Enhancing_eResearch_productivity_with_NeSIs_consultancy_service.pdf (1.12 MB)
Download fileEnhancing eResearch productivity with NeSI's consultancy service
presentation
posted on 2020-03-10, 03:57 authored by Alexander Pletzer, Chris ScottChris Scott, Wolfgang Hayek, Georgina RaeGeorgina RaeMany research areas from bioinformatics and genomics, to materials science, fundamental
physics, earthquake simulation and weather/climate prediction are increasingly dependent
on the availability of powerful computing platforms and deep software stacks.
Unfortunately, scientific software too often runs at sub-optimal performance, sometimes
reaching only a few percent of the maximum peak performance of the supercomputer.
Small changes in code implementation details, the choice of compilers and libraries and
adjustments in runtime environment have been shown to sometimes have a significant
impact on code performance. By walking through some examples, we show how
researchers were able to leverage NeSI’s free consultancy service to squeeze more
performance out of their application, sometimes reducing the execution time by several
factors, a win-win solution which benefits science and saves core hours.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Alex Pletzer is research software engineer for NeSI at NIWA. Originally a physicist,
Alex drifted towards high performance during a career that spans research in plasma
physics, working for a private company in Colorado and supporting users at
university in Pennsylvania.
Chris Scott is research software engineer for NeSI at University of Auckland.
Currently lead of the computational science team, Chris has a background in
molecular dynamics, Monte Carlo methods, finite element analysis, visualisation and
parallel computing
Wolfgang Hayek is research software engineer for NeSI at NIWA and scientific
programming group lead at NIWA. Wolfgang has expertise in radiative transfer
modelling, fluid dynamics, data analysis and high performance computing
Georgina Rae is engagement manager and, until recently, was team lead for the
computational science team. Georgina has experience in food and plant research
and has worked in the world of intellectual property and commercialisation