HPC: Key Technologies and Tools

Advancing education and training in High Performance Computing (HPC) and its applicability to HPDA and AI is essential for strengthening the world-class European HPC ecosystem. It is of primary importance to ensure the digital transformation and the sustainability of high-priority economic sectors.

Accelerators are the basic building blocks of the next-generation exascale systems. In this context, The European PILOT project will be the first demonstration of two European High Performance Computing (HPC) and High Performance Data Analytics (HPDA) accelerators – all designed, implemented, manufactured and owned by Europe.

Capable of a billion calculations per second, exascale computing still needs to overcome technology gaps that limit performance and energy efficiency. There is a need to increase computation ability and enable the seamless integration of reconfigurable accelerators in heterogeneous high-performance computing (HPC) multi-node platforms.

The growing need to process extremely large data sets is the driving force accelerating the transition to high-performance computing. However, the flat data storage hierarchies with a central parallel file system are proving to be inadequate. Emerging multi-tier storage hierarchies could meet the needs of data-intensive applications but currently lack adequate control mechanisms for the available resources.

The EU-funded EUPEX will support the creation of a sustainable European scientific and industrial high-performance computing (HPC) ecosystem, and help lay the foundations for Europe’s digital sovereignty. Specifically, EUPEX will pave the way for the upcoming European Exascale systems.

The EU ACROSS project will codesign and develop an HPC, Big Data, AI convergent platform, supporting applications in the aeronautics, climate and weather, and energy domains. To this end, it will leverage on next generation of pre-exascale infrastructures, still being ready for exascale systems, and on effective mechanisms to easily describe and manage complex workflows in these three domains.