Northern Intensive Computing Environment

北方密集计算环境

• 批准号: EP/T022167/1
• 负责人: Colin Bain
• 金额: $ 554.71万
• 依托单位: Durham University
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2020 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=EP%2FT022167%2F1
• 关键词: Northern; Intensive; Computing; Environment

We propose to establish a new national Tier-2 HPC service ("NICE19") by purchasing and operating a novel architecture supercomputer, based upon IBM Power9 CPU and Nvidia Volta GPUs. This architecture is used in both #1 and #2 of the most recent list of the Top500 supercomputers in the world, within the USA government lab-based SUMMIT and SIERRA supercomputers. Currently this architecture is not widely available in the UK, so by establishing a national Tier-2 facility we will add significant diversity and capability to the UK e-infrastructure. This architecture supports memory coherence between the GPU and CPU and a hierarchy of interconnects to allow effective distributed GPU use, extending problem sizes that can tackled beyond that of other GPU-accelerated architectures, increasing data sizes for accelerated simulation and analysis codes, and reducing the 'time to science' for a range of 'hard' problems.The purpose of this facility is to enable new science across many different disciplines. Our primary focus will be on experimental users who generate large data sets that need analysis (e.g. cyro-EM facilities) and for modellers who use machine learning. By supporting and bringing together these two communities, there will be many opportunities for new and exciting science. This will bring HPC to many communities who have not engage with HPC before now, with many benefits in getting better value out of experiments and existing datasets. In addition, existing investments in network infrastructure for the DiRAC consortium of STFC users will be leveraged to connect the facility to experimental facilities and other Tier-2 centres for optimal data flows between sites.This proposal is led by the N8 Centre of Excellence in Computationally Intensive Research (N8-CIR) and supported by the N8 partnership. This will provide 8 FTE of Research Software Engineers (RSEs) to support these communities, port and optimize their software for this new platform and train users, which will be essential to maximize the benefit of this novel facility. These codes will then be able to run efficiently on the facility, supported by trained users. The architectural similarity with SUMMIT and SIERRA will also provide a route to exascale computing. This proposal will therefore have a long-lasting impact, beyond the lifetime fo this facility.

我们建议通过购买和运营基于IBM Power 9 CPU和Nvidia Volta GPU的新型架构超级计算机，建立新的国家Tier-2 HPC服务（“NICE 19”）。这种架构在最近的世界500强超级计算机名单中的第1和第2位都使用过，包括美国政府实验室的SUMMIT和SIERRA超级计算机。目前，这种架构在英国还没有广泛使用，因此通过建立一个国家二级设施，我们将为英国的电子基础设施增加显著的多样性和能力。这种架构支持GPU和CPU之间的内存一致性以及互连层次结构，以允许有效的分布式GPU使用，扩展可以解决的问题大小，超出其他GPU加速架构，增加加速模拟和分析代码的数据大小，以及减少一系列“困难”问题的“科学时间”。这个设施的目的是使新的科学跨越许多不同的学科。我们的主要关注点将是那些生成需要分析的大型数据集的实验用户（例如cyro-EM设施）和使用机器学习的建模者。通过支持和汇集这两个社区，将有许多新的和令人兴奋的科学机会。这将把HPC带到许多以前没有接触过HPC的社区，在从实验和现有数据集中获得更好的价值方面有很多好处。此外，将利用现有的为STFC用户组成的DiRAC联盟在网络基础设施方面的投资，将该设施与实验设施和其他二级中心连接起来，以实现站点之间的最佳数据流。这将提供8名全职研究软件工程师（RSE）来支持这些社区，为这个新平台移植和优化他们的软件，并培训用户，这对于最大限度地发挥这个新设施的优势至关重要。然后，这些代码将能够在经过培训的用户的支持下在设施上有效运行。与SUMMIT和SIERRA的架构相似性也将为exascale计算提供一条途径。因此，这一建议将产生长期影响，超出该设施的寿命。