Bringing together software and hardware experts from HPC and Embedded to address the challenge of the energy efficient use of parallel technologies, the Adept project has successfully launched. Adept is supported with €2.8m through the European Commission’s Framework 7 programme, and the consortium led by EPCC, the supercomputing centre at the University of Edinburgh, comprises two world-leading Universities, Uppsala and Ghent, as well as two representatives from industry, Alpha Data Parallel Systems and Ericsson.
In addition to furthering the understanding of the power usage of parallel software and hardware, the project, which was foreshadowed in the article ‘Projects take new approach to energy efficiency’, aims to develop a tool that enables the rapid exploration of power consumption and performance design space across a range of heterogeneous architectures.
‘Over the last 15 years, one of our overriding research goals has been to produce new technologies and tools to help programmers understand and optimise their systems for better performance and power efficiency,’ said Professor Erik Hagersten from Uppsala University. ‘This project brings us together with application experience from HPC and large-scale commercial Embedded computing, as well as some of the leading researchers in efficient performance modelling. This is an ideal environment for taking our research results to a new level.’
Alpha Data Parallel Systems, a leading global supplier of high-performance reconfigurable platforms, is one of the commercial partners in Adept. Dr Andrew McCormick, Design Engineer at Alpha Data, added: ‘Adept will help bring power management for HPC down from the cluster level to the individual application level. Identifying the total lifetime cost of power hotspots in applications may justify the extra development costs of using lower power customisable hardware accelerators. Alpha Data is pleased to be involved in this project, which could lead to new opportunities for the reconfigurable computing market.’
Adept Project Coordinator, Dr Michèle Weiland, discussed the Adapt project and its role in addressing energy efficiency in HPC 2013-14.
