HPC 2015-16 | Contents Contents Living in interesting times


Tere is a distinctly forward-looking theme to this year’s View into high-performance computing. Firstly we look at how Canada and Europe are organising themselves


to take advantage of, and in Europe’s case possibly shape, the future technology of HPC. Tere are many differences between the two. Canada is a single, albeit federal nation; whereas the European Union, despite its name, is a very loose collection of nation states all with their own priorities and interests. Central power is surprisingly weak, compared to the power of individual governments. But there are similarities in their approach to HPC. Fundamentally,


both have realised that they must pool resources. In the case of Canada, this has taken the form of Compute Canada, which has evolved from a disparate organisation with computational and financial resources distributed across more than 30 institutions to a well-structured federation, providing national leadership and coordination. As Mark Dietrich writes on page 10, the goal is to build a digital infrastructure that will transform Canada’s economy from one based on natural resources to a knowledge-based economy Across the Atlantic, the need to fit European infrastructure and


How to make HPC happen in Europe Computing Canada’s future 4


Leonardo Flores Añover and Augusto Burgueño Arjona discuss how and why Europe should play a leading role in HPC


10


Mark Dietrich outlines how Canada is building a digital infrastructure to transform the country from an economy based on natural resources to a knowledge-based economy


HPC evolves from the commodity cluster 14


Robert Roe surveys the processor market that underlies the next generation of HPC systems Software critical to HPC’s future


Robert Roe discusses the trends that will shape high-performance computing over the coming years


Solutions not just technology


Companies, from integrators to high-end suppliers, are all focused on the customer, as Tom Wilkie discovers in a survey of the marketplace for HPC systems


Directory of suppliers 33


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EDITORIAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE TEAM Editor-in-Chief: Dr Tom Wilkie (editor.scw@europascience.com) Technical writer: Robert Roe (editor.scw@europascience.com) Circulation/readership enquiries: Pete Vine (subs@europascience.com)


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industry for the digital age lies behind the European Commission’s painstaking negotiations to develop an EU strategy for high- performance computing. Tis is a task of great delicacy, for it involves not just the governments of EU member states but the user communities and the vendors of soſtware and systems. Given the complexity of the problem, a coherent and sensible strategy has evolved, as Leonardo Flores Añover and Augusto Burgueño Arjona outline on page 4. In his survey of the HPC market on page 20, Robert Roe finds that


soſtware as much as hardware will be critical to the future. Tom Wilkie looks at the ‘ecosystem’ of suppliers of systems on page 26, and discovers a subtle and complex landscape in which integrators offer benefits to the end-user that the major companies cannot, while at the same time offering benefits to the major suppliers as well. On the technology front, the settled paradigm that (with some


notable exceptions) x86 processors have been the technology of choice for HPC is finally breaking up and a wide range of future possibilities are in view. Robert Roe concludes his feature on page 14 with what might be a message for the whole sector: ‘Te future of HPC is no longer a monoculture of clusters of commodity hardware but rather a highly diverse ecosystem, populated by different processor technologies, different architectures, and different soſtware solutions. It may be messy but it will be interesting.’


Dr Tom Wilkie Editor-in-Chief


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