September 16, 2019 — Today the whole world is trying to push supercomputer technology to the exascale level, i.e. a billion billion calculations per second. In Europe, this exascale vision will be made possible with contributions by Consortia funded by the Horizon 2020 Programme of the EU in projects such as ExaNeSt, which built a first ‘straw man’ prototype, having worked on this since 2016.
The ExaNeSt Consortium consists of twelve partners across seven EU countries, each of them with expertise in a core technology needed for innovation to reach exascale. ExaNeSt has taken a sensible integrated approach to co-design the hardware and software that is needed to enable the prototype to run in real-life evaluations.
The prototype is now successfully built, demonstrating energy efficiency in a High-Performance Computing (HPC) testbed: the energy consumed for solving a given problem on this new platform is 3 to 10 times lower than what traditional HPC processors of the same time generation consume for solving the same problem. The substantial prototype has been validated through the execution of full HPC applications from materials science, climate forecasting, computational fluid dynamics, astrophysics, neuroscience, and a database.
ExaNeSt addressed key issues such as energy efficiency by using ARM cores, moving data across shorter distances, and avoiding unneeded copyings of data; it uses power-efficient and silent liquid cooling; the prototype has non-volatile memories integrated into the processor fabric and innovative fast interconnects, while we worked to avoid congestion.
ExaNeSt has contributed to a new generation of European Supercomputers, thus creating new business opportunities. The project’s advances in performance and efficiency will enable SME’s in several sectors of the economy to utilize HPC and data analytics, with an attractive trade-off between usability and affordability. ExaNeSt has also educated numerous young engineers, contributing to close the large skills gap in academia and industry.
The energy-efficient solutions are expected to spread to standard off the shelf computing systems, assisting the efforts of the EU to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and reach environmental targets.
ExaNeSt collaborates with other European R&D projects and partners, including:
- EuroServer, which developed the underlying efficient communication between ARM processors;
- ExaNoDe, which focused on novel three-dimensional integration technologies and on systems software;
- ECOSCALE, which develops programmable-hardware accelerators for specialized computations;
- EuroEXA, which is the follow-on project of the above;
- Kaleao Ltd., which enables and produces new generation computing platforms by converging compute, storage, and networking into efficient, extremely compact, and transparent server solutions.
- Xilinx Inc., providing FPGA technology and flexible high speed communication.
- Micron Inc., for advanced low power memory and storage technology.
ExaNeSt develops and prototypes solutions for Interconnection Networks, Storage, and Cooling, as these have to evolve in order for the production of exascale-level supercomputers to become feasible. We tune real HPC Applications, and we use them to evaluate our solutions.