Project profile

France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, Switzerland
01/04/2021 - 31/03/2024

Motivation – Exascale system challenges

  • High node counts (hundreds of thousands of nodes, millions of cores) require new levels of parallelism and communication
  • Heterogeneous computing devices: modern accelerators (such as GPUs) processing data at high rates (tens of TFlop/s) significantly increase data rates
  • These results in huge increases of interconnect network traffic

Next generation of Exascale systems will require innovative, highly efficient interconnect networks

  • Must support high node counts and massively parallel processing systems
  • Providing a set of “smart” features (i.e., efficient network resource management, in-network computing, fabric mgt) allowing applications to scale efficiently at Exascale levels and beyond
  • Support power-efficient accelerators and compute units, and wide-spread data-centric and AI-related applications

Goal: covers the variety of solutions (to the above network requirements)

  • Improve the current Atos BXI technology (Bullsequana eXascale Interconnect)
  • Contribute to the design and specification of the next BXI generation to anticipating future systems requirements
  • Enrich the European interconnect technology ecosystem to foster new kinds of networks, system SW and applications

Status / Highlights

  • Network requirement are defined, and network traces for MPI-based applications (NEST, LAMMPS, TSMP) collected
  • Hardware testbeds were setup, and are running with good stability
  • Architecture specifications defined for both Ethernet Gateway IP and Low-Latency Ethernet MAC & PCS to be used in future switches
  • NIC: architecture specification of transport layer definedfirst RTL version of Low-Latency Ethernet MAC & PCS completed
  • Efficient Network Resource management: congestion characterisation finishedfirst results of congestion management obtained
  • Endpoint functions and reliability: the API of sPIN (Processing In-Network) was defined; a first prototype of MPC MPI using multiple rails was developed; ParaStation MPI was extended to support BXI

Collaboration with other projects

  • The three SEA Projects (DEEP-SEA, IO-SEA and RED-SEA) develop complementary technologies for the Modular Supercomputing Architecture

 

Project coordinator

Bull SAS

Address: France
Website:https://atos.net/en/

Project website