Project Overview and Results

Project Overview

To achieve high performance and high energy efficiency on near-future exascale computing systems, a technology gap needs to be bridged: increase efficiency of computation with extreme efficiency in HW and new arithmetics, as well as providing methods and tools for seamless integration of reconfigurable accelerators in heterogeneous HPC multi-node platforms. TEXTAROSSA applied a co-design approach to heterogeneous HPC solutions, supported by the integration and extension of IPs, programming models and tools derived from European research projects, led by TEXTAROSSA partners.

The main directions for innovation are towards:

1. Enabling mixed-precision computing, through the definition of IPs, libraries, and compilers supporting novel data types (including Posits), used also to boost the performance of AI accelerators
2. Implementing new multilevel thermal management and two-phase liquid cooling
3. Developing improved data movement and storage tools through compression
4. Ensure secure HPC operation through HW accelerated cryptography
5. Providing RISC-V based IP for fast task scheduling and IPs for low-latency intra/inter-node communication

These technologies will be tested on the Integrated Development Vehicles mirroring and extending the European Processor Initiative ARM64-based architecture, and on an OpenSequana testbed. To drive the technology development and assess the impact of the proposed innovations TEXTAROSSA will use a selected but representative number of HPC, HPDA and AI demonstrators covering challenging HPC domains such as general-purpose numerical kernels, High Energy Physics (HEP), Oil & Gas, climate modelling, and emerging domains such as High Performance Data Analytics (HPDA) and High Performance Artificial Intelligence (HPC-AI).

Project results

The following objectives of the project have been addressed by applications and use cases:

• Energy efficiency (Increase the energy efficiency by 2-5x compared with current available HPC solutions based on CPU or CPU+GPU thanks to:  i) new energy-efficient processors and accelerators, ii) integrated use of FPGAs, iii) bi-phase cooling, iv) mixed-precision and data compression techniques, v) direct communication between FPGAs.)
• Sustained application performance (Achieve an increase in performance by 2-10x compared with current solutions based on CPU or CPU+GPU thanks to new AI accelerators and high-performance GPUs and FPGAs, HW fast schedulers, low-latency inter-/intra-node links, better cooling allowing higher frequencies, fast flow enabled at programming mode and run time levels.)
• Seamless integration of reconfigurable accelerators (TEXTAROSSA vendors will adopt tools and solutions of the project.)
• Integrated Development Platforms (IDVs)
• Development of new IPs
• Fine-tuned thermal policies integrated with an innovative cooling technology

For further details please check the deliverable D6.3.