Introduction

Together with NVIDIA and OpenACC.org, Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) will host a virtual Hackathon starting August 15 and concluding August 24, 2023. Open Hackathons provide exciting opportunities for scientists to accelerate their AI or HPC research under the guidance of expert mentors from national laboratories, universities and industry leaders in a collaborative environment. Representing distinguished scholars and preeminent institutions around the world, these teams of mentors and attendees work together to realize performance gains and speedups using a variety of programming models, libraries and tools.

Background

Currently there are several large-scale computing systems in the US that are based on General-Purpose Graphic Processing Units, or GPGPUs, including Summit at ORNL, Sierra at Lawrence Livermore National Lab and the Perlmutter machine at NERSC. In addition, the upcoming exascale computers, Aurora at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), and Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), will have GPU accelerators as well. These GPU-based supercomputers offer tremendous computing power for science and engineering, but writing efficient software to take full advantage of them may be challenging. In addition, large-scale multicore CPU-based systems continue to play an important role for many scientific applications. Scaling up these CPU-based applications may also require deep understanding of inter-node and intra-node computational characteristics.

Goal

The goal of the Open Hackathon is for computational scientists to port, accelerate and optimize their scientific applications to modern computer architectures, including CPUs, GPUs and other computing technologies. Participating teams should leave the event either with their applications accelerated and/or optimized on the latest supercomputing hardware or a clear roadmap of the next steps needed to leverage these resources.

This Hackathon is open to everyone looking to take their projects to the next level; however, priority acceptance will be given to BNL affiliated scientists and their collaborators.

Prerequisites

• Teams are expected to be fluent with the code or project they bring to the event and motivated to make progress during the hackathon.
• A minimum of 3 team members must participate throughout the entire event. Lack of participation for the duration of the Hackathon may cause the entire team to be excused.
• Projects brought to the event are required to have a license attached and detailed in the application. For more information on why licenses are important and how to obtain one, please use the following links:
  • https://tldrlegal.com/
  • https://choosealicense.com/

Recommended

• No advanced GPU skills are required, but teams are expected to know the basics of GPU programming and profiling. A collection of GPU lectures, tutorials, and labs are available for all participants at no fee. Please contact organizers for more information to help you prepare for the hackathon.

GPU Compute Resources:

Teams attending the event will be given access to a GPU cluster for the duration of the Hackathon.

Event Format:

The BNL Open Hackathon will be hosted online with all times Eastern Time (ET). All communications and collaborations will be conducted via Zoom, Slack and email.