Supercomputing, or simply SC, is a prestigious event for the HPC community. Held annually for more than three decades, SC is where thousands of HPC users, researchers, enthusiasts, and salespeople get together to share their work, pitch new systems, network, and socialize. Both its technical track and exhibition are among the most respected in the HPC community. This year’s SC had a record attendance of over 18,000 participants as well as the largest-ever exhibition floor.
As a reflection of our growing community, this year we had a busy roster of Chapel events at SC24.
Chapel/Arkouda at the HPE Booth
For the first time in Chapel’s history, there was a Chapel/Arkouda demo at the HPE booth. From Monday to Thursday, the HPE booth was never short of activity. Festivities began as soon as the exhibition floor opened with the announcement of El Capitan as the world’s fastest supercomputer. With El Capitan online, HPE bolstered its position as the industry leader in supercomputing. The top three supercomputers in the TOP500 list (which happen to be the only ones to break the exaflop barrier) are HPE Cray Supercomputing EX systems.
Our booth demo slides are available online
Thanks to the espresso bar, fresh popcorn, El Capitan swag, and scavenger hunts, there were no dull moments in the HPE booth for the rest of the event. During this period, we demonstrated Chapel and Arkouda to many visitors at our demo station. We also had the chance to chat with many of our fellow HPE colleagues in person. We are looking forward to continuing our conversations with Chapel and Arkouda enthusiasts, and with other groups at HPE. Our slides, which also include two recorded demos, are available online.
Éric Laurendeau’s Distinguished Talk at PAW-ATM
PAW-ATM is a workshop where HPC technologies that are alternatives to the conventional MPI+X paradigm are the main focus. PAW-ATM’s popularity has kept it on the SC agenda for more than a decade now, where it’s been a forum for HPC users, developers, researchers, and enthusiasts of Chapel and other programming paradigms to get together and exchange ideas.
This year’s PAW-ATM hosted the CHAMPS team’s PI, Éric Laurendeau, as the Distinguished Speaker. For those who haven’t heard of CHAMPS before, it is a multiphysics simulation software framework for aerodynamics developed by Professor Laurendeau’s team at Polytechnique Montreal. Boasting more than 150,000 lines of Chapel code, CHAMPS is the largest application written in Chapel, to our knowledge.
Éric’s slides are available online
Éric took the audience through a tour of what building an aircraft entails, from the initial design to the final certification, highlighting the importance of computational modeling. CHAMPS, entirely developed by his graduate students of mechanical engineering, competes with other industry-grade modeling and simulation solutions in terms of its fidelity to the real-world data. Éric also demonstrated how Chapel makes parallel programming easy for his team. His slides are available on the Chapel website. Éric is a great speaker, and [note:If you don't have access to the SC24 recording, check out Éric's excellent CHIUW 2021 keynote instead. ], you can watch his talk. We also recommend reading his recent interview, 7 Questions for Éric Laurendeau: Computing Aircraft Aerodynamics in Chapel on the Chapel Blog.
Chapel and Arkouda Talks in the SC24 Technical Program
The Chapel team had several talks in the SC schedule as well. Materials from these talks are now all available online. Read on for the full list with quick summaries.
Bioinformatics and Chapel
Michael Ferguson presented Exploring Suffix Array Algorithms in Chapel at the Parallel Applications Workshop (PAW-ATM). Michael summarized how suffix array algorithms can be implemented in parallel in Chapel to help metagenomics research. This work was a summary of a collaboration with Bonnie Hurwitz, a professor at the University of Arizona. You can find Michael’s slides on our website. His code is also available online.
Python for Science at Scale: Arkouda
Ben McDonald presented Exploring Data at Scale with Arkouda: A Practical Introduction to Scalable Data Science at the High Performance Python for Science at Scale (HPPSS) workshop. Ben demonstrated how Arkouda’s Python client/Chapel server architecture can enable interactive exploratory data analytics at scale. His slides are available. We also recommend checking out his live demo where he processes hundreds of GBs of data interactively, using only a couple of nodes and Arkouda.
Chapel’s Take on GPU Programming
I presented Productive, Vendor-Neutral GPU Programming Using Chapel at the Workshop on Accelerator Programming and Directives (WACCPD). I went through examples with less than 10 lines of code to showcase how applications can easily be made parallel, distributed, and GPU-enabled. You can check out my slides on the Chapel website. Alternatively, you can watch a live GPU programming demo or presentation to learn more about GPU programming in Chapel.
Applications-First Approach in HPC Education
I also presented Consider an Applications-First Approach for PDC at the Workshop on Education for High-Performance Computing (EduHPC) on behalf of Michelle Strout. This talk proposed an alternative approach in Parallel and Distributed Computing whereby teaching parallel programming is not approached from the bottom up, as is typically done today (with OS and hardware knowledge as prerequisites), but top-down where relatable parallel applications are used to introduce parallelism concepts to highlight their benefits. Slides from this talk are online. If you are interested in using Chapel in teaching, please reach out to the Chapel team at HPE and check our upcoming events page for monthly educator meetups, which take place on the 2nd Wednesday of each month.
Closing Thoughts
The Chapel team has been working on preparing for SC24 for months, alongside many other teams at HPE. Beyond preparing Chapel-related material, Michelle Strout and myself served on the Technical Program Committee, and I also served on the Organizing Committee for PAW-ATM.
The Chapel community didn’t forget to have fun and socialize this year either. During our annual Chapel Users Group happy hour (CHUG), we got to know each other better, where some members of the community met for the first time in person after years of close collaboration.
The Chapel team had a very productive SC24. Above, we’ve summarized the Chapel-related events at a variety of venues within SC24. However, business cards being passed around, community discussions, hallway conversations, and exchanges during loud parties are what ignite new collaborations at SC. And we had countless of those. We are very excited to foster those relationships and grow our welcoming community even further. We hope to see you all at SC25!
