Exascale computing project receives funding
A new European exascale computing project, known as EuroEXA, has launched at the Barcelona Supercomputer Center, Spain, this week.
EuroEXA is the latest in a series of exascale investments under the Horizon 2020 programme, which will contribute €20m to the project over the next three and a half years.
This €20m will include research and development (R&D) for exascale system software, server hardware, networking, storage, cooling and datacentre technologies. The project partners include users who will bring their expertise in high performance computing (HPC) applications areas such climate and weather, physics, and life sciences
The initial EuroEXA funding will be spread across the 16 participating members, which span HPC centres, vendors, and user organisations in eight countries.
The largest recipient of the EU funding will go to the University of Manchester, UK, which is one of the UK’s leading institutions involved in cutting-edge supercomputing.
John Goodacre, Professor of Computer Architectures at the University of Manchester, said: “To deliver the demands of next generation computing and exascale HPC, it is not possible to simply optimise the components of the existing platform.
“In EuroEXA, we have taken a holistic approach to break-down the inefficiencies of the historic abstractions and bring significant innovation and co-design across the entire computing stack.”
The project will develop HPC-capable ARM and Xilinx FPGA designs, which will be incorporated into an operational prototype by 2020, along with new memory and cooling technologies. The hope is that this will be the basis of a European exascale system to be deployed in the 2022-2023 timeframe.
