SESSI (SeRC Efficient Simulation Software Initiative)

Developing and writing high performance HPC codes is an enormous effort that requires deep expertise from both the application and the computer science side. Application domain specialists often do not have sufficient expertise in computer science and computer scientists do not have sufficient knowledge of the scientific domain to develop better algorithms and code. To make significant progress, a tight collaboration between the two to make significant progress. The goal of SESSI is to have impact on and through selected, widely used codes by fostering such collaborations, which necessarily need to be long lived.

Although it might seem that the Exascale is already here, pre-Exascale machines in Europe are still not production ready and, more importantly, most scientific codes are not ready yet. In addition to the expected increase in core count, recent hardware developments have brought new challenges, such as more heterogeneous connections between cores in CPUs, between CPUs and GPUs and between CPUs and GPUs in different nodes.

SESSI pulls together a critical mass of applications and software engineering experts to get the combined knowledge needed to improve the performance of relevant HPC applications. The work is performed through co-design efforts, in collaboration with hardware vendors.

Members

People involved can be found here.

Projects

GROMACS, PI: Berk Hess
Nek5000/Neko, PI: Philipp Schlatter
HPC Group, PI: Stefano Markidis