Section: Application Domains

Application Domains

HPC, simulation

The RUNTIME group is working on the design of efficient runtime systems for parallel architectures. We are currently focusing our efforts on High Performance Computing applications that merely implement numerical simulations in the field of Seismology, Weather Forecasting, Energy, Mechanics or Molecular Dynamics. These time-consuming applications need so much computing power that they need to run over parallel machines composed of several thousands of processors.

Because the lifetime of HPC applications often spreads over several years and because they are developed by many people, they have strong portability constraints. Thus, these applications are mostly developed on top of standard APIs (e.g. MPI for communications over distributed machines, OpenMP for shared-memory programming). That explains why we have long standing collaborations with research groups developing parallel language compilers, parallel programming environments, numerical libraries or communication software. Actually, all these “clients” are our primary target.

Although we are currently mainly working on HPC applications, many other fields may benefit from the techniques developed by our group. Since a large part of our efforts is devoted to exploiting multicore machines and GPU accelerators, many desktop applications could be parallelized using our runtime systems (e.g. 3D rendering, etc.).