Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

European Initiatives

HPC-GA

• Program: FP7 IRSES Marie-Curie

• Project acronym: HPC-GA

• Project title: High Performance Computing for Geophysics Applications

• Duration: Jan 2012 - Dec 2014

• Coordinator: Jean-François Méhaut (UJF, France)

• Other partners: UFRGS, Inria, BCAM et UNAM.

• Abstract: The design and implementation of geophysics applications on top of nowadays supercomputers requires a strong expertise in parallel programming and the use of appropriate runtime systems able to efficiently deal with heterogeneous architectures featuring many-core nodes typically equipped with GPU accelerators. The HPC-GA project aims at evaluating the functionalities provided by current runtime systems in order to point out their limitations. It also aims at designing new methods and mechanisms for an efficient scheduling of processes/threads and a clever data distribution on such platforms. The HPC-GA project is unique in gathering an international, pluridisciplinary consortium of leading European and South American researchers featuring complementary expertise to face the challenge of designing high performance geophysics simulations for parallel architectures.

MontBlanc2

• Program: FP7 ICT-2013, Exascale Computing Platforms

• Project acronym: MontBlanc2

• Project title: European scalable and power efficient HPC platform based on low-power embedded technology

• Duration: Oct 2013 - Nov 2016

• Coordinator: Alex Ramirez (BSC, Spain)

• Other partners: Inria, Bull, ST, ARM, Gnodal, Juelich, BADW-LRZ, HLRS, CNRS, CEA, CINECA, Bristol, Allinea

• Abstract: The Mont-Blanc project aims to develop a European Exascale approach leveraging on commodity power-efficient embedded technologies. The project has developed a HPC system software stack on ARM, and will deploy the first integrated ARM-based HPC prototype by 2014, and is also working on a set of 11 scientific applications to be ported and tuned to the prototype system. The rapid progress of Mont-Blanc towards defining a scalable power efficient Exascale platform has revealed a number of challenges and opportunities to broaden the scope of investigations and developments. Particularly, the growing interest of the HPC community in accessing the Mont-Blanc platform calls for increased efforts to setup a production-ready environment. The Mont-Blanc 2 proposal has 4 objectives:

  1. To complement the effort on the Mont-Blanc system software stack, with emphasis on programmer tools (debugger, performance analysis), system resiliency (from applications to architecture support), and ARM 64-bit support

  2. To produce a first definition of the Mont-Blanc Exascale architecture, exploring different alternatives for the compute node (from low-power mobile sockets to special-purpose high-end ARM chips), and its implications on the rest of the system

  3. To track the evolution of ARM-based systems, deploying small cluster systems to test new processors that were not available for the original Mont-Blanc prototype (both mobile processors and ARM server chips)

  4. To provide continued support for the Mont-Blanc consortium, namely operations of the original Mont-Blanc prototype, the new small scale prototypes and hands-on support for our application developers

  Mont-Blanc 2 contributes to the development of extreme scale energy-efficient platforms, with potential for Exascale computing, addressing the challenges of massive parallelism, heterogeneous computing, and resiliency. Mont-Blanc 2 has great potential to create new market opportunities for successful EU technology, by placing embedded architectures in servers and HPC..

COST ComplexHPC

http://complexhpc.org

• Program: COST Action IC0805

• Project acronym: ComplexHPC

• Project title: Open European Network for High-Performance Computing in Complex Environments

• Duration: May 2009 - June 2013

• Coordinator: Emmanuel Jeannot

• Other partners: This Action gathers more than 20 countries and 30 partners in Europe.

• Abstract: The goal of the Action is to establish a European research network focused on high performance heterogeneous computing in order to address the whole range of challenges posed by these new platforms including models, algorithms, programming tools and applications. The network will aim at contributing to exchange information, identify synergies and pursue common research activities, therefore reinforcing the strength of European research groups and the leadership of Europe in this field.