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FORINFRA-Nasj.sats. forskn.infrastrukt

Experimental Infrastructure for Exploration of Exascale Computing

Alternative title: Eksperimentell infrastruktur for utforskning av exascale-beregninger

Awarded: NOK 37.5 mill.

The exponential increase in need for computing power has fueled the quest for developing exascale computers capable of performing a billion billion (10^18) floating point operations per second. Once estimated to be reachable by 2018, the real breakthrough was not officially reached before the fall 2022 when the Frontier system was ranked first on the Top500 list of the 500 most powerful computers in the world. This upcoming generation of computing will rely on an intricate interplay between thousands of sophisticated processing nodes, each with a large number of cores, deep memory hierarchies and equipped with accelerators, organized in complex communication topologies. Such computers are essential for the coming digital society. The aggregated level of complexity in a system designed for billion-way concurrency represents a major challenge with many features: How to program such computers? How to port existing code, and how to reach a satisfactory level of reliability and efficiency while maintaining an acceptable energy footprint? While competing technologies in hardware, middleware, and software are being driven by major research projects in the United States, Japan and the EU, it is essential for Norwegian HPC research groups to keep pace with the frontier research. This means to build a strong competence on the upcoming exascale technology, thereby helping the entire Norwegian research community and Norwegian industry to be well prepared. Together with partners, Simula Research Laboratory has established eX3 with the aim of becoming exactly the previously missing national resource that can pave the way for exascale computing in Norway. The eX3 project is funded by the RCN program for national research infrastructures, Simula and other partners. In addition to the host institution Simula, the project consortium also counts the national HPC management body Sigma2, HPC research groups from the University of Tromsø, NTNU, the University of Bergen, and Oslo Metropolitan University, as well as the HPC technology providers Dolphin Interconnect Solutions and Numascale.

The exponential increase in need for computing power has fueled the quest for developing exascale computers capable of performing a billion billion (10^18) floating point operations per second. Once estimated to be reachable by 2018, there is still a stretch to go before this milestone is reached. This upcoming generation of computing will rely on an intricate interplay between thousands of sophisticated processing nodes, each with a large number of cores, deep memory hierarchies and equipped with accelerators, organized in complex communication topologies. Such computers are essential for the coming digital society. The aggregated level of complexity in a system designed for billion-way concurrency represents a major challenge with many features: How to program such computers? How to port existing code, and how to reach a satisfactory level of reliability and efficiency while maintaining an acceptable energy footprint? While competing technologies in hardware, middleware, and software are being driven by major research projects in the United States, China, Japan and the EU, it is essential for Norwegian HPC research groups to keep pace with the frontier research. This means to build a strong competence on the upcoming exascale technology, thereby helping the entire Norwegian research community and Norwegian industry to be well prepared. Together with partners, Simula Research Laboratory will establish eX3 with the aim of becoming exactly the previously missing national resource that can pave the way for exascale computing in Norway. The eX3 project is designed to run for five years, funded by the RCN program for national research infrastructures. In addition to the host institution Simula, the project consortium also counts the national HPC management body Sigma2, HPC research groups from the University of Tromsø, NTNU, Oslo Metropolitan University, and the University of Bergen, as well as the HPC technology providers Graphcore, Dolphin Interconnect Solutions, and Numascale.

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FORINFRA-Nasj.sats. forskn.infrastrukt

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