ECOSCALE

In order to sustain the ever-increasing demand of storing, transferring and mainly processing data, HPC servers need to improve their capabilities. Scaling in number of cores alone is not a feasible solution any more due to the increasing utility costs and power consumption limitations. While current HPC systems can offer petaflop performance, their architecture limits their capabilities in terms of scalability and energy consumption. Extrapolating from the top HPC systems, such as China’s Tianhe-2 Supercomputer, we would require an enormous 1GW power to sustain exaflop performance while a similar yet smaller number is triggered even if we take the best system of the Green 500 list as an initial reference.

Apart from improving transistor and integration technology, what is needed is to refine the HPC application development and the HPC architecture design. Towards this end, ECOSCALE will analyse the characteristics and trends of current and future applications in order to provide a hybrid MPI+OpenCL programming environment, a hierarchical architecture, runtime system and middleware, and a shared distributed reconfigurable hardware based acceleration.