HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING
Exascale efficiency
EUROPEAN RESEARCHERS HAVE DEVELOPED A FRAMEWORK TO BOOST ENERGY EFFICIENCY OF CPU, GPU AND FPGA RESOURCES, WRITES ROBERT ROE
The drive for exascale and the power envelopes set for these systems, requires HPC hardware
and software developers to think outside the box to develop more energy efficient technologies to support exascale systems. Legato (Low Energy Toolset for
Heterogeneous Computing) is one such project with the lofty aims of developing
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a programming framework to support heterogeneous systems of CPU, GPU and FPGA resources that can offload specific tasks to different acceleration technologies through its own runtime system. The project’s researchers aim to make
a reliable, secure and energy efficient programming framework for HPC, that enables users to write a single code for multiple processing technologies. The system also aims to deliver additional energy savings through reduction of processor voltage, while maintaining application stability. Osman Unsal, group manager for the
department of computer architecture and parallel paradigms at the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC), explains that the rise in AI and ML applications provides an opportunity to make use of
FPGAs, which can run some tasks much more efficiently than other processing technologies. ‘For HPC we have scientific applications
to run and we need good floating point performance. That had generally been the Achilles heel of FPGAs. They would do very well with fixed point precision, integer or DSP-type applications which are in a different category than HPC applications. ‘This class of applications potentially make much better use of FPGAs from
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‘Those cases where a classical algorithm may be difficult to design... AI can help you come up with a solution’
February/March 2020 Scientific Computing World 7
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