Between e-Infrastructures, ESFRI has identified in FP7 High-

Performance Computing a strategic priority for Europe. In order to have the highest return from the associated massive economical and political commitment, HPC resources

must be exploited at the highest level. Their access must be effective and capillary, their services must allow more and more people to use the resources, regardless their geographical location. Projects like PRACE, DEISA and HPC-Europa have been supported by the EU to cope with such issues providing the best solutions for the European research community

Bassini, S.

Cavazzoni, C.

Gheller, C.

English

Scientific Open-access Literature Archive and Repository

DOI 10.1393/ncc/i2009-10409-5Colloquia: CSFI 2008IL NUOVO CIMENTO Vol. 32 C, N. 2 Marzo-Aprile 2009European actions for High-Performance Computing: PRACE,DEISA and HPC-EuropaS. Bassini, C. Cavazzoni and C. GhellerCINECA, Consorzio Interuniversitario - Casalecchio di Reno, Bologna, Italy(ricevuto il 22 Giugno 2009; pubblicato online il 30 Settembre 2009)Summary. — Between e-Infrastructures, ESFRI has identified in FP7 High-Performance Computing a strategic priority for Europe. In order to have the highestreturn from the associated massive economical and political commitment, HPC re-sources must be exploited at the highest level. Their access must be effective andcapillary, their services must allow more and more people to use the resources, re-gardless their geographical location. Projects like PRACE, DEISA and HPC-Europahave been supported by the EU to cope with such issues providing the best solutionsfor the European research community.PACS 07.05.Bx – Computer systems: hardware, operating systems, computer lan-guages, and utilities.1. – IntroductionBuilding a world-class pan-European High Performance Computing (HPC) Serviceis a highly ambitious undertaking that involves governments, funding agencies, centrescapable to host and manage the supercomputers, and the scientific and industrial usercommunities with leading edge applications. In contrast to Research Infrastructuresthat focus on a single scientific instrument an HPC Infrastructure has two unique char-acteristics: supercomputers serve all scientific disciplines and high-end (hereafter tier-0)supercomputers have a fast (typically, three years) depreciation cycle since they addressleading edge services.This requires a periodic renewal of the systems and a continuous upgrade of the infras-tructure. Furthermore, novel architectures and system designs are continuously createdby the vendors for leadership systems. Finally, at any given time a number of differentsystems are available each of them serving a particular application spectrum best.This fact mandates a distributed Pan-European Research Infrastructure, since nosingle site can host all the necessary systems because of floor space, power, and coolingdemands.In the last years, the European Commission has strongly supported the path towardsuch infrastructure, funding a few core projects with the goal of designing, implementingc© Societa` Italiana di Fisica 9394 S. BASSINI, C. CAVAZZONI and C. GHELLERFig. 1. – The pyramid model promoted by PRACE.and deploying it, creating, at the same time, the awareness, the skills and the competen-cies necessary for its optimal exploitation.CINECA is involved in all these projects, namely PRACE, DEISA (and its follow-upDEISA2) and HPC-Europa (and its follow-up HPCE2), representing the bridge betweenthe national HPC reality, in particular for scientific research, and the correspondingcontinental framework and the new services becoming progressively available.2. – PRACEPRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (http://www.prace-project.eu/), has the goal of preparing the creation of a persistent pan-European High-Performance Computing (HPC) Service and Infrastructure. This infrastructure will bemanaged as a single European entity. In other words, the partnership will become aunique entity of the pan-European HPC ecosystem. European scientists and technolo-gists will be provided with world-class supercomputers with capabilities comparable tothe largest systems available worldwide. The service will comprise three to five superiorHPC centers strengthened by regional and national supercomputing centers. The infras-tructure will be complemented with network and grid access, and the services requiredto enable applications. These include development of parallel application software ex-pertise, packages, and data handling. It will build on the partners experience and useconcepts and services from EC-funded projects such as GEANT2 and DEISA (see nextsection).The European model of a sustainable high-performance ecosystem promoted byPRACE consists of a small number of supercomputer centres offering computing ser-vice at the highest performance level; national and regional centres with supercomputersoffering the performance to run most of the advanced computing; and the local comput-ing centres in universities, research labs or in other organizations strengthening softwaredevelopment and researchers competence in computational science. This results in thepyramid architecture sketched in fig. 1.PRACE is now focussed in studying the implications of the persistency and sustain-ability of such infrastructure. This implies the implementations of a continuous evalu-EUROPEAN ACTIONS FOR HPC: PRACE, DEISA AND HPC-EUROPA 95ation and procurement process of the tier-0 systems, the deploy of prototype systems,the build-up of structured relationships with vendors to gather strategic information inadvance, the set-up of a governance and a management system and the set-up of enablingactions on scientific applications for future tier-0 systems.In parallel, using the results of these activities PRACE will prepare the deployment ofPetafop/s system in 2009/2010 to be installed in a few tier-0 sites. CINECA has recentlyjoined the lists of candidate sites for hosting tier-0 systems and has scheduled the deployof its tier-0 system in the 2011/2012 time frame.3. – DEISADEISA (Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputer Applications -http://www.deisa.eu) is a consortium of eleven major national supercomputing centresin Europe. The involved sites are FZJ-Julich, LRZ, HLRS and RZG Garching (Germany),ECMWF and EPCC (UK), IDRIS-CNRS (France), CSC (Finland), CINECA (Italy),BSC (Spain) and SARA (The Netherlands). The partners in this project consider ittheir mission and their responsibility to provide visionary leadership in the area of high-performance computing in Europe. Therefore, the consortium decided to create and op-erate a distributed petascale supercomputing facility, whose integrated power has reachedseveral hundreds of teraflops in 2008. The principal objective of this Integrated Infras-tructure Initiative (I3 - http://cordis.europa.eu/infrastructures/home.html) is toadvance computational science in leading scientific and industrial disciplines by deployingan innovative Grid-empowered infrastructure to enhance and reinforce High-PerformanceComputing in Europe. This super-cluster with appropriate software and with dedicatedhigh-speed networks, represents a way open, in the immediate future, for innovative andcreative thinking that enhances the impact of existing infrastructures (see fig. 2). It isassumed that this approach will provide answers to a number very demanding require-ments arising from the scientific community. The DEISA infrastructure is based on thetight coupling of homogeneous (with respect to architecture and system software) na-tional supercomputers, to provide a distributed supercomputing platform operating inmulti-cluster mode. The production capability of the distributed platform provides asubstantial European added value to the existing national infrastructures.Leading scientists across Europe are exploiting the bundled supercomputing powerand the related global data management infrastructures in a coherent and comfortableway. A special focus is set on grand-challenge applications from key scientific areas likematerial sciences, climate research, astrophysics, life sciences and fusion-oriented energyresearch. Since 2005, the focus has been enhanced by defining the DEISA ExtremeComputing Initiative (DECI, http://www.deisa.eu/science/deci, see also sect. 3).The DEISA research infrastructure is also open, under certain conditions, to users ofnon-member organisations.DEISA is collaborating with a large number of projects or institutions in Europe.The first priority has been cooperation with other EU funded infrastructure projectsin HPC (HPC-Europa, http://www.hpc-europa.org/) or Grid computing (EGEE,http://www.eu-egee.org/). DEISA also deploys very close collaborations with otherprojects emerging in the R&D area in particular.The United States are also deploying a technology-driven, grid-empowered infrastruc-ture, TeraGrid (http://www.teragrid.org/). In this project, five computing systemsacross the country are integrated to form a unique, single-system platform using veryhigh-bandwidth, dedicated networks to guarantee highest performance. DEISA can be96 S. BASSINI, C. CAVAZZONI and C. GHELLERFig. 2. – The DEISA HPC Grid with the continental filesystem.seen as the European counterpart to TeraGrid. Though implementation strategies arenot identical, close collaboration with TeraGrid is ongoing.4. – HPC-EuropaIf PRACE addresses the design and the management of the European HPCinfrastructure and DEISA provides its technological implementation, HPC-Europa(http://www.hpc-europa.eu/) enables the access to the European HPC facilities andpromotes the diffusion of the know-how and the exchange of competencies and skills.The main goal of HPC-Europa is the support to Transnational Access, that is toenable researchers from all over Europe to visit a participating research institute, tocarry out a collaborative visit of several months and to gain access to some of the mostadvanced European High-Performance Computing facilities, having consultancy and sup-port provided by experienced staff.Over the four years lifespan of the action, HPC-Europa is providing HPC service,specialist support, scientific tutoring and collaboration opportunities to more than 1000European researchers, a very large community of users, providing them with more than22 million of CPU hours of computing time.An interesting side-outcome of the project results to be the design, implementationand adoption of an effective and efficient model for reviewing and selection of researchersEUROPEAN ACTIONS FOR HPC: PRACE, DEISA AND HPC-EUROPA 97and HPC-based research projects that could be proposed to, and exploited by the nextgeneration petascale facility in Europe and beyond and, in particular, by PRACE. Suchmodel, once validated by the European E-Infrastructures community, could represent apossible subject of discussion even with extra-European centers and projects working inthe field.

European actions for High-Performance Computing: PRACE,

DEISA and HPC-Europa

http://eprints.bice.rm.cnr.it/16520/1/ncc9391.pdf

European actions for High-Performance Computing: PRACE, DEISA and HPC-Europa

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