ParTec participates in a variety of German- and EU-funded research and innovation projects in Quantum Computing, HPC, and Artificial Intelligence. These projects focus on developing technologies that enable efficient use of leading-edge, heterogeneous systems up to and including Exascale levels of performance.
Examples are DEEP-SEA, EUPEX, HPCQS, and CoE RAISE.
ParTec contributes to the development of new software architectures, to the development of runtime systems, middleware components, and management tools for production-ready, heterogeneous systems. In doing so, it puts the focus on improvements and extensions of the scheduling and resource management subsystems for the Modular Supercomputing Architecture (MSA) as well as programming models, libraries, and management tools.
In addition, ParTec also performs project management functions in some of the projects.
At present ParTec is working with a large number of research partners in the active research and innovation projects described below.
The map of Europe indicates the location of these partners, with orange showing cities with just one partner, and blue indicating the presence of multiple partners at the same location.
The series of past DEEP projects did break new ground in defining the MSA as a way to enable efficient use of heterogeneous systems for complex HPC workloads and workflows.
The key concept is to dynamically aggregate the right set of compute and I/O resources (CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, ad-hoc filesystems, advanced storage nodes) to best support each application or workflow through all execution phases, instead of handing out a fixed number of nodes with a fixed and pre-ordained combination of CPUs and accelerators.
The DEEP projects did develop three successive prototypes complete with the required system software and programming environments, always in close collaboration with leading-edge scientific applications.
As a result of the stringent co-design approach used, the benefits and advantages of the MSA could be demonstrated, and MSA systems are now in use throughout Europe.
ParTec and Jülich Supercomputing Centre were the driving forces behind defining the MSA HW and SW architecture generations, and ParTec did develop a complete MPI implementation and system management suite which fully support the operation of MSA systems on a production level.
CoE RAISE and the previous DEEP projects have received funding from the European Union’s Framework 7 and Horizon 2020 research and innovation programmes under grant agreement No. 951733 (CoE RAISE), No. 287530 (DEEP), No. 610476 (DEEP-ER), and No. 754304 (DEEP-EST).
The DEEP-SEA project builds upon proven software packages to create an open-source environment which will optimally support heterogeneous and MSA supercomputers, guided by codesign with seven applications from high-impact scientific fields.
The software stack also supports code optimization across existing and future architectures and systems.
ParTec coordinates the work on system software, extends ParaStation MPI including its runtime environment to support application malleability, and develops support for composing partitioned global address space programming models (such as GPI-2) and MPI workloads.
ParTec also supports the coordinator (Jülich Supercomputing Centre) in project management tasks.
The project activities have received funding from the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) under grant agreement No 955606 (DEEP-SEA), No. 955811 (IO-SEA), No. 955776 (RED-SEA), No. 101033975 (EUPEX) and No. 101036168 (EPI SGA2). The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 or Horizon Europe research and innovation programme and from national funding agencies, in the case of ParTec from the German ministry of education and research (BMBF).
IO-SEA develops a novel data management and storage platform for Exascale computing based on Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) and on-demand provisioning of storage services.
The platform makes efficient use of storage tiers spanning solid-state memory and storage devices at the top all the way down to tape-based technologies.
The project targets MSA systems and uses the DEEP-SEA development system. ParTec develops extensions to its MPI and system management/monitoring suite which support the automatic deployment and use of ephemeral I/O servers by complex parallel applications.
The project activities have received funding from the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) under grant agreement No 955606 (DEEP-SEA), No. 955811 (IO-SEA), No. 955776 (RED-SEA), No. 101033975 (EUPEX) and No. 101036168 (EPI SGA2). The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 or Horizon Europe research and innovation programme and from national funding agencies, in the case of ParTec from the German ministry of education and research (BMBF).
RED-SEA builds upon the European BullSequana eXascale Interconnect (BXI), together with standard and mature technology (Ethernet), and the results of previous EU-funded interconnect initiatives to provide a competitive and efficient European fabric solution for the Exascale era and beyond.
This involves developing key hardware blocks as well as the system software and programming environments. ParTec develops extensions to its MPI and system management suite to support the RED-SEA networks and optimize performance on BXI.
The project activities have received funding from the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) under grant agreement No 955606 (DEEP-SEA), No. 955811 (IO-SEA), No. 955776 (RED-SEA), No. 101033975 (EUPEX) and No. 101036168 (EPI SGA2). The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 or Horizon Europe research and innovation programme and from national funding agencies, in the case of ParTec from the German ministry of education and research (BMBF).
EUPEX develops a heterogeneous, production-class pilot HPC platform based on the ARM CPU architecture and implementing the MSA, and will make it available to the European scientific communities.
The platform is engineered to scale to Exascale levels, and it includes a comprehensive software ecosystem based on European technologies.
A set of key European HPC applications guides the HW and SW design, following a co-design approach and making sure that the resulting pilot platform fully satisfies HPC end-user requirements.
ParTec is coordinating the SW stack work package and extends its MPI and system administration/monitoring suite to support excellent application scaling and efficient management and operation of the resulting EUPEX systems.
The project activities have received funding from the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) under grant agreement No 955606 (DEEP-SEA), No. 955811 (IO-SEA), No. 955776 (RED-SEA), No. 101033975 (EUPEX) and No. 101036168 (EPI SGA2). The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 or Horizon Europe research and innovation programme and from national funding agencies, in the case of ParTec from the German ministry of education and research (BMBF).
The European Processor Initiative (EPI) designs and implements a roadmap for a new family of low-power European processors for extreme scale HPC, high-performance Big-Data, and a range of emerging applications in other domains.
In its second phase (EPI SGA2), it will finalize the development of the first generation of low-power microprocessors and accelerators, enhancing existing technologies to target upcoming European Exascale systems, and advance development of a second generation of CPUs, accelerators, and integration technologies.
ParTec contributes its expertise in inter-node communication libraries and management/monitoring of large, heterogeneous systems and extends/adapts its software suite to take maximum advantage of the new architecture features.
The project activities have received funding from the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) under grant agreement No 955606 (DEEP-SEA), No. 955811 (IO-SEA), No. 955776 (RED-SEA), No. 101033975 (EUPEX) and No. 101036168 (EPI SGA2). The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 or Horizon Europe research and innovation programme and from national funding agencies, in the case of ParTec from the German ministry of education and research (BMBF).
DaREXA-F develops innovative methods for reducing the data volume which is exchanged between compute nodes of HPC systems or stored on parallel file systems.
Following a co-design approach, the GENE Plasma turbulence simulation code will be extended to use variable precision arithmetic, data compression and altogether new data formats, and the improvements of these approaches regarding data volumes, execution time and energy use will be validated.
A successful DaREXA-F project can significantly advance the European ITER experiment and fusion research in general. ParTec contributes its expertise in communication libraries and create experimental data reduction extensions to the ParaStation MPI library.
The EECliPs project explores the potential of significantly reducing the energy use of climate simulations via the use of advanced hardware systems and software stacks. After systematically exploring the power and energy consumption behavior of the ICON climate and weather model on a wide range of heterogenous systems, the project will define and install a small proof-of-concept system with the most promising, leading-edge heterogeneous architectures. This system will serve to measure and optimize the ICON code both for minimum execution time and minimum energy used to compute a solution, and to assess how the latest heterogeneous (and therefore specialized) hardware can be best integrated with the DKRZ data center. ParTec advises the project in the selection of leading-edge heterogeneous hardware components and will support the installation and operation of the proof-of-concept system.
IFCES-2 explores innovative methods for optimizing the parallel execution of the ICON earth system model on heterogeneous HPC systems, with the objective of efficient scaling to the Exascale level.
This includes raising the general degree of parallelism in the model components and workflow, improving the communication between the model components, and using dynamic load balancing techniques. ParTec contributes to experiments with functional parallelization and will adapt and optimize its ParaStation MPI library to support code coupling and dynamic load balance measures.
MExMeMo develops a novel multi-scale model for the manufacturing of soft materials. These pose major challenges for HPC, since several physical processes are coupled at very different scales and the associated simulation codes place very different demands on the hardware. On conventional, even GPU-accelerated systems, such a coupled simulation will run with low efficiency.
The MExMeMo code will fully leverage the MSA, support a wide range of spatial and temporal scales, and map them to the best suitable compute resources on a dynamic MSA system. The objective is to show good scaling up to the Exascale level.
ParTec contributes its unmatched experience with MSA systems and will adapt/extend its MPI implementation and system management suite to support the extraordinary requirements of the MExMeMo code. Additionally, ParTec leads the design and the development of a coordinator enabling the efficient scheduling of such tightly coupled simulations on MSA systems.
Destination Earth develops a highly accurate “digital twin” model of the Earth to monitor and predict environmental change and human impact.
It will help policy-makers to monitor and simulate the Earth’s system developments and human interventions, anticipate environmental disasters and resultant socio-economic crises to save lives and avoid large economic downturns.
Furthermore, the digital twin will enable the development and testing of scenarios for ever more sustainable development. HPC systems co-funded by the EuroHPC JU will be used to run the Destination Earth software.
A consortium of three leading European research institutions European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts, European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites, and European Space Agency) coordinates this major European Commission initiative. ParTec experts are contributing as sub-contractors to the European Technology Platform for High-Performance Computing to a technology roadmap which will inform the Destination Earth implementation phases.
Destination Earth is a European Union funded initiative and is implemented by ECMWF, ESA, and EUMETSAT.
HPCQS develops and deploys an open hybrid HPC-QS infrastructure that will provide non-commercial cloud access to public and private European users.
As part of this, it will integrate and couple two quantum simulators, each capable of controlling more than 100 qubits, with two existing top-tier European supercomputers, and develop a hybrid programming platform for combining classical HPC algorithms with quantum simulations and thereby accelerating the computing speed of classical supercomputers.
ParTec leads the work package dealing with of integrating the Quantum Simulators with the existing HPC infrastructure software, and supports the installation of the pilot systems.
The project activities have received funding from the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) under grant agreement No 955606 (DEEP-SEA), No. 955811 (IO-SEA), No. 955776 (RED-SEA), No. 101033975 (EUPEX) and No. 101036168 (EPI SGA2). The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 or Horizon Europe research and innovation programme and from national funding agencies, in the case of ParTec from the German ministry of education and research (BMBF).
QSOLID
In QSolid, 25 leading German institutions from science and industry are on a quantum computer with enhanced error correction.
The approach chosen is to reduce the vulnerability of qubits to errors with the help of high-precision manufacturing methods, new material systems, optimal control of the qubits as well as state-of-the-art error avoidance methods based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) at firmware level. The project will create a comprehensive ecosystem integrated with the JUNIQ supercomputing infrastructure at Jülich Supercomputing Centre and made accessible to external users.
ParTec is leading two tasks and contributes to solutions for connecting the quantum hardware to existing Modular Supercomputing Architecture systems, with focus on efficient management and allocation of the resources provided by the quantum hardware.
The Center of Excellence (CoE) RAISE develops complex, AI-based applications in science and industry which will take advantage of future Exascale systems in Europe and create significant scientific, industrial, and societal benefit.
In addition, RAISE integrates existing AI SW technology and optimizes it for efficient use of European HPC systems and scaling up to Exascale. RAISE plans to market the specific use cases, the UAIF and a UAIF-based certification service after the end of the project.
ParTec supports the coordinator Jülich Supercomputing Centre in all project management tasks and advises the project on IP and legal organization topics.
CoE RAISE and the previous DEEP projects have received funding from the European Union’s Framework 7 and Horizon 2020 research and innovation programmes under grant agreement No. 951733 (CoE RAISE), No. 287530 (DEEP), No. 610476 (DEEP-ER), and No. 754304 (DEEP-EST).
