Taking place from March 2 to 3, 2016, the Oil & Gas High Performances Computing (HPC) Conference is hosted annually at Rice University and is the premier meeting place for networking and discussion focused on computing and information technology challenges in the oil and gas industry. The conference has become a key venue for planners and practitioners alike and describes itself as “a forum for taking the pulse of industry needs and discussing challenges, opportunities and new development at the interface of the oil and gas industry, the IT industry and the academic and research community.”

High-end computing and information technology is a critical business enabler and differentiator with a relatively well-understood return on investment in the oil and gas industry. However, there are critical challenges, such as a constantly changing technology landscape, an increased focus on software and software innovation, and escalating concerns around workforce development.

Focused on computing and information technology challenges and needs, technical themes for conference sessions are developed each year based on current trends and the diversity and strengths of the abstracts received.

The 2016 speaker line-up includes

• Keynote: Francois Alabert, Vice-President Exploration Technology, Total: “How is High Performance Computing reshaping oil and gas exploration and production?”
• Keynote: Sverre Brandsberg-Dahl, Chief Geophysicist, Data Processing and Technology, PGS: “Exploration Seismology and the Return of the Supercomputer”
• Plenary: Barbara Chapman, Professor, IACS, Stony Brook University and University of Houston: “HPC Workforce Challenges”
• Plenary: Brent Gorda, General Manager, High Performance Data Division Intel: “HPC I/O Today and the Road Ahead”
• Plenary: Douglas Kothe, Deputy Director of Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate, ORNL: “Computational Science and Engineering Applications at Exascale: Challenges and Opportunities”
• Keynote: Paul Messina, Senior Strategic Advisor/Argonne Distinguished Fellow, ALCF: “The Path to Exascale Computing”
• Plenary: Dan Stanzione, Executive Director, Texas Advanced Computing Center: “The Evolution of a Comprehensive Computation and Data Infrastructure at the Texas Advanced Computing Center”

The workshop will kick off on Wednesday, March 2 at 8:30 AM with four optional morning (mini) tutorials.

• Performance analysis of MPI+OpenMP Programs with HPCToolkit, John Mellor-Crummey, Professor, Computer Science & ECE, Rice University
  The number of hardware threads per processor on multicore and manycore processors is growing rapidly. Fully exploiting emerging scalable parallel systems will require programs to use threaded programming models at the node level. OpenMP is the leading model for multithreaded programming. This tutorial will give a hands-on introduction of how to use Rice University’s open-source HPCToolkit performance tools to analyze the performance of programs that employ MPI + OpenMP to harness the power of scalable parallel systems. See http://hpctoolkit.org? for more information about HPCToolkit.
  PETSc: The Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation, Matthew G. Knepley, Asst. Professor, Computational and Applied Mathematics, Rice University
  PETSc, is a suite of data structures and routines for the scalable parallel solution of nonlinear equations, often arising from partial differential equations or boundary integral equations. PETSc has been used for years in the oil and gas industry, including development contributed back from WesternGeco and Shell. It supports MPI, shared memory pthreads, and GPUs, as well as hybrid MPI-shared memory pthreads or MPI-GPU parallelism. In this brief tutorial, we will highlight basic sparse parallel linear algebra, linear and nonlinear algebraic solvers, structured and unstructured meshes, and timestepping. We will show how optimal, hierarchical, multilevel solvers for complex, multiphysics problems can be dynamically assembled using the PETSc object system.

• Parallel Adaptive PDE Simulation with libMesh, Roy Stogner, Institute for Computational Engineering & Science, University of Texas
  The libMesh C++ library is an open source set of tool classes and frameworks designed to enable easy yet flexible development of applications for the simulation of boundary value problems on hybrid parallel supercomputers. Utilities for a posteriori adaptive refinement of unstructured and even multi-dimensional meshes allow users to efficiently resolve many multiscale problem-dependent solution features automatically, and support for adjoint methods allows users to perform goal-oriented refinement or parameter sensitivity analysis based on the specific quantities of interest they intend to post-process. This session will give a brief introduction to finite element software design with libMesh, show how the more advanced capabilities can be enabled, and introduce examples of libMesh-based application frameworks from academia, the national laboratories, and private industry which have been designed for third party use.
• Introduction to OpenMP 4.0 and 4.5, Barbara Chapman, Stony Brook, Xinmin Tian, Intel, Amit Amritkar, University of Houston and Deepak Eachempati, Cray Research
  For over a decade, OpenMP has been the de-facto standard for parallel programming on shared memory systems. It has continued to evolve in order to meet the programming needs of a diversity of application developers, and to handle the requirements of new generations of computer architecture. In this tutorial we give a brief overview of the basics of OpenMP and then introduce the new features on OpenMP 4.0 and 4.5, with short examples to illustrate their usage.

The general conference will open at noon on Wednesday, March 2, 2016.

• Check out the full technical program
• Learn more: 2016 Rice Oil & Gas HPC Conference

 

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