CSC – The IT Center for Science Ltd., CSCS – The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, SARA – The Dutch national centre for HPC & e-science support, and T-Platforms have announced a partnership to deliver a next-generation supercomputer prototype system. The system is part of the future HPC technology assessment activities of the pan-European PRACE Research Infrastructure (PRACE RI).
The prototype will be used to evaluate power efficiency, manageability and novel programming environments. It will combine the latest innovations in packaging, cooling, interconnect and accelerator co-processing technology as well as OS and systems management solutions. The prototype will also be used to develop highly scalable parallel hybrid applications which efficiently leverage both the CPU and accelerator co-processors. The system will be large enough to enable the study of scaling properties of benchmarks and parallel scientific and technical applications.
CSC and T-Platforms will collaborate in porting the GPAW (DFT) and Elmer (FEM) applications to the system with the goal to utilize the accelerators efficiently and optimize the internode communication between accelerators as well as to improve checkpoint-restart performance. SARA will focus on evaluating power efficiency and developing energy-to-solution tools, as well as evaluating a different accelerator architecture by a number of relevant applications, such as Crunch and Crunch2 (X-Ray crystallography), Voxel 3d (ortohopedics) and Rbflow (CFD) codes. CSCS will focus on exploring portable, directives-based programming approaches and direct accelerator-to-accelerator communication paradigms for scalable code development.
