Speaker
Description
High Performance Computing (HPC) has been an integral part of HEP computing for decades, but the use of supercomputers has typically been limited to running cycle-hungry simulations for theory and experiment. Today’s supercomputers offer spectacular compute power but are not always simple to use - supercomputers have a highly specialized architecture that means that code that runs well on a laptop or a small compute cluster will rarely scale up efficiently.
In this talk I will discuss initiatives developed at NERSC (the primary computing center for the DoE Office of Science) that are designed to enable scientists to work productively with supercomputers. In particular, I will describe how we are taking advantage of container technology (via the Shifter project) to solve the problems of portability and scalability on supercomputers at NERSC.
