HPC 2015-16 | European update
European cooperation through Prace means that researchers across Europe can gain access to supercomputers such as SuperMUC at the Leibniz-Rechenzentrum in Garching near Munich
Developing exascale
technology: a strategic choice. HPC has become indispensable to support policy-making, to maintain national sovereignty and to further economic competitiveness. HPC is a strategic technology in the context of critical national security applications, such as nuclear simulation and modelling, cyber-war and cyber-criminality (industrial espionage). Supercomputers are in the first line for detecting today’s sophisticated cyber-attacks and security breaches, insider threats, and electronic fraud. HPC is also a critical tool for supporting the decision-making process, for example by modelling the impact of political decisions on energy, home security, or climate change. At the same time, the much larger and more complex datasets of modern science and engineering generate a need for technologies with significantly higher performance. Tis is why mastering HPC technologies
– all the way from hardware and system soſtware to applications has become a national strategic priority for the most powerful nations. Te USA, China, Japan, Russia, and India have all declared HPC an area of strategic priority and have created national programmes with large investments to develop HPC technology and deploy state-of-the-art exascale supercomputers (see, for example, the US President’s recent Executive Order establishing a National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI) to foster US leadership in this field over the coming decades). Te motivation for developing exascale
technologies, therefore, is not merely to have the fastest supercomputer in the world. Te goal is to build ‘first of a kind’ systems rather than ‘one of a kind’. Te transition to exascale computing is an opportunity to influence a wide range of technologies that will feed into the broader ICT market within
6
a few years of their introduction in high-end HPC – giving a competitive advantage to those developing them at an early stage. Tis global race is really about supremacy
in supercomputing and in all the disciplines and markets that depend heavily on this technology. Te risk of not being a global player is immense: being technologically locked out or deprived of this strategic know-how. Te EU’s strategy to become a global
player in HPC has to take advantage of European strengths and overcome our weaknesses, with an approach aimed at developing technologies with a market potential large enough for sustainable growth. Even though the EU is currently weak compared to the USA in terms of HPC system vendors, there are particular strengths that can be deployed to get the EU back on the world stage as a supplier of leading-edge technology. For example,
“Te risk of not being a global player is immense”
Europe has technical skills and world- leading capabilities in critical technologies such as power-efficient nanoelectronics, interconnects, and processor design. Europe also has a strong position in parallel soſtware development, and global leadership in HPC applications. Te European approach is co-design:
choosing and developing technologies that really fit the needs of important applications and the users of such technology. Tis will facilitate the take-up of products and systems based on European IP and, in the longer run, feed into the broader ICT sector – from smart phones to embedded systems to servers – solutions that have been produced in the EU.
The European HPC strategy In 2012, the European Commission called on EU member states and private partners to step up joint efforts on a common HPC strategy to ensure European leadership in the supply and use of HPC systems and services by 2020. An independent study carried out by IDC6
found that, overall, Europe has
made impressive progress in crucial areas for the implementation of the European HPC Strategy, especially in organising the European HPC community to pursue HPC leadership on a unified basis; in expanding the scientific and industrial access to and use of supercomputers; and in launching initiatives to strengthen the European HPC supply chain. Governance: Tere is wider and better
European awareness of HPC, structured by a Commission-led effort to create the first Europe-wide HPC strategy. HPC governance in Europe has improved with the establishment of Prace11
industry-led European Platform on HPC (ETP4HPC)12
in 2010 and the in 2011. Prace is building a pan-
European HPC infrastructure for scientific and engineering research accessible to all EU researchers through a single peer-review process, while the ETP4HPC has defined the Strategic Research Agenda in this domain. However, the European effort needs to
go further. No single member state has the financial and technical capacity to compete effectively in HPC globally. A full HPC ecosystem can only be established by joint efforts that have enough critical mass to realise the goal of attaining leadership in the supply and use of HPC: that is, in both ‘production’ and ‘consumption’ of this technology. Europe has been falling behind other regions of the world because of its under-investment in establishing a complete HPC ecosystem, encompassing the acquisition of leadership- class computers, the development of its own independent HPC system supply, and the
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36