The DEEP-ER project took the Cluster/Booster concept to the next technology level: the Booster was built from 72 second-generation Intel® Xeon Phi^TM 7210 “Knights Landing” processors, which provided 64 cores and 16 GByte of high-bandwidth memory. The ASIC implementation of the EXTOLL fabric with 100 Gbit/s bandwidth per link connected all Booster nodes and was also used for the Cluster, which consisted of 16 dual-CPU Intel® Xeon® nodes. All compute nodes were provided with high-performance NVMe storage devices, and as a new concept, a “network-attached memory” prototype implemented on an FPGA was integrated. The Booster integration was performed using Eurotech Aurora technology, and it involved a highly ambitious backplane which carried PCIe signals from the Xeon Phi blades to the EXTOLL NIC cards. The picture at the left shows the front and left side of the Booster. The large Xeon Phi blades and the EXTOLL NICs plus cabling are clearly visible.

Together with the lessons learnt from the DEEP project, seven complex, real-world HPC applications from the fields of earth crust simulation, high temperature superconductivity, human exposure to electromagnetic fields, lattice quantum chromodynamics, oil & gas exploration, radio astronomy and space weather simulation, provided co-design input for the DEEP-ER protype. The DEEP software stack was adapted for the new Booster, and parallel I/O components were added which leveraged the high-performance, local NVMe storage.

The DEEP-ER project started on October 1, 2013 and came to a successful conclusion on March 31, 2017. The consortium consisted of fourteen partners from seven European countries, with Forschungszentrum Jülich acting as the coordinator. The project budget was 10M €, and the European Union contribution was 6.4 M€.

The project received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement No. 610476.