GPUs, and other components of interest (e.g., network and I/O systems). Provided as a linkable library or shared object, PAPI can be called directly in a user program, or used transparently through a variety of third-party tools, making it a de facto standard for hardware counter analysis. Industry liaisons with Bull, Cray, Intel, IBM, NVIDIA, and others ensure seamless integration of PAPI with new architectures at or near their release. As the PAPI component architecture becomes more populated, performance tools that interface with PAPI automatically inherit the ability to measure these new data sources, usually with no changes at the user level. This provides a richer environment in which performance analysts can work.
PAPI 5.4.1 is a minor release with a major rewrite of the CUDA component as well as several other enhancements and bug fixes. This release provides CUDA 6.5 support for multiple GPU devices and multiple CUDA contexts, and there have been several other bug fixes and enhancements.
New Platforms:
- Updated support for Intel Haswell and Haswell-EP.
- Added ARM Cortex A7.
- Added ARM 1176 CPU (original Raspberry Pi).
Enhancements:
- Enhance PAPI preset events to allow user defined events.
- User defined events are set up via a user event definition file.
- New test demonstrating attaching an eventset to a single CPU rather than a thread.
- Use the term “event qualifiers” instead of “event masks” to clarify understanding.
- Added pkg-config support to PAPI.
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed lustre segfault bug in lustre component.
- Fixed compilation in the absence of a Fortran compiler.
- Fixed bug in krental_pthreads ctest to join threads properly on exit.
- Fixed bug in perf_events where event masks were not getting cleared properly.
- Fixed memory leak bug in perf_events.
More details on these changes can be found in the file ChangeLogP541.txt inside the PAPI tarball, available on the PAPI software page.
Interview
Dakota Makres
Where are you from, originally?
I am from Knoxville, TN.
How would you sum up your education thus far? You’re a high school senior now. How does that feel?
My education is something I take seriously. I received a great education. My teachers at Gibbs High School were phenomenal, and it feels great to be senior about to enter into the grown up world.
Tell us how you found out about the internship at ICL.
I have been a life-long friend of the family to the Finchums, so when I started looking at internship opportunities, I asked Teresa if there was anything I could help with around the office (ICL). And, behold, my internship was born.
How has your experience working as an intern changed your perspective, if at all?
My perspective really hasn’t changed that much. There are certain things I wouldn’t necessarily like to do again (i.e., filing), but I definitely enjoyed meeting new and interesting people every day at ICL.
What was your favorite part of the intern experience at ICL?
My favorite part of the internship would have to be the ICL 25th anniversary celebration. Being in the Neyland Stadium skybox doesn’t happen everyday, and being surrounded by such an interesting group just made the experience all the more memorable.
Are you planning on pursuing higher education? What areas interest you the most?
I am going to Pellissippi in the fall for two years, then after the two years I might transfer to UT to further my degree. I am interested in business, or possibly even journalism.
What are your interests/hobbies outside of school/work?
I enjoy kicking back with my friends, going to see movies, watching the Vols play—just hanging out whenever possible. I also really enjoy detailing cars.
Tell us something about yourself that might surprise people.
I am obsessed with having a clean car and I go to Chick-Fil-A several times a week.
ICL Alum Brett Ellis was selected as the new Group Leader for Data Center Operations at ORNL, effective March 1st. As the Group Leader for Data Center Operations, Brett will oversee a very large and complex operation to include Servers, Storage, Virtualization systems, data center operators, SAP BASIS, SharePoint, and a myriad of other technologies. Congratulations, Brett!