Stay up-to-date on the latest news, events and resources for the OpenACC community. This month’s highlights covers the Organization's newly elected president, an updated OpenACC 3.1 specification, upcoming 2021 GPU Hackathons, new resources and more!

1. November 2020
OPENACC MONTHLY
HIGHLIGHTS

2. 2
WHAT IS OPENACC?
main()
{
<serial code>
#pragma acc kernels
{
<parallel code>
}
}
Add Simple Compiler Directive
POWERFUL & PORTABLE
Directives-based
programming model for
parallel
computing
Designed for
performance and
portability on
CPUs and GPUs
SIMPLE
Open Specification Developed by OpenACC.org Consortium

3. 3
silica IFPEN, RMM-DIIS on P100
OPENACC GROWING MOMENTUM
Wide Adoption Across Key HPC Codes
ANSYS Fluent
Gaussian
VASP
LSDalton
MPAS
GAMERA
GTC
XGC
ACME
FLASH
COSMO
Numeca
400+ APPS* USING OpenACC
Prof. Georg Kresse
Computational Materials Physics
University of Vienna
For VASP, OpenACC is the way forward for GPU
acceleration. Performance is similar to CUDA, and
OpenACC dramatically decreases GPU
development and maintenance efforts. We’re
excited to collaborate with NVIDIA and PGI as an
early adopter of Unified Memory.
“ “
VASP
Top Quantum Chemistry and Material Science Code
* Applications in production and development

4. 4
READ PRESS RELEASE
OpenACC Organization has announced Jack Wells, director of
strategic planning and performance management at Oak Ridge
National Laboratory, as the incoming president.
OPENACC ANNOUNCES NEW PRESIDENT
As we ready future systems to support science in the exascale era, I
am extremely excited about the science that will emerge. Important to
the story is the development of a performance-portable programming
tool chain for scientific computing. This includes the evolution of
language extensions and frameworks; maturation of accelerated
compiler directives such as OpenACC; and the emergence and
adoption of library abstractions.
“ “

5. 5
DON’T MISS THESE UPCOMING EVENTS
COMPLETE LIST OF EVENTS
Event Call Closes Event Date
Simon Fraser University GPU Hackathon January 13, 2021 February 22, March 1-3, 2021
Helmholtz GPU Bootcamp January 15, 2021 March 15, 22-24, 2021
CCNU GPU Hackathon February 12, 2021 April 12, 19-21, 2021
EPCC GPU Hackathon 2021 February 19, 2021 April 19, 26-28, 2021
Argonne GPU Hackathon February 19, 2021 April 19, 27-29, 2021
SDSC GPU Hackathon 2021 March 4, 2021 May 4, 11-13, 2021
Digital in 2021: Many of our events will continue to happen digitally! Get the same high-touch training and
mentorship without the hassle of travel!

6. 6
READ BLOG
After last year’s major specification update, 3.0, the technical
committee took some time to give OpenACC compilers a chance
to catch up to the current specification before adding other major
features. The development work for OpenACC 3.1 focused
primarily on clean-up and clarifications for the specification with
only a few new user-facing features, including support for Fortran
BLOCK and DO CONCURRENT constructs, support for C++
range-based FOR loops, and improved compatibility between
implementations by specifying argument names in API routines.
UPDATED SPECIFICATION: OPENACC 3.1

7. 7
REGISTER TO ATTEND
Stencil operations are used widely in HPC applications and pose an
optimization challenge on both CPUs and GPUs. On GPUs, fine-
tuned optimizations can be formulated using low-level APIs such as
CUDA, but many large established codes prefer a portable, higher-
level API such as OpenACC. Although OpenACC lacks the fine-
tuning of CUDA, it does allow for some tuning through a variety of
parallelization constructs and loop directives. Attend this webinar as
Ronald M. Caplan of Predictive Science Inc. (PSI) discusses
various OpenACC directive options to optimize the computationally
heaviest stencil operation within the production solar physics
research code Magnetohydrodynamics Around a Sphere (MAS).
UPCOMING WEBINAR: OPTIMIZING STENCIL
OPERATIONS WITH OPENACC

8. 8
RESOURCES
Paper: GPU Acceleration of the FINE/FR CFD
Solver in a Heterogeneous Environment with
OpenACC Directives
X.M. Shine Zhai, David Gutzwiller, Kunal Puri and
Charles Hirsch
OpenACC has been highly successful in adapting legacy CPUonly
applications for modern heterogeneous computing environments equipped
with GPUs, as demonstrated by many projects as well as our previous
experience. In this work, OpenACC is leveraged to transform another
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) high order solver FINE/FR to be
GPU-eligible. On the Summit supercomputer, impressive GPU speedup
ranging from 6X to 80X has been achieved using up to 12,288 GPUs.
Techniques critical to achieving good speedup include aggressive
reduction of data transfers between CPUs and GPUs, and optimizations
targeted at improving exposed parallelism to GPUs. We have
demonstrated that OpenACC offers an efficient, portable and
easilymaintainable approach to achieve fast turnaround time for high-
fidelity industrial simulations.
READ PAPER
Fig. 1. Relative Mach number at (a) 50% of the blade span and (b) 95% of
the blade span using the conventional RANS solution. (c) Instantaneous
density snapshot using FINE/FR at polynomial order 4, where shock wave
boundary layer interaction (SWBLI) in the form of the lambda-shock can
be seen on the upper blade surface

9. 9
RESOURCES
Paper: Toward OpenACC-enabled GPU-FPGA
Accelerated Computing
Norihisa Fujita, Ryohei Kobayashi, Yoshiki Yamaguchi,
Kohji Yoshikawa, Makito Abe and Masayuki Umemura
Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have garnered significant
interest in research on high-performance computing because their
computation and communication capabilities have drastically improved in
recent years due to advances in semiconductor integration technologies
that rely on Moore's Law. These improvements reveal the possibility of
implementing a concept to enable on-the-fly offloading computation at
which CPUs/GPUs perform poorly to FPGAs while performing low-latency
data movement. We think that this concept is key to improving the
performance of heterogeneous supercomputers using accelerators such
as the GPU. In this paper, we propose a GPU-FPGA-accelerated
simulation based on the concept and show preliminary results of the
proposed concept.
READ PAPER
Fig. 1. Performance comparison of ARGOT code with mesh size,
showing the performance improvement of the GPU-based
implementations when the OpenMP implementation is set to 1.

10. 10
RESOURCES
Books, eBooks and online courses: InformIT
VISIT SITE
InformIT, a part of Pearson, is your one-stop resource for
Addison-Wesley DRM-free eBooks and video courses for
learning tech skills including game development,
programming, and data engineering.
Through the end of 2020, InformIT is offering the community
35% off books or eBooks and 50% off video courses with
coupon code: NVIDIA.

11. 11
RESOURCES
Website: GPUHackathons.org
Technical Resources
VISIT SITE
Explore a wealth of resources for GPU-accelerated
computing across HPC, AI and Big Data.
Review a collection of videos, presentations, GitHub repos,
tutorials, libraries and more to help you advance your skills
and expand your knowledge.

12. 12
STAY IN THE KNOW:
JOIN THE OPENACC COMMUNITY
JOIN TODAY
The OpenACC specification is designed for, and
by, users meaning that the OpenACC organization
relies on our users’ active participation to shape
the specification and to educate the scientific
community on its use.
Take an active role in influencing the future of both
the OpenACC specification and the organization
itself by becoming a member of the community.

13. WWW.OPENACC.ORG
Learn more at