Spring 2009 Agenda

Please feel free to edit your agenda items. If you want to add an agenda item, go ahead but please let Rob Armstrong know. If it seems that your item has disappeared (and we didn't discuss it) look harder, it may have been rearranged into a different slot. If it still doesn't seem to be there, someone (probably Rob) deleted it by mistake. Let Rob know.

Newcomers to the CCA Forum are strongly encouraged to present a short introduction to their research and interests as they relate to the CCA.


If you plan to call in to the meeting, please sign yourself up for the phone@cca-forum.org mailing list. This is where coordination will take place, last-minute information will be posted, etc. The signup page is https://www.cca-forum.org/mailman/listinfo/phone.

Please keep an eye on the phone list in case we have to change the MeetingPlace ID during the meeting

If you're interested in participating remotely for specific topic only, please email bernholdtde@ornl.gov to indicate your interests.

See below for details of start times and access codes for the telecon and MeetingPlace.



8am - 9am Working Continental Breakfast

8am Welcome and Where are the Bathrooms
Host: David Bernholdt

Introductions
Rob Armstrong, SNL

The Next CCA Meeting in the Seattle Area
Next Host: Manoj Krishnan, PNNL

The meeting will be held at the Westin in downtown Seattle.
Please notify Manoj of any pre-meeting plans by 15 May.

Site Selection and Scheduling for the Meeting One Year from Now
Rob Armstrong, SNL

TASCS News
David Bernholdt

A brief summary of what's been going on (technically) in TASCS since the last CCA Forum meeting.

• No prepared presentation this time because we've been working on our review instead. That's Wednesday 29 April.
• TASCS is writing an article for SciDAC Review, due in June

Dynamic Optimization for CCA Applications
Jeffrey A. Sandoval (presenter), Keith D. Cooper, John Mellor-Crummey?, Rice University

This talk will motivate the use of dynamic optimization for CCA applications. I will describe the use of HPCToolkit for online performance profiling and the LLVM compiler infrastructure for dynamic optimization.

An Update on my iMesh CCA Component
Jay Billings, ORNL

Roundtable: How Much Automation is Possible with OnRamp
Rob Armstrong, SNL

To what degree can OnRamp be made automagic? If two components are taken from the same monolithic code, to what degree can OnRamp (possibly) untangle them into port calls? Given that it can't do everything what is the appropriate way of "inlining."



CCARB update
Ben Allan, SNL

12n-1pm Working Lunch and Group Discussion of Topics of Current Interest

• Use of MCMD in groundwater simulation
• AMR mesh component development
• Opportunities for CCA to help with deployment and use of automatic differentiation technologies

ccaEcloud Phase I
Stefan Muszala, Tech-X, I'll talk about wrapping up the ccaEcloud Phase I work and briefly update other related work (TASCS-FACETS, Babel Structs and onRamp).


PerfExplorer component for CCA released
Kevin Huck, University of Oregon
(brief presentation)

Update from the NEAMS Program
David Bernholdt, ORNL

NEAMS is major initiative from the DOE Office of Nuclear Energy to modernize modeling & simulation in the nuclear energy industry. The program has a vision of an overarching architecture and framework to help integrate, organize, and make more usable, what is envisioned to be a very large and broad spectrum of software. At present, a team at ORNL, is working on the design of the architecture and framework.

Today I'll give a brief overview of the Salome framework from EDF using two of their presentations:

• http://trac.mcs.anl.gov/projects/neams-ibm/attachment/wiki/edf-0902/001_SALOME_SALOME_ANL_IBM_ORNL_WORSHOP_20090211.pdf?format=raw
• http://trac.mcs.anl.gov/projects/neams-ibm/attachment/wiki/edf-0902/049_SALOME_SALOME_ANL_IBM_ORNL_WORSHOP_20090211.pdf?format=raw

Interface Contracts in the Wild: An Brief Analysis of Denovo
David Bernholdt, ORNL

We've run into a real scientific application that was written with design-by-contract ideas! Here is a brief analysis of Denovo's approach to and use of contracts.

Roundtable: Parallel Programming Models
David Bernholdt, ORNL

Context: What can/should CCA do to help programming of multicore processors?

Summary of discussions:

• Strong support of CCA's historical stance of separation of concerns, including when it comes to emerging approaches for dealing with multicore
• Recognition that CCA could (should) do more to insure that CCA does not get in the way of multicore solutions (i.e. threading in one form or another).
• Action items for the Forum:
  • Define thread safety for purposes of the CCA (c.f. MPI-2's definition of thread safety)
  • Add thread safety requirements to everything in the CCA specification
  • Insure that all CCA middleware is implemented with appropriate thread safety
  • Investigate the use of SIDL annotations (a la contracts) to allow developers to specify thread safety characteristics of their interfaces/methods
• Following approach of TASCS Initiatives, look for "value adds" where CCA can provide a platform to give users additional multicore-related capabilities
  • BabelRMI already has an asynchronous call concept. Could that be expanded into a general CCA-level interface to multithreaded programming?
  • Consider thread-based implementations/adaptations of the MCMD capability
  • Consider task pools

End 5:00pm local time

Dinner on your own



Remote Participants: Please email David if you want to participate in a BOF. Otherwise he won't bother setting up the phone gear.

8am-9am Continental Breakfast
8am Round 1 BOFs

• OnRamp?, Geoff, UO
• BabelRMI use cases, potential applications, Ken Chiu, BU

9am Round 2 BOFs

• More discussion of dynamic compilation and optimization and potential targets, Jeff Sandoval, Rice
• CCARB, Ben Allan, SNL

10am Review Practive Run

End 12:00n local time

TASCS Review Team meeting