The pace of development of HPC hardware shows no signs of slowing, and programming leading-edge systems is a research topic in itself. EPCC is involved in a range of HPC research areas such as development of language standards, and evaluation of new technologies and programming models.

Example Projects

  • PlanetHPC

    Led by EPCC, PlanetHPC is a Support Action funded by the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme. Launched in November 2009, this two-year initiative provides a unique forum for European researchers and industrialists to identify the research challenges facing High performance Computing (HPC) today. PlanetHPC brings together the major players in European HPC from the scientific and business sectors – users, service providers, hardware providers and software providers. By bringing these communities together and facilitating their interaction, our aim is to coordinate activities, strategies and roadmaps for HPC in Europe. Project website: http://www.planethpc.eu.

  • OpenMP

    EPCC is a member of the OpenMP Architecture Review Board (the governing body for OpenMP), together with many of the major hardware vendors, and other academic institutions. OpenMP is an industry standard API for programming shared memory parallel computers using Fortran, C and C++. EPCC has been actively involved in the development of the API, and chaired the committee that produced versions 2.5 and 3.0 of the OpenMP specification.EPCC has also produced a set of microbenchmarks for OpenMP which have become a widely used tool for assessing the performance of OpenMP implementations. A further set of microbenchmarks, measuring the performance of combined OpenMP and MPI implementations, has also recently been produced as part of EPCC’s contribution to the PRACE project. 

  • DEISA2

    The DEISA consortium integrates the national supercomputing services of eight European partner nations using selected Grid technologies. The resulting infrastructure is unmatched worldwide in its heterogeneity and complexity, enabling the operation of a powerful supercomputing Grid built on top of national services, facilitating Europe’s ability to undertake world-leading computational science research. DEISA provides services to single projects as well as virtual European communities.EPCC plays a full and active role in the project. In addition to coordinating the DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative, EPCC leads both the benchmarking and training teams and works in collaboration with the other partners to evaluate and integrate new technologies, to operate the infrastructure and provide applications support to users. 

  • PRACE

    PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) is intended to prepare for the creation of a persistent pan-European HPC service, based on an infrastructure of around 4–5 Petaflop-scale supercomputers. There are PRACE partners in most European countries who work on activities ranging from the governance and legal framework for the future infrastructure, through dissemination and training, to a number of technical activities looking at possible hardware and software for Petascale systems.EPCC has a leading role in investigating software for Petaflop/s systems. The primary aim is to identify and understand the software libraries, tools, benchmarks and skills required by users to ensure that their application can use a Petaflop/s system productively and efficiently. Analysing the application requirements for these systems is a major challenge but is vital to ensure the systems meet the needs of European researchers. This is the largest technical activity and involves all the PRACE partners. 

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