This sounds like a very important change in the high performance computing community. What else is NERSC doing to help?
NERSC and Cray have been participating in a joint “Center of Excellence” study over the last year to examine hybrid programming for a few key applications chosen from the NERSC workload. In a nutshell, the study underscored several of the points noted above as well as others, namely: that performance of hybrid codes is often, although not always, better than MPI alone; that memory usage is generally more efficient; that performance often improves up to six OpenMP cores but decreases with 12 because of NUMA effects; and that different portions of codes respond differently so that individual kernels may be slower with OpenMP but the code overall may be faster.
