Previous | 
Home
Section: Partnerships and Cooperations
European Initiatives
FP7 & H2020 Projects
Mont-Blanc2
-
Title: Mont-Blanc (European scalable and power efficient HPC platform based on low-power embedded technology)
-
Mont-Blanc consortium: BSC, Bull, Arm, Juelich, LRZ, USTUTT, Cineca, CNRS, Inria , CEA Leti, Univ. Bristol, Allinea
-
Corse participants: Brice Videau, Kevin Pouget
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 project has 4 objectives:
-
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
-
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
-
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)
-
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.
-
EoCoE
-
Title: Energy oriented Centre of Excellence for computer applications
-
-
Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputacion (Spain)
-
Commissariat A L Energie Atomique et Aux Energies Alternatives (France)
-
Centre Europeen de Recherche et de Formation Avancee en Calcul Scientifique (France)
-
Agenzia Nazionale Per le Nuove Tecnologie, l'energia E Lo Sviluppo Economico Sostenibile (Italy)
-
Fraunhofer Gesellschaft Zur Forderung Der Angewandten Forschung Ev (Germany)
-
Instytut Chemii Bioorganicznej Polskiej Akademii Nauk (Poland)
-
Max Planck Gesellschaft Zur Foerderung Der Wissenschaften E.V. (Germany)
-
-
Corse participants: Jean-François Méhaut, Frédéric Desprez and Francieli Zanon Boito
-
The aim of the present proposal is to establish 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 modeling. These four pillars will be anchored within a strong transverse 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 modeling 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.
-
Francieli Zanon Boito started in November 2017 as post-doc for the EoCoe project. She is working with Frédéric Desprez, Thierry Deutsch (CEA INAC) and Jean-François Méhaut. Francieli is investigating the data storage issues for the scientific workflows on the nano-scale characterization center (PFNC@Minatec http://inac.cea.fr/en/Phocea/Vie_des_labos/Ast/ast_technique.php?id_ast=217).
HPC4e
-
Corse particpants: Jean-François Méhaut, Frédéric Desprez, François Broquedis, Emmanuelle Saillard (Post-Doct since Dec 2016)
-
This project aims to apply the new exascale HPC techniques to energy industry simulations, customizing them, and going beyond the state-of-the-art in the required HPC exascale simulations for different energy sources: wind energy production and design, efficient combustion systems for biomass-derived fuels (biogas), and exploration geophysics for hydrocarbon reservoirs. For wind energy industry HPC is a must. The competitiveness of wind farms can be guaranteed only with accurate wind resource assessment, farm design and short-term micro-scale wind simulations to forecast the daily power production. The use of CFD LES models to analyze atmospheric flow in a wind farm capturing turbine wakes and array effects requires exascale HPC systems. Biogas, i.e. biomass-derived fuels by anaerobic digestion of organic wastes, is attractive because of its wide availability, renewably and reduction of CO2 emissions, contribution to diversification of energy supply, rural development, and it does not compete with feed and food feed-stock. However, its use in practical systems is still limited since the complex fuel composition might lead to unpredictable combustion performance and instabilities in industrial fuels. The next generation of exascale HPC systems will be able to run combustion simulations in parameter regimes relevant to industrial applications using alternative fuels, which is required to design efficient furnaces, engines, clean burning vehicles and power plants. One of the main HPC consumers is the oil & gas (O&G) industry. The computational requirements arising from full wave-form modeling and inversion of seismic and electromagnetic data is ensuring that the O&G industry will be an early adopter of exascale computing technologies. By taking into account the complete physics of waves in the subsurface, imaging tools are able to reveal information about the Earth’s interior with unprecedented quality.
-
Emmanuelle Saillard was one year post-doc for the HPC4e project. She used the BOAST framework on the Alya application (BSC) and the Hou10ni application (Inria Magique 3D). Emmanuelle Saillard got an Inria Research position (CR2) in the Storm team at Bordeaux.
-
Two papers [18], [16] were accepted this year with the Brazilian researchers at UFRGS and also with the Magique3D team.
-
Jean-François Méhaut got a Chaire position at Laboratório Nacional Computação Cientifica (LNCC) in Petrópolis (Brazil). The LNCC is also partner of the HPC4e project. Jean-François Méhaut is working on the optimization of the MHM (Multiscale Hybrid-Mixed Methods) simulator by using the binLPT loop scheduling strategies and also new memory allocators.
PRACE-5IP
-
Inria partners: Hiepacs team (Inria Bordeaux Sud-Ouest), Storm team (Inria Bordeaux Sud-Ouest), Nachos team (Inria Sophia Antipolis Méditerranée), Corse team (Inria Grenoble Rhône Alpes) Inria contact: Stéphane Lanteri (Nachos, Sophia Antipolis)
-
Corse participants: François Broquedis, Jean-François Méhaut
The objectives of PRACE-5IP are to build on and seamlessly continue the successes of PRACE and start new innovative and collaborative activities proposed by the consortium. These include:
-
assisting the transition to PRACE2 including analysis of TransNational Access;
-
continuing and extend advanced training which so far provided more than 18800 person-training days;
-
preparing strategies and best practices towards Exascale computing;
-
coordinating and enhancing the operation of the multi-tier HPC systems and services;
-
supporting users to exploit massively parallel systems and novel architectures.
The Inria contribution is in the prolongation of involvement (jointly with CINES) in PRACE 4IP – WP7. The participation of Inria’s researchers has been enlarged to include project-teams that were all involved in the C2S@Exa Inria Project Lab. The Inria teams will contribute to the WP7 and the following sub-tasks:
The activities are organized along two complementary lines
-
Generic (or transverse) technologies for simulation software
-
Specific (or vertical) technologies i.e. simulation software
The Corse activities for PRACE-5IP will start with the hiring of one year postdoc in 2018. We will work on the DIOGENEs (DisOntinous GalErkin Nanoscale Solvers) software suite developed in the Nachos team. The post-doc will investigate the new vectorization features of processors.
-
Collaborations in European Programs, Except FP7 & H2020
-
Abstract: Run-Time verification (RV) is a computing analysis paradigm based on observing a system at run-time to check its expected behavior. RV has emerged in recent years as a practical application of formal verification, and a less ad-hoc approach to conventional testing by building monitors from formal specifications.
There is a great potential applicability of RV beyond software reliability, if one allows monitors to interact back with the observed system, and generalizes to new domains beyond computers programs (like hardware, devices, cloud computing and even human centric systems). Given the European leadership in computer based industries, novel applications of RV to these areas can have an enormous impact in terms of the new class of designs enabled and their reliability and cost effectiveness.
This Action aims to build expertise by putting together active researchers in different aspects of run-time verification, and meeting with experts from potential application disciplines. The main goal is to overcome the fragmentation of RV research by (1) the design of common input formats for tool cooperation and comparison; (2) the evaluation of different tools, building a growing sets benchmarks and running tool competitions; and (3) by designing a road-map and grand challenges extracted from application domains.