LUMI Hackathon: Optimizing for AMD GPUs

The selected projects will receive help from HPE and AMD staff of the HPE Center of Excellence for LUMI and from members of the LUMI User Support Team. The hackathon will be on-site only in Brussels, Belgium, from Monday October 14 till Friday October 18. Additionally, we will have a one day online preparation day which includes an introduction to profiling CPU and GPU code on LUMI. Each selected team will also have a preparatory meeting with its mentors to discuss the goals of the hackathon and the state of the project.
The deadline for applications is 26. August 2024.

The following sections give more detail on what to expect and describe how you can apply. In order to make sure we can properly support those who attend we are asking for some information on what you hope to achieve.

Who can apply

This is an open call. Anyone who is a member of an organization eligible to receive an allocation for LUMI compute resources is also welcome to apply to this program. In brief, this means that a research software developer affiliated with a research organization in countries part of the LUMI consortium and/or the EuroHPC countries can apply. This includes associated countries to H2020. A company, which has its headquarters in such countries, is also eligible. By partnering with European research groups and/or companies, a non-European applicant can also participate, but please note that the principal investigator of any projects that apply will need to be based in the EU or an associated country. Ph.D. students and holders of postdoctoral fellowships are also eligible to apply, but we may ask for further letters of support in such cases.

For more information, please see:

• LUMI General Terms of Use https://www.lumi-supercomputer.eu/lumi-general-terms-of-use_1-0/
• EuroHPC JU Access Policy https://eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/sites/default/files/2021-03/Decision%2006.2021%20-%20Access%20policy.pdf

What we are looking for

We are looking for research groups and companies interested in making their scientific software utilize efficiently the new AMD GPU-compute architecture in LUMI, in collaboration with LUMI experts. We are looking for proposals outlining a team effort of solving performance bottlenecks in existing software. The scope should be limited so that the task can be accomplished in one week with your team of two (2) to four (4) people.

Collectively the team should know the application intimately. There will be intensive mentoring during this 5-day hands-on workshop. Mentors come from HPE’s Center of Excellence, and the LUMI User Support Team and will help your team accomplish your team’s goal. The goal is to help with optimization of code that is already ported to GPUs, not to support a full port of the code. For this other opportunities are offered by the LUMI project. We therefore expect that your software already compiles and runs on AMD GPUs, preferably with a build system based on standard tools like Make or CMake. Participants are expected to have their code installed on LUMI before the hackathon so that during the hackathon week the focus can be on the optimization of the code. It is also important to have a realistic goal for the hackathon that can be realised in a week.

It is an advantage if intended work is mainly in their own source code, and not in external third-party libraries (for which they are not the main developers), as it may be difficult to interact quickly with third parties during the hackathon.

We are mainly looking for software with open source licenses, or at least free academic use. We will consider commercially licensed software only in exceptional cases.

Applicants are also responsible for ensuring compute time on LUMI via a EuroHPC (development) project, of for applicants from LUMI consortium countries, their local resource allocator(s).

How to apply

Closing date: 26. August 2024, 17:00 CEST
Preparation/bootstrapping day: Online, Wednesday, 9. October 2024
Hackathon period: 14.-18. October 2024

Please have a look at the hackathon registration questions and send in a ticket as described here: https://www.lumi-supercomputer.eu/events/hackathon-registration-2024/

The application form is relatively short and we ask for: contact information, a short technical description of the software (programming languages, libraries etc), a description of the intended work, and a motivation for why a successful effort will be useful for the end-users (scientists).

Please ensure that at least two (2) members of your team can join on-site in Belgium. Otherwise we can’t take your application into account.

Teams whose application successfully passes the selection process will need to register for the event to confirm participation within two weeks from notification of acceptance. The notification of acceptance will include information on how to register.

The hackathon is free of charge. Participants have to organize and pay for their travel and accommodation in Brussels.

How we will assess your application

Assessment process

The teams will be selected based on a scientific and technical review. The scientific review is performed by the LUMI consortium and/or external evaluators. The technical review is performed by the LUMI User Support Team and HPE/AMD Center of Excellence (“CoE”). We may ask for an interview to discuss your proposal (done remotely). In such case, applicants will be provided with comments prior to the interview in order to prepare. The interview will only be focused on the technical feasibility and not on the scientific merit.

Assessment criteria

The scientific assessment is mainly done with respect to the potential impact in the specific field of science where the software will be used. Relatively less importance is given to the scientific track record of the applicants. Furthermore, the proposed software and/or implementation is evaluated relative to the state-of-the-art in the field, and if a successful effort would fill a gap in the currently available software on LUMI.

The technical assessment is mainly done with respect to the technical feasibility of porting the software to AMD GPUs and subsequently running on the LUMI supercomputer. These include both: 1) technical aspects of the software such as programming language, the use of libraries and frameworks, and the internal data structures and algorithms, and 2) the practical aspects such as the difficulty of achieving the goal during the hackathon and the team’s ability to participate on-site. In particular, the software development track record of the applicant (or applicants), and the balance of skills in the final project team, which will include staff from the HPE CoE and the LUMI User Support Team, will be taken into account. Projected software speed-ups or preliminary benchmarks are helpful in the evaluation, but are not required.

Venue

The hackathon will be held in Brussels, Belgium, from Monday, 14. October to Friday, 18 October. It will start around lunchtime on the 14. and end at lunchtime on the 18. to allow for travel. The location is HOEK 38, Leuvenseweg 38, 1000 Brussel (and the offices of the FWO, one of the main funding offices for research in Flanders), just behind the Belgian parliament and just a 10-15 minutes walk from the medieval city centre and central station (which on weekdays has 6 trains per hour to Brussels Airport). On the first and last day all groups will present their projects jointly in the auditorium of the venue, while for the other days several smaller rooms have been reserved so that in principle there will be only two teams per room for work on the code.