Treece Burgess Provides Jupyter Notebook Tutorial
ICL’s Treece Burgess recently presented a comprehensive tutorial on the use of Jupyter Notebook. The tutorial is available to view online.
ICL Hosts Sparse BLAS Workshop
ICL hosted a Sparse BLAS Workshop November 7-9, 2023. The workshop brought together scientists from major research institutions and industry partners, including AMD, ARM, Intel, MathWorks, and NVIDIA, and focused on developing a common understanding and interface for basic operations on sparse linear algebra objects. For three days, the attendees listened to pitch talks, discussed in breakout sessions, and engaged in hackathons focused on implementing a reference for sparse BLAS operations. The dry workshop sessions were complemented by a social program allowing the participants to explore Knoxville’s downtown cuisine and enjoy a college party. The positive feedback at Supercomputing encourages the participants to continue the effort remotely and plan for the next workshop edition. A special thanks to ICL’s Operations team that ensured both the smooth workshop execution and that nobody went home hungry.
Congratulations
ICL’s Daniel Mishler Awarded with Best Student Poster at IEEE Cluster 2023
IEEE Cluster 2023 was held in Santa Fe, NM October 31st through November 3rd. ICL’s Daniel Mishler brought home the award for Best Student Poster for his research poster Performance Insights into Device-initiated RMA using Kokkos Remote Spaces.
Conference Reports
SC23
The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis returned to Denver in 2023, November 12th – 17th. This year’s conference General Chair was ICL alumnus Dorian Arnold.
ICL was once again well represented on the conference program. The ICL@SC23 web page details ICL’s attendees and a full schedule of ICL participation in the workshops, tutorials, and BoFs. Updated project handouts were on hand in the University of Tennessee’s booth space, which also offered conference attendees a place to take a break from collecting swag and enjoy a friendly game of spikeball.
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ICL Alumni Dinner
The annual ICL Alumni Dinner was held at Henry’s Tavern in Denver on November 15th, and gathered around 40 past and present ICL members. It was a vibrant evening fostering connections and re-connections among attendees, embodying the collaborative spirit fundamental to ICL’s legacy.
Recent Releases
LAPACK 3.12.0
The LAPACK team announced version 3.12.0 of the venerable software library. New features include:
- Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DMD)
- Truncated QR with Column Pivoting
- Reciprocal Scaling of complex vectors
- Improvements in the 64-bit API
- as well as bug fixes and other changes as detailed at: https://www.netlib.org/lapack/lapack-3.12.0.html
SLATE 2023.11.05
SLATE version 2023.11.05 adds:
- Updated examples for revised Users and Developers Guides
- Improved performance using 2D GPU grids and GPU-to-GPU copies
- Improved error handling for singular matrices
- Fixed numerous bugs and refactored for better sustainability
- And more! See: https://github.com/icl-utk-edu/slate/releases/tag/v2023.11.05 for further details.
Ginkgo 1.7.0
The Ginkgo team is proud to announce the new Ginkgo minor release 1.7.0 for its sparse linear algebra package: https://github.com/ginkgo-project/ginkgo/releases/tag/v1.7.0.
This release brings new features such as:
- Complete GPU-resident sparse direct solvers feature set and interfaces,
- Improved Cholesky factorization performance,
- A new MC64 reordering,
- Batched iterative solver support with the BiCGSTAB solver with batched Dense and ELL matrix types,
- MPI support for the SYCL backend,
- Improved ParILU(T)/ParIC(T) preconditioner convergence
- and more!
Interview
You Wu
Where are you from originally?
I was born and raised in Xiamen, a subtropical island located on the southeast coast of China, overlooking the Taiwan Strait. Some of my best memories are just hanging out on the beach, walking by the sea with my mom, and playing fetch with my dog Nico.
Can you summarize your educational and professional background?
I completed my high school in Wiesbaden, Germany in 2020. Later that year, I moved to Switzerland to begin my undergrad studies in Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) at ETH Zurich. It was during this time that I discovered an interest in high-performance computing. Joining the student cluster competition team ‘RACKlette’ was a significant step, and it took me all the way to competing at the student cluster competition in Dallas during SC22.
How did you first hear about ICL, and what made you want to work here?
I first heard about ICL when I met Phuong at SC22. She also participated in SCC and she was so passionate about her work that I thought it must be a good place where I could learn a lot!
What are your main research interests and what do you work on at ICL?
I am interested in physically based simulations and particularly in the mechanics of porous media. I also have grown a keen interest in sparse linear algebra during my stay at ICL.
At ICL, I am currently working on improving the language interoperability of the Ginkgo library by creating C bindings and using them for the first prototype of the Julia package Ginkgo.jl. This can help in enhancing Ginkgo’s accessibility for domain scientists.
What would you like to do next in your career?
I would like to further contribute to Ginkgo while learning more about heterogeneous computing. Afterwards, I wish to continue pursuing a Ph.D. after I finish my studies at ETH Zurich.
What are your interests/hobbies outside of work?
I don’t have specific hobbies that I engage in outside of work regularly and I’m often quite content with just sitting idle. But every now and then, I might also feel a pulse to create something different, like carving a seal or doing some traditional Chinese ink-wash painting. Being alone in nature is super relaxing for me too, I enjoy soaking in the peace a lot.
Tell us something about yourself that might surprise people.
My full name Wu You (吴莜) including my surname in its original order means ‘carefree’ in Chinese.
