HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING g
‘It is hoped that the legacy is not just a milestone on the way to exascale,’ stressed Goodacre. ‘The tasks being undertaken include significant work in increase compute and thermal density – required for exascale, but this will be very useful to many markets that have power or environmental constraints.’ One particular area that the EuroEXA
project hopes to address is the memory bottleneck that faces many HPC users. By shifting away from the von Neumann architecture, it is hoped that the technologies developed for this project could help the industry to break away from this model. While the von Neumann architecture has been incredibly important for the development of computing, the architecture has an inherent bottleneck around the shared bus between program and data memory, which limits data transfer between CPU and memory. Goodacre continued: ‘Likewise, the
work we’re doing in shifting mindset from a von Neumann – “what’s the next operation, read the data, store the data” and communicate through the IO unit, is also undergoing significant evolution. Although we’re using FPGA, the goals here are to move forward on a dataflow paradigm for compute, in which
we can address the memory bottleneck issues while significantly increasing compute efficiency by allowing data to flow between operands without needing written, and then read back from memory.’ Another positive benefit that could
come from the push for exascale computing is the democratisation of HPC technology and technological advances that can be applied to smaller HPC systems. Just as the power consumption and efficiency savings that Goodacre mentioned previously can be applied to smaller systems, so can developments in memory architecture, storage and cooling efficiency. While not every technology developed
for exascale will eventually trickle down into the HPC industry, the ones that do
“HPC is a small market, and getting the compute density they need, we believe, would be cost prohibitive without being able to share aspects of the design with other markets”
could have benefits that make HPC more efficient and potentially cheaper for the entire industry.
‘Cost is a major barrier to petascale
today, and something that’s seldom even discussed for exascale,’ commented Goodacre. ‘EuroExa also has activities in supporting what is being called “silicon- modules”. As you are starting to see in the market, this provides a way to build a big processor by bringing a number of smaller components together. Not only does this help with reducing cost by increasing silicon yield, it also simplifies development and ultimately enables “IP” reuse at the silicon level, enabling vendors to share the cost of mask sets over a larger market. ‘HPC is a small market, and getting the
compute density they need, we believe, would be cost-prohibitive without being able to share aspects of the design with other markets.’ Goodacre also mentioned the memory
system that is being developed as part of the project: ‘EuroExa also goes a step further in this regard too, with a new memory system architecture designed to enable multiple silicon modules to interact generically, and not only in the manner defined by a single device.’ He also noted several areas where
petascale HPC can benefit from the work done to reach exascale. This includes maturing the tools and methodologies for dataflow programming, technology to enable silicon-module reuse, compute density advances (silent cooling), scalable system architecture model (beyond clustering) and application frameworks and OS libraries that leverage this new platform. With all these potential benefits, it is clear that the pursuit of exascale can produce far more than just an exascale supercomputer. However, the road to exascale is long and filled with uncertainty around the development and deployment of new technologies that may not be a commercial success. ‘EuroExa is just a step on the path
towards exascale. The fragmentation and uncertainty of “winning” future funding calls is the biggest challenge to deliver exascale. Taking turns in which projects get funded, just extends the overall time to deliver anything,’ stressed Goodacre. ‘Exascale needs ground-breaking
innovations to be fundamental to the end results, and this is in conflict with the ongoing business needs of existing suppliers, in terms of risk management. So, whether there will be enough open funding to complete the innovations to a point that the commercialisation risks are small enough to enable adoption, is one of my outstanding questions.’
10 Scientific Computing World October/November 2017 @scwmagazine |
www.scientific-computing.com
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