New exascale projects at EPCC

16 July 2018

The EU has recently funded a significant number of new projects to continue to drive forward Europe’s readiness for the transition to exascale computing. As a result EPCC will add another three projects to its portfolio of exascale activities.

VESTEC

EPCC has been awarded €350,000 as part of the successful VESTEC proposal. VESTEC, led by the German Centre for Aerospace Research, will develop new models for “urgent supercomputing” and real-time data feeds with the aim of turning supercomputers into powerful decision-support tools for natural hazard emergencies such as wildfires, mosquito-borne disease outbreaks and dangerous space weather events.

EPiGRAM-HS

EPCC has been awarded €500,000 as part of this project to address the heterogeneity challenge of programming exascale supercomputers. Led by the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (KTH), EPiGRAM-HS will improve programmability, extending a set of existing programming models to exploit accelerators, reconfigurable hardware and heterogeneous memory systems.

SAGE-2

SAGE-2 (Percipient StorAGe for Exascale Data Centric Computing 2) will create a next-generation data storage system to enable extreme scale computational workflows. The project will build on the Mero object store to create a system where data-centric computing can be undertaken, moving compute to data rather than data to compute.

EPCC has been awarded €310,000 to work on integrating new non-volatile memory technologies with the object store and storage hierarchy, and enabling byte-level access to data for applications.

EPCC and exascale

EPCC has been at the forefront of research into exascale systems, the next generation of HPC, for a number of years now. Our involvement includes key projects such as CRESTA and NextGenIO, which have explored both hardware development and the preparation of software and applications.