ParTec

ParTec at the EuroHPC Summit 2024
A great opportunity to showcase results of the SEA projects

The EuroHPC Summit, which took place from 18 to 21 March in Antwerp, Belgium, offered interested parties the opportunity to learn about the results of the SEA projects. The projects results were presented in the poster session and  the workshop on “Co-Designing the Future of European HPC: Eco-friendly Technologies, Systems and Software”. These highlighted technology areas developed in Europe as a result of successful co-design, including the SEA projects outcomes. The workshop organised by Sai Narasimhamurthy, and Hans-Christian Hoppe presented the key SEA projects results; both are employees of ParTec AG.

About the SEA projects

The SEA projects DEEP-SEA, RED-SEA and IO-SEA realise the joint vision of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), Eviden and ParTec AG for a dynamic Modular System Architecture (dMSA) for future Exascale High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems. The four core partners have brought together the best European academic and industrial expertise to develop the technologies for the next generation of supercomputers. DEEP-SEA focuses on the programming environment & software stack for Exascale systems. IO-SEA provides a data management and storage platform for these systems, and RED-SEA enhances the European interconnect technology BXI and its related low-level software.

Key results

  • The integrated software stack developed by DEEP-SEA is one of the key results of the projects, alongside the establishment of the dMSA in large, operational systems like JSC’s JUWELS and the MeluXina system in Luxembourg, and soon in the JUPITER system at JSC. The stack integrates “best of breed” programming models, APIs, tools and libraries that are also relevant for non-modular HPC systems. In particular, the abstraction of optimization cycles, the support of hierarchical storage systems and the use of modern CI/CD techniques will bring direct benefits for such systems. This also applies to the pioneering work in the area of malleability. The stack is freely available as open source to all interested parties.

  • IO-SEA developed a storage and I/O stack suitable for the dMSA that deals with data movements across hierarchical storage systems including novel non-volatile memory, solid state devices, hard disk drives and tape storage. IO-SEA also developed the concept of short lived “ephemeral storage services” that are created on demand and enable users to flexibly operate the system. The project also introduced extensive use and exploitation of instrumentation and telemetry across the I/O stack and new I/O APIs that expose the actual semantics of data.

  • The RED-SEA project has laid the groundwork for the development and industrialization of the third generation of the European BXI interconnect. The project helped to bring BXI to the Exascale level, with improved scalability and resilience to reach well over 100K endpoints, while significantly improving the latency and the bandwidth available for each endpoint. RED-SEA also addressed real-world network performance with congestion management and adaptive routing mechanisms. Finally, RED-SEA opened up BXI to Ethernet compatibility, by designing a seamless interface between BXI and Ethernet via a new low-latency Gateway solution.

  • The ParaStation Modulo Software Suite and especially ParaStation MPI with its runtime and execution environment are key components of all three projects. They were extended and optimized to support the new concepts (for instance malleability), interconnects (BXI) and services (like the IO-SEA ephemeral storage services).

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