Research

Given the complexity of modern supercomputers and HPC systems, achieving theoretical peak performance depends on myriad parameters. In order to optimize the system performance and efficiently use the underlying resources, various methods can be applied, including simulation, benchmarking, and monitoring. However, these methods and the tools used are not compatible with each other, i.e., both the individual tools and the approaches consider only a certain part of a certain domain, e.g., network or I/O, resource allocation. At the same time, each of these approaches generates certain knowledge that can be applied to similar problems or for a certain system configuration. To avoid that such knowledge is generated only for one-time purposes, and also to support other users, this knowledge must be easily accessible and available to the community. The MAWA-HPC project aims to develop a universal workflow and tool suite (starting with the execution environment up to the evaluation dashboard) that can be applied to different use cases in different domains. Through its modular design, the workflow should be able to support different community tools at each stage, increasing the compatibility of each tool and covering new use cases. 

The EuroHPC EUPEX consortium will design and build a European modular Exascale-ready pilot system integrating a European general-purpose processor technology (EPI), an interconnect technology (BXI) and a software stack for HPC based on a modular supercomputing architecture (MSA). The High Performance Computing and its Applications Group is contributing to the key technologies here. In particular, we will evaluate direct communication methods for distributed accelerator technologies and adapt them for the new pre-exascale evaluation platform EUPEX. We will also look at the aspect of I/O load balancing in parallel file systems for application and metadata and introduce suitable optimization approaches.