E4 to Participate in Textarossa to Develop Innovative Technologies for Energy-Efficient HPC

29 April 2021

E4 Computer Engineering announces its participation to TEXTAROSSA (Towards EXtreme scale Technologies and Accelerators for HW/SW Supercomputing Applications for exascale), a project co-funded by the European High Performance Computing (EuroHPC) Joint Undertaking and by the Ministero dello Sviluppo Economico (MISE) to drive innovation in efficiency and usability of high-end HPC systems.

TEXTAROSSA aims to achieve a broad impact on the High Performance Computing (HPC) field both for pre-exascale and exascale scenarios. Within the TEXTAROSSA consortium, E4 will develop innovative heterogeneous HPC platforms powered by the latest generation processors, reconfigurable hardware accelerators and integrating innovative EU-developed cooling equipment. The members of the consortium will test and deploy on these platform advanced algorithms, innovative methods and user-oriented software applications for classic HPC domains as well as for emerging domains in High Performance Artificial Intelligence (HPC-AI) and High Performance Data Analytics (HPDA).

To achieve high performance and high energy efficiency on near-future exascale computing systems, a technology gap needs to be bridged: increase efficiency of computation with carefully selected components and equipment coupled with new arithmetics, as well as providing methods and tools for seamless integration of reconfigurable accelerators in heterogeneous HPC platforms. TEXTAROSSA aims at tackling this gap through applying a consistent co-design approach to develop heterogeneous HPC solutions, supported by the integration and extension of IPs, of programming models and tools derived from other European research projects where the partners TEXTAROSSA are contributing.

TEXTAROSSA, co-funded by European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (JU) and by the Italian Ministero dello Sviluppo Economico (MISE), is coordinated by the Agenzia Nazionale per le Nuove Tecnologie, l’Energia e lo Sviluppo Economico Sostenibile (ENEA) and leverages the expertise of 17 partners located in 5 European countries. The project will run for 3 years with the objectives of:

• Developing heterogeneous HPC platforms powered by the latest generation processors and reconfigurable hardware accelerators;
• Implementing new multilevel thermal management and innovative phase-change liquid cooling;
• Enabling mixed-precision computing, through the definition of IPs, libraries, and compilers supporting novel data types (including Posits);
• Ensuring secure HPC operation through HW accelerated cryptography;
• Providing RISC-V based IP for fast task scheduling and IPs for low-latency intra/inter-node communication and improved data-movement/storage through a compression IP.

Within TEXTAROSSA and applying a co-design approach, E4’s is tasked to develop the IDV (Integrated Development Vehicles), mirroring and extending the European Processor Initiative’s ARM64-based architecture. The advanced technologies developed by the partners during the project will be tested and validated on the IDV. To drive the technology development and assess the impact of the proposed innovations, from node to system levels, TEXTAROSSA will use a selected but representative number of HPC, HPDA and AI applications and demonstrators covering challenging HPC domains such as general-purpose numerical kernels, High Energy Physics (HEP), Oil & Gas, climate modelling, as well as emerging domains such as High Performance Data Analytics (HPDA) and High Performance Artificial Intelligence (HPC-AI).

In addition to the technological objectives, TEXTAROSSA aims at fostering the European competitiveness in the development and deployment of advanced solutions for science and industry and make available indispensable tools and systems in the competitive and critical field of HPC. TEXTAROSSA will also provide valuable data to the co-design and development teams of the European Process Initiative (EPI), of which E4 is a member, and constitutes a testbed for mature a EU-developed, innovative two-phase cooling technology enabling this technology to be available in different architectures.

Cosimo Gianfreda, CTO of E4 Computer Engineering: “Over the years, E4 has pursued the strategy to be at the leading edge of the cost-effective technology. Our products have been designed taking into account the requirements of the end users and with the goal to make these systems user-friendly while providing top performance at the lowest TCO. The IDV (Integrated Development Vehicles) developed by E4 in TEXTAROSSA will represent a key testbed for validating innovative technologies and a significant leap in proposing high-tech and energy-efficient solutions.”  

“TEXTAROSSA is both a technological challenge and a significant opportunity to develop new products to better serve the needs of our customers. The technological challenges have always been addressed by the E4 R&D Lab, where we test on a daily basis new equipment and new components. E4 brings this know-how and expertise in TEXTAROSSA within a consistent co-design approach. The expertise of our team will be applied in the development of the IDV (Integrated Development Vehicles), which will be thoroughly tested with real-life and emerging applications in a data-center like environment.”, says Daniele Gregori, Scientific Coordinator of E4.  

To know more about Textarossa go here www.textarossa.eu

To know more about European Processor Initiative project read our article