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Section: Partnerships and Cooperations
European Initiatives
FP7 & H2020 Projects
Mont-Blanc
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Title: Mont-Blanc (European scalable and power efficient HPC platform based on low-power embedded technology)
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Mont-Blanc consortium: BSC, Arm, Bull, CNRS, CEA Leti, Juelich, LRZ, Genci, Cineca, Univ. Cantabria
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Mont-Blanc website: http://www.montblanc-project.eu/
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There is a continued need for higher compute performance: scientific grand challenges, engineering, geophysics, bioinformatics, etc. However, energy is increasingly becoming one of the most expensive resources and the dominant cost item for running a large supercomputing facility. In fact the total energy cost of a few years of operation can almost equal the cost of the hardware infrastructure. Energy efficiency is already a primary concern for the design of any computer system and it is unanimously recognized that Exascale systems will be strongly constrained by power. The analysis of the performance of HPC systems since 1993 shows exponential improvements at the rate of one order of magnitude every 3 years: One petaflops was achieved in 2008, one exaflops is expected in 2020. Based on a 20 MW power budget, this requires an efficiency of 50 GFLOPS/Watt. However, the current leader in energy efficiency achieves only 1.7 GFLOPS / Watt. Thus, a 30x improvement is required. In this project, we believe that HPC systems developed from today's energy-efficient solutions used in embedded and mobile devices are the most likely to succeed. As of today, the CPUs of these devices are mostly designed by ARM. However, ARM processors have not been designed for HPC, and ARM chips have never been used in HPC systems before, leading to a number of significant challenges. The Mont-Blanc project has three objectives:
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To develop a fully functional energy-efficient HPC prototype using low-power commercially available embedded technology
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To design a next-generation HPC system together with a range of embedded technologies in order to overcome the limitations identified in the prototype system
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To develop a portfolio of exascale applications to be run on this new generation of HPC systems. This will produce a new type of computer architecture capable of setting future global HPC standards that will provide Exascale performance using 15 to 30 times less energy
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Mont-Blanc2
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Title: Mont-Blanc (European scalable and power efficient HPC platform based on low-power embedded technology)
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Mont-Blanc consortium: BSC, Bull, Arm, Juelich, LRZ, USTUTT, Cineca, CNRS, Inria, CEA Leti, Univ. Bristol, Allinea
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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 is deployed 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:
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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
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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
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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)
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To provide continued support for the Mont-Blanc consortium, namely operations of the original Mont-Blanc prototype, the new developer kit clusters 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.
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HPC4E
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European partners: Inria, Univ. Lancaster, Ciemat, Total, Repsol, Iberdrola
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Brazilian partners: Coppe, LNCC, ITA, Petrobras, UFRGS, UFPE
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Corse participants: François Broquedis, Frédéric Desprez, Brice Videau
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The main objective is to develop beyond-the-state-of-the-art high performance simulation tools that can help the energy industry to respond future energy demands and also to carbon-related environmental issues using the state-of-the-art HPC systems. HPC4E also aims at improving the usage of energy using HPC tools by acting at many levels of the energy chain for different energy sources. The project includes relevant energy industral partners from Brazil and EU, which will benefit from the project’s results. They guarantee that TRL of the project technologies will be very high.
EoCoE
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Title: Energy oriented Centre of Excellence for computer applications
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Coordinator: Commissariat à L'Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives (CEA)
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European partners: CEA, Juelich, MPG, Enea, Cerfacs, UNITN, Fraunhofer, Univ. Bath, CNR, Univ. Brussels, BSC
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Corse participants: François Broquedis, Frédéric Desprez, Brice Videau
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This projects establishes an Energy Oriented Centre of Excellence for computing applications, (EoCoE). EoCoE (pronounce “Echo”) will use the prodigious potential offered by the ever-growing computing infrastructure to foster and accelerate the European transition to a reliable and low carbon energy supply. To achieve this goal, we believe that the present revolution in hardware technology calls for a similar paradigm change in the way application codes are designed. EoCoE will assist the energy transition via targeted support to four renewable energy pillars: Meteo, Materials, Water and Fusion, each with a heavy reliance on numerical modelling. These four pillars will be anchored within a strong transversal multidisciplinary basis providing high-end expertise in applied mathematics and HPC. EoCoE is structured around a central Franco-German hub coordinating a pan-European network, gathering a total of 8 countries and 23 teams. Its partners are strongly engaged in both the HPC and energy fields; a prerequisite for the long-term sustainability of EoCoE and also ensuring that it is deeply integrated in the overall European strategy for HPC. The primary goal of EoCoE is to create a new, long lasting and sustainable community around computational energy science. At the same time, EoCoE is committed to deliver high-impact results within the first three years. It will resolve current bottlenecks in application codes, leading to new modelling capabilities and scientific advances among the four user communities; it will develop cutting-edge mathematical and numerical methods, and tools to foster the usage of Exascale computing. Dedicated services for laboratories and industries will be established to leverage this expertise and to foster an ecosystem around HPC for energy. EoCoE will give birth to new collaborations and working methods and will encourage widely spread best practices.