Dr Yutong Lu, Director, System Software Laboratory, School of Computer Science, National University of Defense Technology

Scientific discovery and life science research need more and more supercomputing and data processing power, but the gap between the capability of the supercomputers and the requirements of the most demanding applications is becoming wider. The peak performance of supercomputers, such as Tianhe-2, is increased dramatically by using the latest heterogeneous architecture and high-speed interconnects, however the efficiency of real applications is still limited by conventional models, algorithms, and IO processing. Therefore, we need to improve application scalability and efficiency to adapt to the capability of emerging supercomputers, exploring the relationships between the CPU, accelerator, interconnect and the storage subsystem. This talk analyzes the key issues of application scalability for advanced HPC systems in the post-petascale era. The capabilities of CPUs, accelerators, interconnect and I/O storage systems will be discussed and how they fit together to create a whole HPC-System. Included in this discussion will be how large-scale applications running on Tianhe-2 are designed and supported by balancing the system’s computation, communication, data management, and fault tolerance. Some large applications from different domains will be presented, including CFD, genomics, and cosmology, as well as big data types of workloads. A co-design approach will be highlighted for the research and development activities, to deliver a whole system for scalable computing, and to support the large-scale domain applications efficiently.

About the author
Prof. Dr. Yutong Lu is the Director of the System Software Laboratory, School of Computer Science, National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), Changsha, China. She is also a professor in the State Key Laboratory of High Performance Computing, China. She got her B.S, M.S, and PhD degrees from the NUDT. Her extensive research and development experience has spanned several generations of domestic supercomputers in China. During this period, Prof. Lu was the Director Designer for the Tianhe-1A and Tianhe-2 systems. Her continuing research interests include parallel operating systems (OS), high-speed communication, global file system, and advanced programming environment.