Registration is open for a workshop at ECMWF on 25 and 26 September to review progress in the development of new I/O techniques for supercomputing at the exascale. Memory and I/O bottlenecks remain two of the key challenges that need to be solved in order for applications to be able to fully exploit the capabilities of exascale systems.
Over the last four years, the EU-funded NEXTGenIO project has been working to design, build and deliver a prototype hardware platform based around new non-volatile memory (NVRAM) technology. The prototype contains HPC nodes designed and built by Fujitsu and featuring Intel’s new Octane DCPMM memory DIMMs, with 3 TiB of NVRAM per node.
In addition to the hardware, the project has developed a full software stack which is deployed on the prototype and which explores its novel capabilities.
“One of the goals of the workshop is to review the capabilities of the prototype as reflected in a quantitative assessment of performance gains,” says Tiago Quintino, one of the workshop organisers.
The workshop will also discuss usage scenarios for byte-addressable persistent memory and the impact it will have on high-performance computing and data intensive applications. Speakers at the workshop will represent the user community, hardware vendors and software tool providers.
On 27 September, there will be a hackathon for hands-on work with the new prototype. Attendance at the hackathon is limited to 20 people.
The NEXTGenIO project is an EU-funded Horizon 2020 project coordinated by the Edinburgh Supercomputing Centre (EPCC).
“ECMWF is one of the end users represented in the project as it needs to prepare its weather forecasting systems for the massively parallel supercomputing facilities of the future,” says Tiago.
“It has helped to co-design the NEXTGenIO architecture and is contributing to the assessment of the prototype. The results of the project will feed into ECMWF's Scalability Programme.”
The workshop registration and abstract submission deadline is 2 August. For further details and to register, please visit the workshop page.
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