The growing gap between I/O bandwidth and compute speed as well as the need to significantly improve system resiliency will be two of the most important challenges at the Exascale.
Devoting significant attention towards finding adequate solutions to these two extremely pressing challenges and continuing with an integrated approach to Exascale research were the key drivers to extend the EC-funded project DEEP (Dynamical Exascale Entry Platform).
Having started in October 2013, the DEEP-ER (DEEP – Extended Reach) project will advance the Cluster-Booster architecture developed in DEEP from a hardware point of view in terms of processor technology, network interconnect, and storage. On the software side of the project the central research topics will be I/O and resiliency. The 14 project partners involved ensure that both hardware as well as software parts are closely integrated and fine-tuned with chosen applications. These seven exemplary applications stem from various scientific and engineering fields and will be in the need of Exascale soon. They have been selected as they represent different requirements of simulation-based and data-intensive codes.
Having opted for such a holistic approach highlights that the project partners strongly believe in adhering to the research principle of co-design. Only this way it will be feasible to achieve Exascale performance on application level. By the end of the project, in autumn of 2016, a large-scale prototype will be deployed with applications fine-tuned on the underlying software and hardware architecture.