Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

European Initiatives

FP7 & H2020 Projects

EXA2CT

• Type: FP7

• Defi: Special action

• Instrument: Specific Targeted Research Project

• Objectif: Exascale computing platforms, software and applications

• Duration: September 2013 - August 2016

• Coordinator: IMEC, Belgium

• Partner: Particular specializations and experience of the partners are:

  • Applications:

    • NAG - long experience in consultancy for HPC applications

    • Intel France - collaboration with industry on the migration of software for future HPC systems

    • TS-SFR - long experience in consultancy for HPC applications in Aerospace and Oil & Gas

  • Algorithms – primarily numerical:

    • UA - broad experience in numerical solvers, with some taken up by the PETSc numerical library and other work published in high-ranking journals such as Science.

    • USI - expertise in parallel many-core algorithms for real-world applications on emerging architectures

    • Inria - expertise on large scale parallel numerical algorithms

    • IT4I - experience in the development of scalable solvers for large HPC systems (e.g. PRACE)

  • Programming Models & Runtime Environments:

    • Imec - leads the programming model research within the Flanders ExaScience Lab

    • UVSQ - specialized in code optimization and performance evaluation in the area of HPC

    • TS-SFR - leading the BMBF funded GASPI project

    • Fraunhofer - developed a GASPI runtime environment used in industrial applications

  • Hardware Optimization:

    • Intel France - investigates workloads for new hardware architectures within the context of the Exascale Computing Research centre

• Inria contact: Luc Giraud

• Abstract: The EXA2CT project brings together experts at the cutting edge of the development of solvers, related algorithmic techniques, and HPC software architects for programming models and communication. We will produce modular open source proto-applications that demonstrate the algorithms and programming techniques developed in the project, to help boot-strap the creation of genuine exascale codes.

  Numerical simulation is a crucial part of science and industry in Europe. The advancement of simulation as a discipline relies on increasingly compute intensive models that require more computational resources to run. This is the driver for the evolution to exascale. Due to limits in the increase in single processor performance, exascale machines will rely on massive parallelism on and off chip, with a complex hierarchy of resources. The large number of components and the machine complexity introduce severe problems for reliability and programmability.