OpenACC and Open Hackathons Monthly Highlights: September 2024

Stay up-to-date on the latest news, research, and resources. This month's edition covers the 2024 Open Accelerated Computing (OAC) Summit call for speakers, OpenACC Birds-of-a-Feather at SC24, a word from the Helmholtz Hackathon mentor, and more!

1. September 2024
OPENACC AND
OPEN HACKATHONS
MONTHLY HIGHLIGHTS

2. 2
WHO IS OPENACC?
The OpenACC Organization is dedicated to helping the research and
developer community advance science by expanding their accelerated
and parallel computing skills.
3 Areas of Focus
Ecosystem
Development
Training/Education
OpenACC
Specification

Participating in work that enables
and/or advances interoperability of
parallel programming models in
compilers or tools with the vision of
transitioning to standard language
parallelism.
Managing one of the leading
hackathon series, our events have
been instrumental in training
thousands of domain experts and
accelerating over 550 scientific
applications using a variety of
programming models and tools.

Developing and utilizing the
OpenACC directives-based
programming model to port,
accelerate, or optimize scientific
applications.

3. 3
silica IFPEN, RMM-DIIS on P100
OPENACC SPECIFICATION MOMENTUM
Wide Adoption Across Key HPC Codes
ANSYS Fluent
Gaussian
VASP
LSDalton
MPAS
GAMERA
GTC
XGC
ACME
FLASH
COSMO
Numeca

400+ APPS* USING OPENACC
Prof. Georg Kresse
Computational Materials Physics
University of Vienna
For VASP, OpenACC is the way forward for GPU
acceleration. Performance is similar to CUDA, and
OpenACC dramatically decreases GPU
development and maintenance efforts. We’re
excited to collaborate with NVIDIA and PGI as an
early adopter of Unified Memory.
“
“
VASP
Top Quantum Chemistry and Material Science Code
* Applications in production and development

4. 4
LEARN MORE
The 2024 Open Accelerated Computing (OAC) Summit is a
platform to examine the latest research and advances in
scientific computing using the latest technologies and tools.
Topics covered include enabling interoperability of parallel
programming models, transitioning to standard language
parallelism, using the OpenACC directives-based programming
model to accelerate or optimize scientific applications, shared
experiences and use cases from Open Hackathons, and more.
Take advantage of this opportunity to highlight your research to
our global community by submitting a talk proposal today!
2024 OPEN ACCELERATED COMPUTING SUMMIT
Call for Speakers Closes October 31st!

5. 5
UPCOMING OPEN HACKATHONS & BOOTCAMPS



COMPLETE LIST OF EVENTS
Event Call Closes Event Date
Singapore Generative AI Hackathon October 13, 2024 October 29 - November 15, 2024
NCHC Open Hackathon October 15, 2024 November 13, December 2-4, 2024
Georgia Tech Open Hackathon November 20, 2024 January 21, 28-30, 2025
Helmholtz Open Hackathon February 10, 2025 April 1, 8-11, 2025
IDRIS Open Hackathon March 18, 2025 May 13, 20-22, 2025
Onsite and Digital: Our events offer in-person, digital and hybrid formats!

6. 6
LEARN MORE
This interactive BoF will bring together the research and
developer communities to discuss successes and challenges
across multiple disciplines, brainstorm new feature requests for
the specification, updates on implementation from the various
compiler vendors, and share experiences from the Open
Hackathon and Bootcamp program.
Come ready to participate in this knowledge sharing event.

JOIN OUR OPENACC BIRDS-OF-A-FEATHER
Tuesday, November 19th | 5:15 PM EST

7. 7
I always enjoy mentoring at the hackathons because the exchange of
experience goes both ways. I get a chance to share my experience, but I
also learn from the teams that bring new tools, approaches, and ways to
think about computational challenges. It’s great that people from different
branches of science work on similar topics and get the opportunity to
cross-nurture and learn from each other.
WATCH THE VIDEO
At the hackathons, mentors share knowledge with computational
scientists, strengthen their ties with the community, and help
bridge the academia-industry gap.
Hear from Peter Steinbach, a mentor from Helmholtz Zentrum
Dresden Rossendorf, as he shares his motivation for helping teams
accelerate their codes at the 2024 Helmholtz Open Hackathon.
GROWING YOUR SKILLS
Mentoring at Helmholtz Open Hackathon 2024
“
“
Peter Steinbach
Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf
BECOME A MENTOR

8. 8
RESOURCES
In this work, the two-stage multisplitting iteration methods based on the
equivalent modulus equations are analyzed for solving linear
complementarity problems. New convergence results are presented where
the convergence domains of the parameter matrices are enlarged compared
the existing literatures. Furthermore, the improved domains are validated by
numerical examples with parallel computations using OpenACC.
READ PAPER
Paper: On the two-stage multisplitting iteration methods for
linear complementarity problems
Wenxiu Guo, Hua Zheng, Xiaoping Lu, Yongxiong Zhang

9. 9
RESOURCES
Paper: OpenACC Acceleration of Parallel Direct Numerical Simulation of
Turbulent Flows
Ahmed Abdellatif, Joan Grau, Ricardo Torres, Lluís Jofre

READ PAPER
This work presents a state-of-the-art computational approach for performing large-scale
simulations of turbulence on heterogeneous compute nodes. The approach proposed
combines message passing interface (MPI) parallelization for distributing the
computation across nodes with open accelerators (OpenACC) to target a graphical
processing unit (GPU) acceleration. Two different OpenACC approaches, corresponding
to managed and non-managed data management, have been tested and compared. The
results obtained indicate that the non-managed strategy outperforms the non-managed
scheme in all cases. Additionally, the non-managed GPU-accelerated approach presents
an overall speedup of 6× with respect to the CPU version. Finally, the capability of the
resulting parallel and accelerated flow solver to perform high-fidelity simulations of
turbulent flow is validated against a canonical wall-bounded fluid problem.

Fig. 1. Schematic illustrating the role of heterogeneous
(CPU + GPU) computing in efficiently performing
large-scale DNSs, such as wall-bounded high-pressure
transcritical flows which involves thermodynamically
complex systems with non-ideal gas behavior.

10. 10
RESOURCES
To issue early warnings and rapidly initiate disaster responses after tsunami damage, various
tsunami inundation forecast systems have been deployed worldwide. Japan’s Cabinet Office
operates a forecast system that utilizes supercomputers to perform tsunami propagation and
inundation simulation in real time. Although this real-time approach is able to produce significantly
more accurate forecasts than the conventional database-driven approach, its wider adoption was
hindered because it was specifically developed for vector supercomputers. In this paper, we migrate
the simulation code to modern CPUs and GPUs in a minimally invasive manner to reduce the testing
and maintenance costs. A directive-based approach is employed to retain the structure of the
original code while achieving performance portability, and hardware-specific optimizations including
load balance improvement for GPUs are applied. The migrated code runs efficiently on recent CPUs,
GPUs and vector processors: a six-hour tsunami simulation using over 47 million cells completes in
less than 2.5 minutes on 32 Intel Sapphire Rapids CPUs and 1.5 minutes on 32 NVIDIA H100 GPUs.
These results demonstrate that the code enables broader access to accurate tsunami inundation
forecasts.
Paper: Modernizing an Operational Real-time Tsunami
Simulator to Support Diverse Hardware Platforms
Keichi Takahashi, Takashi Abe, Akihiro Musa, Yoshihiko Sato, Yoichi
Shimomura, Hiroyuki Takizawa, Shunichi Koshimura
READ PAPER
Figure 10: Runtime of NLMNT2 routine with respect to the
number of asynchronous queues on NVIDIA A100

11. 11
RESOURCES
Documentation: OpenACC Programming
And Best Practices Guide
VIEW GUIDE
Explore a wealth of resources for writing portable code,
assessing application performance, and understanding
and exploring the OpenACC directives-based
programming model for parallelization and accelerated
computing.
This guide covers the OpenACC directives syntax,
profiling, parallelizing and optimizing loops, handling data,
interoperability and advanced features of the specification.

12. 12
STAY IN THE KNOW: JOIN THE COMMUNITY
OPENACC AND HACKATHON UPDATES
JOIN TODAY
The OpenACC Organization is dedicated to
helping the research and developer community
advance science by expanding their accelerated
and parallel computing skills.

Take an active role in influencing the future of both
the OpenACC specification and the organization
itself by becoming a member of the community.
Keep abreast of the new tools, latest resources,
recent research, and upcoming events.

13. WWW.OPENACC.ORG
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