Start of the Exascale Projects DEEP-ER and Mont-Blanc 2
The EU-funded Exascale projects DEEP Extended Reach, DEEP-ER for short, and Mont-Blanc 2 started in October 2013. They will run in parallel for three years and are the extensions of the DEEP and Mont-Blanc projects, respectively.
The goal of DEEP-ER, which is coordinated by JSC, is to update the Cluster-Booster architecture introduced by the DEEP project and extend it with additional parallel I/O and resiliency capabilities. In DEEP-ER, Cluster and Booster nodes will be connected to a uniform network. Novel non-volatile memory technology will be tested at different architecture levels, building up a multi-level storage hierarchy. A software environment for parallel I/O and resiliency will be built upon this storage infrastructure. To recover applications after hardware failures, a multi-level checkpoint/restart mechanism using the available memory devices and a task-based recovery mechanism based on the OmpSs programming environment will be set up.
The design and development of the DEEP-ER extensions will be driven by the requirements and results obtained from seven scientific applications, representative of today's HPC applications portfolio. These applications will be ported to the DEEP-ER prototype demonstrating its usability and its scalability towards Exascale.
Fourteen European partners constitute the DEEP-ER consortium. Amongst other activities, JSC is participating in the architectural (both hardware and software) design, the development of the I/O and resiliency software layers, guidance and support for the application developers, and the installation of the DEEP-ER prototype at Jülich. Detailed information can be found at http://www.deep-er.eu.
In the Mont-Blanc 2 project, JSC's contribution focuses on the adaptation of the performance analysis tool Scalasca to the available hardware prototypes, based on energy-efficient processors from the cell phone and tablet market. For further information, see http://www.montblanc-project.eu/.
(Contact: Estela Suarez, e.suarez@fz-juelich.de)
from JSC News No. 217, 29 November 2013