The objective of these supercomputing pilot systems will be to produce a prototype system that can be used in a pre-operational environment, able to perform jobs and run software components designed as part of the pilot program.
The proposals are expected to cover European research, integration of technological components, joint design of systems, validation and testing of advanced supercomputing pilot systems for exascale performance, driven by an ambitious set of extreme data and application of HPC and energy efficiency requirements
Project proposals should address the following points (non-exhaustive list):
- Description of the supercomputing pilot system, with architectural features and measurable objectives that demonstrate the relevance and potential of the pilot system as a significant step towards the implementation of future operational European exascale systems. The description of the pilot should cover, inter alia: targeted number of computational elements, interconnections and network topologies for exascale, cooling, I/O, etc.
- Definition of clear and measurable intermediate and final objectives to demonstrate the suitability of the pilot system, e.g. in terms of system performance, performance improvements for the selected applications, energy balance and efficiency, scalability, resilience, etc. The proposal should clearly describe the approach to measure and verify each of these objectives and should demonstrate that the pilot scheme would offer a clear approach towards an overall reduction in energy consumption.
- Description of software related issues, including software stack, software scalability and adaptation for heterogeneous systems, software reliability, optimisation and inclusion of a range of software programming tools and environments, compilation technologies for basic education sets and for higher level support of large-scale applications with various programming models, etc. The proposal should clearly describe the approach to measure and verify each of these objectives and should demonstrate that the pilot system would offer a clear approach towards an overall reduction in energy consumption. Pilot systems should aim to offer pluralism in European solutions and maximise their integration within the software stack.
