GW4 Tier 2 HPC Centre for Advanced Architectures

GW4 Tier 2 HPC 高级架构中心

基本信息

批准号：
EP/P020224/1
负责人：
Simon McIntosh-Smith
金额：
$ 382.26万
依托单位：
University of Bristol
依托单位国家：
英国
项目类别：
Research Grant
财政年份：
2016
资助国家：
英国
起止时间：
2016 至无数据
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=EP%2FP020224%2F1
关键词：
GW4 Tier HPC Centre Advanced

项目摘要

This proposal by a consortium of the GW4 Alliance of Bristol, Bath, Cardiff and Exeter, in partnership with Cray and the Met Office, is to provide a national 64-bit ARM-based HPC service. The system will be one of the world's first to be based on Broadcom's Vulcan server-class chip. Details of this device are still under NDA, but the Vulcan CPU is generating excitement because it trades off much greater provision of memory bandwidth for less emphasis on peak FLOP/s, the former being more important for most scientific codes. Providing access to such a machine as a national service should therefore enable the UK's HPC community to quantify the benefit of memory bandwidth focused CPUs, thus informing future system procurements from Tier 1 to Tier 3. If this greater focus on memory bandwidth does, as expected, result in greater performance and science throughput, then ARM64-based machines, such as the Cray XC Scout system that we are proposing in this bid, will be genuine contenders for Tier 1 and Tier 3 production systems from 2017. In addition to our goal of providing one of the world's first ARM64 production HPC systems, this proposal will also provide a service to enable algorithm development and the porting and optimisation of scientific codes in readiness for ARM64 machines. This algorithm and software effort is a crucial part of any architectural evaluation, as rigorous architecture-to-architecture comparisons are only possible when optimisation levels across the architectures are similar. There is already tremendous interest in evaluating ARM64 within the HPC community, with multiple ARM-based HPC projects underway around the world. Our proposed machine will be able to run most existing codes "out of the box", supporting the most common parallel programming languages, including OpenMP and MPI. Thus most users should be able to begin to evaluate the service with minimal effort, and so we expect demand to be strong.The system will be run as a national facility, with open calls for computing time allocated via a lightweight resource allocation process. A top-level Consortium Management Board will determine the policy for resource allocation between the different application areas as well as fundamental computational science research into next generation parallel algorithms. Operating expenses will be covered by the consortium and its partners. Systems administrator and power costs will be split across the partners, while a group of expert research software engineers will help the community develop new algorithms, port codes and rigorously evaluate this important new architecture.

由布里斯托尔，巴斯，加的夫和埃克塞特联盟的一个联盟与克雷和大都会办公室合作的提案是提供一项基于全国64位ARM的HPC服务。该系统将是世界上第一个基于Broadcom的Vulcan Server级芯片之一。该设备的详细信息仍在NDA之下，但是Vulcan CPU引起了兴奋，因为它可以更大地提供记忆带宽，以减少对峰值失败的重视，而前者对大多数科学代码更为重要。因此，提供进入该机器作为国民服务的机器的访问应使英国的HPC社区能够量化以记忆带宽为重点的CPU的好处，从而告知未来从1级到第3级的系统采购。 1和3级生产系统从2017年开始。除了我们提供世界上第一个ARM64生产HPC系统之一的目标外，该提案还将提供一项服务，以实现算法开发以及对ARM64机器准备就绪的科学代码的移植和优化。这种算法和软件工作是任何架构评估的关键部分，因为只有在架构的优化级别相似时，才有可能进行严格的体系结构到架构比较。在HPC社区中评估ARM64的兴趣已经引起极大的兴趣，全球多个基于ARM的HPC项目正在进行中。我们提出的机器将能够“开箱即用”运行大多数现有的代码，从而支持最常见的并行编程语言，包括OpenMP和MPI。因此，大多数用户应该能够以最小的努力开始评估服务，因此我们希望需求强大。系统将作为国家设施运行，并通过轻量级资源分配过程进行计算时间的开放呼吁。顶级财团管理委员会将确定不同应用领域之间的资源分配政策，以及对下一代并行算法的基本计算科学研究。业务费用将由财团及其合作伙伴支付。系统管理员和电力成本将分配到整个合作伙伴中，而一组专家研究软件工程师将帮助社区开发新的算法，端口代码，并严格评估这一重要的新体系结构。