HLST - High Level Support Team

The High Level Support Team (HLST) provides support to scientists from the Research Units of the EUROfusion consortium for the development and optimization of codes to be used on supercomputers since 2009. Such a machine is the “MARCONI-Fusion” supercomputer hosted by CINECA in Bologna, Italy with a total compute power of about 9 petaflop/s.

HLST consists of a core team based at the IPP Garching (Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik) and of high level support staff provided by the other Research Units of EUROfusion. The HLST members are all HPC experts with a background in developing large scientific applications and particular expertise in numerical algorithms.

The HLST provides support for the following tasks:

• Parallelise codes using e.g. OpenMP and/or MPI standards for massively parallel computers;
• Improve the performance of existing parallel codes, both at the single node and inter-node levels;
• Provide support for high performance parallel I/O;
• Support the transfer of codes to new multiprocessor architectures;
• Choose or adapt algorithms and mathematical library routines to improve applications on targeted computer architectures;
• Give advice to the community based on experience gained from specific project work;
• Provide guidance to young scientists on available training activities in HPC, including on new computer architectures;
• Provide consultancy to scientists within the Research Units working on HPC;
• Assess the "MARCONI-Fusion" tickets submitted by the users to the user support of CINECA;
• Monitor and improve the performance of the "MARCONI-Fusion" supercomputer.