Related Activities
A set of linked research and innovation activities:
Focus CoE contributes to the success of the EU HPC Ecosystem and the EuroHPC Initiative by supporting the EU HPC CoEs to more effectively fulfil their role within the ecosystem and initiative: ensuring that extreme scale applications result in tangible benefits for addressing scientific, industrial or societal challenges.
Relevance for EXCELLERAT: EXCELLERAT is one of the Centres of Excellence FocusCoE supports. Focus CoE promotes the services and findings of EXCELLERAT to more partners from science and industry, with particular focus on small and middle size enterprises (SMEs), and thereby reinforces the positive impact of high-performance computing in all of the areas covered by the CoEs. To achieve this, Focus CoE provides a number of services to EXCELLERAT and the other CoEs and supports them in terms of promoting their training offer, coordinate the industrial outreach and foster communication.
The European Technology Platform for High Performance Computing (ETP4HPC) is an industry-led forum. It provides a framework for stakeholders to define European HPC technology research priorities and action plans in order to achieve EU growth, competitiveness and sustainability through major research and technological advances in the medium to long term. ETP recently published its Strategic Research Agenda (SRA), a document outlining a roadmap for the implementation of a research program for the development of European HPC technologies.
Relevance for EXCELLERAT: ETP4HPC is of utmost importance for EXCELLERAT. The European HPC Strategy and the according research agenda will act as a baseline for the EXCELLERAT knowledge base and the identification of future directions. BSC, CINECA, USTUTT, UEDIN, SICOS, KTH are members of ETP4HPC and thus will ensure a close link to the platform and quick knowledge transfer in both directions.
The SME HPC Access Programme in Europe (SHAPE) is a pan-European, PRACE-based programme supporting HPC adoption by SMEs. The Programme aims to equip European SMEs with the awareness and expertise necessary to take advantage of the innovation possibilities opened by HPC, increasing their competitiveness.
A Pilot, trial phase of the programme, was set up in June 2013, and considered a success. It was followed by a second call in November 2014, at the end of PRACE-3IP activities. Regular SHAPE calls are expected in the forthcoming PRACE-4IP activity.
Relevance for EXCELLERAT: PRACE SHAPE concentrates on SMEs. EXCELLERAT will elaborate the experiences of the pilots in SHAPE and during its runtime closely monitor the achievements of SHAPE. Thus the specific services offered by EXCELLERAT to support SMEs will be refined and where possible interlinking with SHAPE will be proposed to enhance the EXCELLERAT service portfolio.
FORTISSIMO provisions simulation services and tools running on a cloud of HPC infrastructures via a “one-stop-shop” which simplifies access to advanced simulation, particularly to SMEs. Fortissimo places emphasis on the exploitation of opportunities at all levels of the value chain all the way from the SME end-users to the providers of High Performance Computing infrastructure.
Relevance for EXCELLERAT: FORTISSIMO is perfectly complementary to the aims of EXCELLERAT. Where FORTISSIMO concentrates on best support for SMEs, especially in terms of easy access and automation of processes, EXCELLERAT goes beyond and provides in-depth knowledge and expertise to moderate to professional users. EXCELLERAT will clearly position its ecosystem in accordance with the FORTISSIMO ecosystem and learn from activities such as the marketplace design and realisation (especially for the portal task). CINECA, USTUTT, UEDIN and SICOS are members of FORTISSIMO and thus will ensure a close link to the platform and quick knowledge transfer in both directions.
“Initiative HPC-PME” is a joint initiative established at the end of 2010 by three French public partners: GENCI, INRIA and OSEO for developing innovation in industry and especially SMEs. It shall allow French SMEs to assess and demonstrate the potential of using HPC in their innovation process.
Relevance for EXCELLERAT: EXCELLERAT will analyse the business model behind HPC-PME and check success stories and how they were achievable to influence its own sustainability activities (especially with respect to addressing and encouraging SMEs).
Mont-Blanc designs a new type of computer architecture capable of setting future global HPC standards, built from energy efficient solutions used in embedded and mobile devices. Within its extension it will further develop the OmpSs parallel programming model to automatically exploit multiple cluster nodes, transparent application check pointing for fault tolerance, support for ARMv8 64-bit processors, and the initial design of the Mont-Blanc Exascale architecture.
Relevance for EXCELLERAT: The extension of Mont-Blanc contributes to the development of extreme scale energy-efficient platforms, with potential for Exascale computing, addressing the challenges of massive parallelism, heterogeneous computing, and resiliency. This second phase of the project has a great potential to create new market opportunities for successful EC technology, by placing embedded architectures in servers and HPC. Thus it is of utmost interest for EXCELLERAT to collaborate with Mont-Blanc and to get early access to knowledge and potential test systems to provide this to their Customers. This collaboration will have a very strong component on co-design, because EXCELLERAT and MONTBLANC combined expertise will allow to propose efficient yet powerful hardware developments for the simulation of complex engineering problems.
Supercomputing Scotland is a programme delivering a unique facility to support company growth via the use of HPC. One aspect of this support is a rigorous analysis of the companies’ readiness to adopt HPC.
Relevance for EXCELLERAT: EXCELLERAT will analyse the Supercomputing Scotland model to understand effective ways of how to approach SMEs and how to build up an ecosystem around this. This will positively influence the definition of the service offerings and the related business models.
In the DEEP project, an innovative architecture for heterogeneous HPC systems has been developed based on the combination of a standard HPC Cluster and a tightly connected HPC Booster built of many-core processors.
DEEP-ER now evolves this architecture to address two significant Exascale computing challenges: highly scalable and efficient parallel I/O and system resiliency. Co-Design will be key to tackle these challenges through thoroughly integrated development of new hardware and software components, fine-tuned with actual HPC applications in mind. On the software side of the project the central research topics will be I/O and resiliency.
Relevance for EXCELLERAT: The produced knowledge and results of DEEP(-ER) are of interest for the EXCELLERAT service portfolio. Knowledge and experiences gained will be the basis for collaboration, access to prototypes will be of interest. EXCELLERAT partners CINECA and BSC are within this project and can be the interface to speed up collaboration set up. As in the case of MONTBLANC, this collaboration will have a very strong component on co-design, aiming to propose efficient yet powerful hardware developments for the simulation of complex engineering problems.
The CRESTA (Collaborative Research into Exascale Systemware, Tools and Applications) Project. In opposite to Mont-Blanc and Deep, it focused on the evolution of common codes towards scalability on ExaFlop systems via co-design.
Relevance for EXCELLERAT: CRESTA has improved a variety of codes such as Gromacs or NEK5000. New linear solvers have been developed. All the technological outputs will be of high interest for the Centre, as well as the analyses of bottlenecks and burden to be overcome. KTH, USTUTT, UEDIN were partners of the CRESTA consortium.
The aim of the EPiGRAM project is to prepare Message Passing and PGAS programming models for exascale systems by fundamentally addressing their main current limitations. The concepts developed will be tested and guided by two applications in the engineering and space weather domains chosen from the suite of codes in current EC exascale projects.
Relevance for EXCELLERAT: With its engineering application as one validation scenario, EPiGRAM will provide EXCELLERAT valuable input for its technology and knowledge base.
The European Processor Initiative (EPI) is a project currently implemented under the first stage of the Framework Partnership Agreement signed by the Consortium with the European Commission (FPA: 800928), whose aim is to design and implement a roadmap for a new family of low-power European processors for extreme scale computing, high-performance Big-Data and a range of emerging applications.
EuroHPC will permit the EU and participating countries to coordinate their efforts and share resources with the objective of deploying in Europe a world-class supercomputing infrastructure and a competitive innovation ecosystem in supercomputing technologies, applications and skills.
NCMS (National Center for Manufacturing Sciences) is a driving force in several US high-tech initiatives, one of them being “Digital Manufacturing and High Performance Computing”.
Relevance for EXCELLERAT: NCMS has run over 350 R&D projects and thus provides a good example for how to drive engineering domains to benefit from HPC. We will look at the business model and the respective properties of this approach.
NDEMC is a public-private partnership to support and enhance the use of modelling and simulation among America’s small and medium manufacturers. The consortium is a resource of expertise, hardware and software in support of improving manufacturing productivity through modelling and simulation to assisting participating SMEs with education, training, and implementation.
Relevance for EXCELLERAT: The NDECM business model and the training approach are candidates to be analysed by the respective activities within EXCELLERAT.