The consortium behind the EU funded ExaNeSt project have announced its first prototype of a new exascale computing system. The consortium announced that The prototype testbed system has been built successfully. They also stated that the energy consumed for solving a given problem on this new platform is 3 to 10 times lower than what traditional HPC processors of the same time generation consume to solve the same problem.
The prototype has been validated through the execution of full HPC applications from materials science, climate forecasting, computational fluid dynamics, astrophysics and neuroscience. ExaNeSt aims to address key issues such as energy efficiency by using ARM cores, moving data across shorter distances, and avoiding unneeded copying of data; it uses power-efficient and silent liquid cooling; the prototype has non-volatile memory integrated into the processor fabric combined with a fast interconnect, to avoid congestion.
The ExaNeSt Consortium consists of twelve partners across seven EU countries, each of them with expertise in a core technology needed for innovation to reach exascale. ExaNeSt has taken a sensible integrated approach to co-design the hardware and software that is needed to enable the prototype to run in real-life evaluations.
ExaNeSt is aiming to contribute to a new generation of European Supercomputers, creating new business opportunities. The project’s advances in performance and efficiency will enable SME's in several sectors of the economy to utilize HPC and data analytics, with an attractive trade-off between usability and affordability.
