Workshops

The Workshop Add-On ticket ($150) includes access to one Workshop on Monday morning and one Workshop on Wednesday morning.  You will be asked to specify your two choices during registration.

Monday, March 4 (8:30 a.m. -Noon)

*Option A: Best Practices in Supercomputing Systems Management
Presented by: Practitioners and Experts from Industry, Academia and National Labs

Abstract: This session will share best practices in supercomputing systems management. In the last few years, our industry has made great progress improving the reliability of very large MPI jobs in our clusters but the challenge still remains on how to best squeeze every last piece of performance out of our systems. Coupled with a changing landscape for the filesystems and evolving services supported by cloud, the choices we make as HPC professionals becomes more difficult but no less critical.

We are organizing a workshop to share best practices in filesystems monitoring and management and performance management with a focus on the cluster’s health to drive application performance. Experts and practitioners from industry, academia and national laboratories will present and share their experiences on these subjects as well as leading a discussion.

Option B: Hiring, Developing and Retaining an Inclusive Workforce
Presented by: Texas Women in High Performance Computing

Abstract: This session will share tips and strategies for attracting and increasing diversity in your workforce, from small modifications in job postings, to cultural shifts that encourage employee retention. The oil & gas industry has recognized the need to bring in a more diverse talent pool, to fill the hundreds of positions in advanced computing, machine learning/artificial intelligence, and data science that are opening up in the coming years. Successfully increasing diversity in the workplace requires careful planning and support at all levels.

Texas Women in HPC (TXWHPC) has organized this workshop to share best practices to broaden the pipeline of candidates for HPC-related jobs, and offer suggestions for ways to keep your organization humming smoothly. Experts from academia, the oil & gas and computing industries will present and share their experiences related to hiring and maintaining a more diverse workforce, and the importance of male allies. The panel session will offer an opportunity for the audience to ask questions of the presenters.


Wednesday, March 6 (8:30 a.m. -Noon)

Option C: Singularity Containers: Secure, Repeatable and Mobile Runtimes for Oil and Gas Applications and Workflows*
Presented by: Ian Lumb, Sylabs

Abstract: Containers are the means through which application runtimes can be fully encapsulated for mobility and reproducibility. Of primary importance to those in the oil and gas industry, by emphasizing integration over isolation, Singularity containers do not introduce additional degrees of complexity and overhead when it comes to making use of special-purpose devices (e.g., GPUs, fabrics). By inheriting permissions native to the Linux operating environment, Singularity containers also avoid security pitfalls that plague other implementations.

In this workshop, the purpose is to directly introduce participants to Singularity containers in as hands-on a fashion as is feasible. Armed with a functioning environment for running Singularity containers, participants will make use of Docker as well as native Singularity containers (i.e., Singularity Image Format (SIF) files) via remotely hosted repositories in the cloud, namely the Docker Hub (https://hub.docker.com/) as well as the Sylabs Cloud (https://cloud.sylabs.io/library), respectively. The workshop will close with considerations such as definition files for detailing a container’s build instructions, signing containers with verifiable keys, deployment considerations, plus additional topics as time permits.

*Attendees will receive information about preparing their laptops prior to start of the workshop.

Option D: Speeding Up the Parallelization Process: An Algorithmic Approach to Multicore and GPU Programming
Presented by: Toni Collis, Appentra Solutions

Abstract:  Designed for both learners and HPC educators HPC educators, this session will cover a new approach to learning a new approach that can product multi-core and GPU enabled code in the space of hours or days rather than weeks or months.

By focusing on a methodological, step-by-step approach to identifying how and where to parallelize, your software can start taking advantage of threads and/or GPU cores in a short amount of development time. This session will focus on how to identify the parallel patterns already present in code, and identification of the data scoping requirements to enable correct OpenMP or OpenACC code. This procedure works for both OpenMP and OpenACC, enabling participants to target the desired architecture quickly and effectively. The benefits can then be applied to any software project your work on in the future.
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Fostering relationships and highlighting trends in HPC for the oil & gas industry.