The DEEP projects is a series of research projects in which, amongst many individual contributions, the Modular Supercomputing Architecture (MSA) has been developed.

Around 2010, we at JSC and our cluster partners started considering how to close the gap between general purpose clusters and highly-scalable systems. The first heterogeneous node designs were appeing, consisting of CPUs and accelerators, but as far as graphics cards (GPU) were concerned, they could only be used as coprocessors, since CPUs and GPUs are statically assigned to each other. We realized that it would be much more beneficial to take the accelerators apart from the node as an autonomous unit and flexibly assign them to the CPUs. We made these ideas the basis of the proposal for the first DEEP project, which was approved and launched end of 2011.

Building on these successful results, the DEEP-EST project that ran from 2017 to 2021 generalized the Cluster-Booster concept in order to address the requirements of a wider variety of applications. The resulting Modular Supercomputing Architecture (MSA) developed in DEEP-EST is designed to meet the requirements of both large-scale simulations traditionally run on HPC systems and data-intensive workloads from the field of artificial intelligence like deep learning. In the DEEP-EST project a hardware prototype has been built to demonstrate the MSA.

The continuos further development of MSA proceeds within the SEA Projects, which run from 2021 to 2024: DEEP-SEA, IO-SEA, and RED-SEA.