• H2020
• Excellent Science

Cray, a German supercomputing company, is piloting its JULIA system in the Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) during the Human Brain Project (HBP) ramp-up phase.

Located at Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany, JULIA is one of two pilot systems and is available now having been integrated into the HBP HPAC platform AII.

The HPAC platform provides a single sign-on mechanism to all integrated resources in the HBP-wide infrastructure. The same account can then be used to access all services for which the user has the required admission.

The infrastructure in place for enabling this mechanism consists of a master LDAP (Lightweight Directory Address Protocol) server and some slave servers.

Slave LDAPs are located at most sites providing hardware resources for the HPAC platform, including Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC), Spain, Cineca (CINECA), Italy, and JSC.

The user and group information stored in the slave LDAP servers are propagated to the HPC systems. The EPFL BlueBrain IV system is hosted at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Porza, Switzerland, and acquires this information from the master LDAP server.

The PCP focuses on areas of dense memory integration, scalable visualisation and dynamic resource management. Cray addresses these topics using dense memory integration, DataWarp nodes; scalable visualisation, tightly integrated visualisation nodes; and dynamic resource management, integration with Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management (SLURM).

The key technologies used are KNL-based computer nodes; 100 Gbps network technology (Omni-Path); NVRAM technologies; and coherent software stack.

Both pilot systems are installed at JSC and integrated into the data infrastructure.

The Human Brain Project is an Horizon 2020 FET Flagship programme.