TACC Establishes Intel Center of Excellence in Seismic ResearchCenter to explore, develop, and share best-in-class cross-architecture programmingbyFaith Singer Nov. 9, 2023 Press Releaseshare this:The Texas Advanced Computing Center at The University of Texas at Austin has established a new Intel oneAPI Center of Excellence to provide high performance computing (HPC) solutions for seismic research. The center will explore, develop, and share best-in-class cross-architecture programming, focusing on projects that develop and optimize seismic imaging benchmark codes using oneAPI for cross-architecture support.TACC will focus on projects that develop and optimize seismic imaging benchmark codes using oneAPI for cross-architecture support. The COE is aligned with the TACC Science and Technology Affiliates for Research (STAR) Scholars program to train and develop future computational scientists to contribute to the scientific research that is critical to developing future energy sources.Specializing in HPC, scientific visualization, data analysis, storage systems, software, research and development, and portal interfaces, TACC deploys and operates advanced computational infrastructure to enable the research activities of scientists across the nation and around the world through international collaborations. TACC Research Scientist Victor Eijkhout will explore and enable seismic imaging and other representative kernels with oneAPI and SYCL, an open standard language from the Khronos Group that allows developers to program heterogeneous architectures in modern C++. SYCL allows parallel programming across CPUs and GPUs, making it possible to write code that will work across multiple platforms and multiple vendors. The COE will evaluate performance portability through SYCL codes on TACC’s Stampede3 supercomputer delivered by Intel CPU Max and GPU Max systems. In addition, Eijkhout will add a SYCL teaching module to the Parallel Programming course he teaches in Spring 2024, and a longer section will be incorporated into an accelerator course co-taught by Eijkhout in Fall 2024.“With the support of the oneAPI COE, TACC will enhance key kernels that are part of our STAR partners’ seismic imaging codes by converting them to use oneAPI,” said John Cazes, director of HPC at TACC. “Intel and TACC have collaborated for more than a decade on enabling open science and industry breakthroughs in HPC, scientific visualization, and data analytics through standards-based software development,” said Joe Curley, general manager of Intel Software Products and Ecosystems. “The new oneAPI Center of Excellence at TACC will continue advancement of methods embraced by the new Unified Acceleration Foundation to explore, develop, and share best-in-class cross-architecture programming for seismic imaging and beyond.”The flexibility of oneAPI allows TACC to develop a single application that performs well on either a central processing unit (CPU) or graphics processing unit (GPU).“These converted codes will function as a template for further development in oneAPI for our STAR partners,” Cazes said. “As part of this effort, TACC will introduce SYCL to the next generation of engineers and scientists at UT Austin and provide oneAPI-focused training to TACC users for Stampede3.”Announced in July 2023, the Stampede3 supercomputer is a new Intel and Dell Technologies supercomputer that will be the high-capability and capacity HPC system available to all open science research projects in the U.S. when it enters full production in early 2024.