Porting GPU-Accelerated Applications to POWER8 Systems

With the US Department of Energy’s announcement of plans to base two future flagship supercomputers on IBM POWER CPUs, NVIDIA GPUs, NVIDIA NVLink interconnect, and Mellanox high-speed networking, many developers are getting started building GPU-accelerated applications that run on IBM POWER processors. The good news is that porting existing applications to this platform is easy. In fact, smooth sailing is already being reported by software development leaders such as Erik Lindahl, Professor of Biophysics at the Science for Life Laboratory, Stockholm University & KTH, developer of the GROMACS molecular dynamics package:

The combination of POWER8 CPUs & NVIDIA Tesla accelerators is amazing. It is the highest performance we have ever seen in individual cores, and the close integration with accelerators is outstanding for heterogeneous parallelization. Thanks to the little endian chip and standard CUDA environment it took us less than 24 hours to port and accelerate GROMACS.