HPC 2014-15 | International cooperation Big Data


Te day before the official opening of the ISC’14 conference in Leipzig in June 2014, delegates assembled for a full day of discussion on how international cooperation could foster the technological developments needed for the next generation of high-performance computing. At the seminar, the man primarily


responsible for driving forward the US exascale programme, Bill Harrod, proposed that ‘the greatest area of such cooperation is system soſtware’. As programme manager for Advanced Scientific Computing Research at the US Department of Energy, he outlined how cooperation could help in developing novel operating systems; soſtware tools for performance monitoring (particularly for energy efficient computation); and system management soſtware that will cope with hardware failures, both in processor nodes and in memory and storage. At the same event, Mike Dewar, chief


technical officer of the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG), reminded his US and Japanese colleagues that, unlike them, Europe was not a single country but rather that the ‘European Union is a collection of nation states’. Some EU countries had different interests in, and expectations of, HPC from others and this diversity made it difficult for the EU to collaborate internationally in the same way as individual countries. However, Europe offers several models


for international collaboration on scientific projects. Cern, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics is well known; Prace, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, is now well-established. But less well known perhaps is an infrastructure project


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needs networks


The way Europe has joined up its networks not only supports supercomputing on the continent, but also offers a model for international cooperation that might have lessons for the development of next-generation technology, as Tom Wilkie discovers


that, amongst other things, underpins the international cooperation facilitated by Prace. Although this particular project is not


directly a supercomputing organisation, European science and supercomputing would be very different without it, so the model it offers is worth some study. It is not a loose collaboration of academic researchers, but equally it is not an intergovernmental organisation with all the bureaucratic machinery that that entails. It owns property, and operates a service for scientists, but it also conducts research itself. Dante (Delivery of Advanced Network


Technology to Europe) was established in 1993 to coordinate the way in which data


“Dante’s main project is Géant, which serves about 50 million users across Europe, reaches over 100 countries worldwide – and is the most advanced international network of its type”


communication networks for European research and education were established, working with the individual countries’ own National Research and Education Networks (NRENs). Dante builds and operates the high- speed networks that connect the NRENs to each other and to the rest of the world, enabling scientists, academics, innovators and students to collaborate across dedicated networks, regardless of where they are. While Cern and other international


scientific collaborative projects tend to be run by intergovernmental bodies, set up only aſter lengthy diplomatic treaty negotiations, and with


Government delegations monitoring every step in the operation, Dante is distinctive in that it is actually a limited liability company, owned by its shareholders, and run by a management team responsible to the board of directors. Te shareholders are the National Research and Education Networks rather than government representatives. (Although some government departments are shareholders, instead of that country’s NREN, this tends to be because the legal status of the NREN does not permit it to own shares in another organisation.) For historical reasons, Dante is


headquartered in Cambridge but, disappointingly perhaps, instead of a Wisteria- covered medieval college building, it is run from a very modern office block to the south of the city and therefore far from the picturesque and historic city centre. (Europa Science Ltd, the publishers of Scientific Computing World, occupies rather dowdier and much less grand offices just around the corner.) Dante’s main project is Géant, which serves


about 50 million users across Europe, reaches over 100 countries worldwide – and, according to Dante, is the most advanced international network of its type. Given the volumes of data that modern research generates, the infrastructure is largely fibre optic cable and in September 2014, Dante, together with its main contractor, the commercial company Infinera, announced that they had successfully demonstrated a single-card terabit super- channel on an active segment of Géant’s production network between Budapest in Hungary and Bratislava in the Slovak Republic. One of the challenges network operators


face is the amount of time it takes to deploy capacity with multiple line-cards and the burden of managing hundreds and thousands of fibre connections. Te demonstration


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