Project-Seminar: Heterogeneous Computing on Power (2017)

From Multi-core and Accelerators (GPUs, FPGAs) to Quantum Computers

Prof. Dr. Andreas Polze

Max Plauth, M.Sc.
Felix Eberhardt, M.Sc.
Lena Feinbube, M.Sc.

Organization

Extent: 4 semester hours (6 graded credit points)

Dates: Wednesday, 13.30 - 15.00, Room: A-1.1; Wednesday, 11.00 - 12.30, Room: C-1.X

The seminar focusses on state-of-the-art IBM Power Systems and Hardware Accelerators such as GPUs, FPGAs and application specific coprocessors (i.e. for compression, cryptography). Furthermore, future trends such as quantum computers are investigated.
  • Heterogeneous Lab: Application scenarios and integration strategies for state-of-the-art (cache-coherent) accelerators such as GPUs (NVIDIA K80/P100) and FPGAs (Xilinx KU060).
  • Virtualization Lab: Capacity Planing and SLAs in virtualized environments.
  • Dependability Lab: Dependability aspects of Power systems.
  • Future Trends: The IBM Q quantum computer and application scenarios.
Participants are required to read fundamental scientific publications and technical documentation on mechanisms of the underlying hardware as well as Software Tools and Operating Systems. Experiments should be planned, evaluated and presented to the fellow students. The Participants are required to hand in a written report of the results.
  • Each participant is expected to work on a seminar project.
  • Each participant is expected to give a 30 minute presentation on their project and the background topic.
  • Presentation slides should be discussed with a supervisor one week prior to the presentation date.
  • Each participant is required to hand in a written report of the results. Roughly 4-6 Pages using the IEEE compsocconf template. Deadline: 30.09.17
  • At the end of the seminar, we plan to assemble a technical report about your seminar topics.

Topics

Based on the wide range of available technologies, the seminar offers project topics from four different focus areas:
  1. Heterogeneous Computing
    • GPU Computing:
      • Apply NX842 compression to alleviate PCIe bottleneck.
      • GPU-offloading support in IBM JDK 8.
    • Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) / Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI)
      • Virtual Machine / Container integration.
      • Dynamic Reconfiguration: modifying FPGA functionality at runtime.
      • Implications of coherent accelerators on programming models.
      • Impact of CAPI on communication costs.
      • Integration in existing applications: how hard is it?
    • ...
  2. Breathing VMs
    • Dynamic Topolgies
    • Dynamic Resizing
    • Capacity Planning
    • SLA Adherence
    • ...
  3. Dependability aspects of Power systems
    • Fault injection on Power platforms
    • N-version computation
    • Stress and resiliency testing
    • ...
  4. Future Trends
    • Quantum Computing
      • IBM-q / Quantum Experience
    • ...

Seminar Dates

Date Topic Presenter
19.04.2017 Introduction OSM
26.04.2017 Allocation/discussion of project topics OSM
10.05.2017 Intermediate Presentation - OS Origins
NeXTStep Internals 		Jan Kohstall
17.05.2017 Intermediate Presentation - HetComp on Power
Breathing LPAR 		Robert Schmid
24.05.2017 Intermediate Presentation - OS Origins
VMS Internals 		Lukas Wenzel
12.07.2017 Final Presentation
tba 		tba
19.07.2017 Final Presentation
tba 		tba
26.07.2017 Final Presentation - Research Seminar
Rail2X Network Simulation 		Dennis Hempfing