Towards Exascale: Foundation of EIC and ECL
The Jülich Supercomputing Centre at
Forschungszentrum Jülich started
two new collaborations with renowned
companies to force the research and
development on Exascale systems.
In March 2010, Forschungszentrum
Jülich and IBM signed the contract for
a joint "Exascale Innovation Center"
(EIC), and, at ISC 2010 in Hamburg,
Forschungszentrum Jülich, Intel, and
ParTec signed a multi-year agreement
to create a new ExaCluster Laboratory (ECL), both located on the campus
of Forschungszentrum Jülich. These
two endeavours reflect the dualistic
concept JSC is pursuing since several
years now. On the one hand side, the
JUGENE supercomputer based on
IBM's BlueGene technology targets
highest scalability while, on the other
hand, the JUROPA/HPC-FF cluster
computer-based on Intel's Nehalem
processors and ParTec's ParaStation
cluster middle-ware aims at more
general purpose applications. Since
both architectures provide a large
potential for machines beyond the
Petaflop range, Jülich's goal is to
analyse the prospect to scale these
technologies to exascale.
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| Forschungszentrum Jülich and IBM signing the contract for a joint "Exascale Innovation Center". From the left: David Jursik (Vice President worldwide Deep Computing Sales, IBM Systems & Technology Group), Dirk Wittkopp (Vice President and
Director IBM Laboratory Böblingen), Prof. Thomas Lippert (Director of Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Forschungszentrum Jülich), Prof. Sebastian Schmidt (Board of
Directors of Forschungszentrum Jülich) (Photo: Forschungszentrum Jülich) |
Exascale Innovation Center (EIC)
EIC will develop hardware and software
for an exascale supercomputer by the
end of this decade. Exascale - which
means a thousand times more performance than JUGENE or 1 exaflop/s - is the premier challenge for supercomputing worldwide. With exascale supercomputers
it will be possible to perform
simulations of unprecedented complexity. However, a great many challenges
have to be tackled to achieve this goal.
Energy efficiency will be the most prominent challenge to be solved in order
to create exascale supercomputers.
In a successful collaboration with IBM
Germany, the German Research Foundation's (DFG) Collaborative Research
Centre for Hadron Physics and JSC
developed the supercomputer QPACE,
which was declared the world's most
energy-efficient supercomputer by the
GREEN500 list last November. "With
QPACE, we have managed to get a grip
on energy consumption," says Prof.
Thomas Lippert, director of the Jülich
Supercomputing Centre. Further challenges are the development of the chip
and processor technology towards the
exascale level with respect to hardware
and the improvement of algorithms with
respect to software in order to run and
use a supercomputer of this size. Jülich
is contributing its outstanding expertise
in the development of algorithms.
According to the schedule, a prototype
of the new exascale supercomputer is
expected to be available in 2015. Five
scientists from the IBM development
laboratory in Böblingen and five scientists from Jülich will be collaborating
with a team of scientists at the IBM
Watson Research Center in Yorktown
Heights. The goal is to install an exascale-class system in Jülich by 2019.
ExaCluster Laboratory (ECL)
ECL will explore the key challenges of
building computing systems with a
thousand times the performance of
today's fastest supercomputers. The
new lab will initially employ about a
dozen researchers and is expected
to triple its staff over time.
"The Forschungszentrum Jülich has
taken a leading role in driving high-performance computing research in
Europe," said Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel's
Datacenter Group. "We have chosen
to work with Forschungszentrum Jülich
and the ParTec Cluster Competence
GmbH, because of their strong history
of innovation in the area of HPC."
The ExaCluster Laboratory will conduct
research into current challenges in systems management software for large
heterogeneous supercomputer systems, with a view to scaling this
software to reach exaflop/s performance. This will include research on
open exascale runtime system software and software tools. The aim of
the work on systems management
software is to further improve the
scalability of ParTec's ParaStation
cluster middle-ware and – at the end –
to create an OpenSource software
stack capable to manage Exascale
systems. Specific problems tackled in
the first 3-year period of the Laboratory
are – among others – the analysis of
the necessary measures to improve
system-resiliency or known scalability
issues with today's MPI-stacks.
Looking at current processor roadmaps it becomes clear that clusters
will not be able to cope with proprietary
solutions from IBM or Cray in the near
future, if they just follow the line of
general purpose CPUs. Therefore, the
applications of accelerator technologies
will be crucial in order to keep clusters
competitive in the next years. ECL will
investigate innovative technologies to
overcome the yet unsolved problem to
couple accelerators more tightly to the
high-speed interconnects building the
spine of today's cluster computers.
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At the ISC 2010 in Hamburg,
Forschungszentrum Jülich and the
companies Intel und ParTec sign
the contract for a joint "ExaCluster
Laboratory". From the left side: Hugo
Falter (ParTec), Prof. Achim Bachem
(Board of Directors of Forschungszentrum Jülich), Prof. Thomas Lippert
(Director of Jülich Supercomputing
Centre, Forschungszentrum Jülich),
Kirk Skaugen (Intel Vice President),
Raj Hazra (Intel).
(Photo: Forschungszentrum Jülich) |
• Norbert Eicker
• Willi Homberg
• Sabine Höfler-Thierfeldt
Jülich
Supercomputing
Centre
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