Description
The Mont-Blanc project aims to develop a European Exascale approach leveraging on commodity power-efficient embedded technologies. The project has developed a HPC system software stack on ARM, and will deploy the first integrated ARM-based HPC prototype by 2014, and is also working on a set of 11 scientific applications to be ported and tuned to the prototype system.
The rapid progress of Mont-Blanc towards defining a scalable power efficient Exascale platform has revealed a number of challenges and opportunities to broaden the scope of investigations and developments. Particularly, the growing interest of the HPC community in accessing the Mont-Blanc platform calls for increased efforts to setup a production-ready environment. The Mont-Blanc 2 proposal has 4 objectives:
- To complement the effort on the Mont-Blanc system software stack, with emphasis on programmer tools (debugger, performance analysis), system resiliency (from applications to architecture support), and ARM 64-bit support
- To produce a first definition of the Mont-Blanc Exascale architecture, exploring different alternatives for the compute node (from low-power mobile sockets to special-purpose high-end ARM chips), and its implications on the rest of the system
- To track the evolution of ARM-based systems, deploying small cluster systems to test new processors that were not available for the original Mont-Blanc prototype (both mobile processors and ARM server chips)
- To provide continued support for the Mont-Blanc consortium, namely operations of the Mont-Blanc prototype, and hands-on support for our application developers Mont-Blanc 2 contributes to the development of extreme scale energy-efficient platforms, with potential for Exascale computing, addressing the challenges of massive parallelism, heterogeneous computing, and resiliency.
Mont-Blanc 2 has great potential to create new market opportunities for successful EU technology, by placing embedded architectures in servers and HPC.