ARM-On the road to HPC (Mont-Blanc), January 16-17, 2017, Barcelona

20/01/2017

The “ARM - On the Road to HPC” event, which was hosted by Mont-Blanc, a European Exascale project, and coordinated by Barcelona Supercomputing Center, took place on 16th and 17th of January, on UPC campus, Barcelona. The scientific committee were: Mateo Valero, Jesus Labarta, Eduard Ayguadé, Miquel Moreto, Marc Casas, Leonardo Bautista-Gomez, Filippo Mantovani, with the local committee of Filippo Mantovani and Renata Gimenez.

‘The Mont-Blanc project, which started in 2011, leverages the fast growing market of mobile technology for scientific computation. During the project, several ARM-based computational platforms have been deployed and configured as production systems for HPC. Also, a complete software stack has been developed and consolidated in order to allow the execution of most complex parallel codes. The Mont-Blanc project has paved the way for enabling ARM in HPC and with this event the Mont-Blanc project wants to promote and encourage the exchange of experiences and knowledge amongst all the major players who contribute to make ARM-based scientific computing a reality.’

On Day 2, ETP4HPC was represented by Jean-Pierre Panziera, Chair, who gave a presentation on ETP4HPC’s involvement and support in the development of HPC in Europe ‘in a nutshell’. 

There were over 130 HPC experts registered at this event, the target audience being:

  • ARM SoC manufacturers, integrators and providers - The privileged position gained by the Mont-Blanc project during these 5 years of activity allows to gather, besides the industrial project partners ARM and Bull, several industrial players that have shown increasing interest in the ideas of the Mont-Blanc project.
  • End-Users - Members of the Mont-Blanc End-User Group as well as other companies that have shown their interest during the Mont-Blanc project in testing the ARM based solutions deployed in the past 5 years.
  • Academic and research entities - Starting from the Mont-Blanc partners, the event will involve other H2020 projects adopting ARM as compute platform, PRACE members, data centres and universities.

You can get a feel for this two day event by watching the following videos:

The topics covered over these two days were:

  • High Performance Computer architectures - The architecture of innovative ARM-based HPC solutions will be presented and discussed.
  • System software ecosystem for ARM - A complete software stack for performing scientific computing on ARM-based systems, including compilers, performance libraries and performance analysis tools is needed to be a valuable solution on the market.
  • Energy efficient solutions - Traditional sensitivity to power consumption of embedded devices together with the desperate need of power efficiency and energy proportionality of future HPC systems will be discussed.
  • Heterogeneity - How to efficiently exploit the increasing number of heterogeneous computational devices that are integrated in modern SoC?
  • Scientific applications - Applications driven machines are most probably not an ideal solution for modern data centres, but how to run old and new codes on modern parallel systems?
  • Resiliency - Can we really survive with system noise and hardware failures on future large exascale systems, or should we fight them?

And the objectives were:

  • Get a comprehensive view of the ARM-based platforms available on the market.
  • Understand and promote the current coverage of the ARM system software ecosystem.
  • Discover the contributions of the biggest players that are contributing in making ARM technology key for the future of HPC and datacentres.
  • Create connections among scientists, technologists, engineers and companies gravitating around emerging technologies for scientific computing.

 

 

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