Announcing the EuroEXA Project for Exascale
Photo: Kickoff meeting on September 6th, 2017, Barcelona, Spain.
EuroEXA is a 3.5-year project starting in September 2017. It benefits from an EU-contribution of almost €20 million and is coordinated at the Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS) in Greece with 15 project partners in Spain, United Kingdom, Greece, Belgium, Sweden, Netherlands, Italy and Germany.
Supercomputing, or high-performance computing, is a branch of computing that deals with scientific, engineering and societal problems that require huge computational resources. These problems are so big, that one has to divide them up in smaller pieces, distribute and run them onto a vast number of computing units and then rebuild from partial solutions the final global solution. Simulating a fusion reactor, testing airplane designs or predicting the weather are examples of such problems. As such it is critical for both Europe's capability to excel in research, for industrial innovation and competitiveness and the data economy. Without world-class high-performance computing facilities, Europe will not achieve its ambition of becoming a vibrant research area and economy and will lose out to China, the US and Japan.
To achieve the demands of extreme scale and the delivery of exascale, we embrace the computing platform as a whole, not just component optimization or fault resilience. EuroEXA brings a holistic foundation from multiple European HPC projects and partners together with the industrial SME focus of MAX for FPGA data-flow; ICE for infrastructure; ALLIN for HPC tooling and ZPT to collapse the memory bottleneck; to co-design a ground-breaking platform capable of scaling peak performance to 400 PFLOP in a peak system power envelope of 30MW; over four times the performance at four times the energy efficiency of today’s HPC platforms. Further, we target a PUE parity rating of 1.0 through use of renewables and immersion-based cooling.
We co-design a balanced architecture for both compute- and data-intensive applications using a cost-efficient, modularintegration approach enabled by novel inter-die links and the tape-out of a resulting EuroEXA processing unit with integration of FPGA for data-flow acceleration. We provide a homogenised software platform offering heterogeneous acceleration with scalable shared memory access and create a unique hybrid geographically-addressed, switching and topology interconnect within the rack while enabling the adoption of low-cost Ethernet switches offering low-Latency and high-switching bandwidth. Working together with a rich mix of key HPC applications from across climate/weather, physics/energy and life-science/ bioinformatics domains we will demonstrate the results of the project through the deployment of an integrated and operational peta-flop level prototype hosted at STFC. Supported by run-to-completion platform-wide resilience mechanisms, components will manage local failures, while communicating with higher levels of the stack. Monitored and controlled by advanced runtime capabilities, EuroEXA will demonstrate its co-design solution supporting both existing pre-exascale and project-developed exascale applications.
Partners
ARM – UK, ICCS (Institute Of Communication And Computer Systems) – Greece, The University Of Manchester – UK, BSC (Barcelona Supercomputing Center) – Spain, FORTH (Foundation For Research And Technology Hellas) – Greece, The Hartree Centre of STFC – UK, IMEC – Belgium, ZeroPoint Technologies – Sweden, Iceotope – UK, Synelixis Solutions Ltd – , Maxeler Technologies – Greece, Neurasmus – Netherlands, INFN (Istituto Nazionale Di Fisica Nucleare) – Italy, INAF (Istituto Nazionale Di Astrofisica) – Italy, ECMWF (European Centre For Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) – International, And Fraunhofer – Germany.
For more information please contact the Computing Systems Laboratory of ECE NTUA : http://cslab.ntua.gr
