Users Helping Users (UHU) Home Page
Purpose
Users Helping Users (UHU for short, pronounced "you-who") is a group
of users who assist other users by mentoring or answering
questions about using the NERSC's computational resources.
The Co-Chairs are
Mike Minkoff
( email ) from
Argonne National
Laboratory and Brian Hingerty
( email ) of
Oak Ridge National Laboratory .
The UHU group is a volunteer effort initiated by the
NERSC user community and NUG.
UHU Mentor Goals
- Provide information and expertise to the Energy Research
high performance computing (HPC) community.
- Ease the transition to new NERSC resources.
- Help educate the NERSC user community on short and
long term application development issues.
UHU Axioms of High Performance Computing
-
Axiom 1: It's not the compilers job! Never has been and never
will be.
Explanation: Compilers simply translate application
software specifications to machine code that is run by users. The
compiler can never know how to get the best performance for the
application. Application developers must provide hints or transform
software based on how the compiler writes machine code for the
hardware.
-
Axiom 2: You must get your hands dirty to understand the
field.
Explanation: To port or develop an application for high
performance parallel supercomputers you have to do some work to get
enough experience to determine which mechanism (parallel algorithms,
communication schemes, computer systems) is best for your application.
-
Axiom 3: There is always a tradeoff between short term and long
term priorities.
- Short Term: Functioning and efficient Code for application science.
- Long Term: Software that can adapt to future technology changes.
Your application software must be :
- Modular
- Portable
- Functionally Complete
- Able to deliver High Performance
Explanation: Design and implementation
decisions must be analyzed prior to crafting the software. A quick
re-engineering of a serial application might provide enough capability
to do application science on the currently available parallel
supercomputer, but this code might not work well on the next generation
system.
UHU Activities
While UHU is new and many of these activities have not been
implemented, UHU activities might include:
- Generic mentor mail list.
- WWW page for Participating mentors
- Co-resident Visits among Mentors and Users
- Educational information and workshops to help solve users'
problems.
UHU Mentor List
- Matti Alatalo ( email
), computational physicist
- Tom Bettge ( email
), computational meteorologist
- Tom Blum ( email
), lattice gauge theorist, computational physicist
- Brian Hingerty ( email
), computational biologist
- Ricky Kendall ( email ),
computational chemist
- Shichang Liu ( email ),
computational physicist
- Mike Minkoff ( email ),
computational and computer scientist
- Scott Parker ( email ),
computational plasma physicist
- Robert D. Ryne ( email ),
computational accelerator physicist
- Jeffrey L. Tilson ( email ),
computation scientist, computational chemist
- Doug Toussaint ( email ),
computational physicist
- Lu Zhong Yi ( email ),
computational physicist