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Section: New Software and Platforms

Platforms

Grid'5000 testbed: extension with GPUs at Lille

KEYWORDS: Experimental testbed, large-scale computing, high-performance computing, GPU computing, cloud computing, big data

FUNCTIONAL DESCRIPTION: Grid'5000 is a project initiated in 2003 by the French government to promote scientific research on large scale distributed systems. The project is later supported different research organizations including Inria, CNRS, the french universities, Renater which provides the wide-area network, etc. The overall objective of Grid'5000 was to build by 2007 a nation-wide experimental testbed composed of at least 5000 processing units and distributed over several sites in France. From a scientific point of view, the aim was to promote scientific research on large-scale distributed systems.

Grid'5000 was installed at the center of IT resources including supercomputing resources of Université de Lille 1 and opened to users in 2005. Since March 2017, the Grid'5000 site has moved to the premises on Inria Lille within the context of the phase 1 of the CPER data program (see Section 9.1) with a completely new hardware equipment. As a scientific leader of the testbed for the Lille's site, N. Melab has been strongly involved in the extension (phase 2 of CPER data) of the platform with 16 computing serveurs, 16 Nvidia GPUs (12 P100 and 4V100), 2 storage serveurs 200TB and 2 administration servers. Grid'5000 at Lille is used by more than 150 users including 100 external ones. The testbed is used for research as well as for teaching allowing a high scientific production (publications, PhD theses, etc.) and over 30 master students to get started with parallel and distributed programming.