Standardizing Node Memory Management for HPC

Computer scientists at Sandia National Laboratories are contributing to standardization of memory management interfaces for HPC applications through the OpenMP Language Committee.  The emergence of multiple levels of memory with distinct characteristics (e.g., high bandwidth or persistent storage) is a disruptive technology change presenting both challenges and opportunities for DOE applications.  OpenMP is the cross-vendor industry standard for shared memory parallel programming, making it an ideal forum to develop a portable solution to address this technology change, one that will allow applications to leverage these new memory types rewriting their code for each specific platform.  For example, applications will be able to use the high bandwidth memory on nodes of the Trinity and Sierra supercomputers and later run the same codes on future machines.  A technical report on the OpenMP web site details progress on this work: http://www.openmp.org/wp-content/uploads/openmp-TR5-final.pdf.

Contact
Stephen Lecler Olivier, slolivi@sandia.gov

January 1, 2017