Telecommunication Systems Institute, Cyberbotics Sàrl, Fraunhofer, EXAPSYS, Institute of Communication and Computer Systems , M3E, Maxeler IoT, Forschungszentrum Jülich, EnginSoft and Appentra announced the formation of a new consortium that will address the industrial software codes for extreme scale computing environments and applications.
OPTIMA is the acronym for “Optimizing Industrial Applications for Heterogeneous HPC systems”. It is an SME-driven project aiming to port and optimize several industrial applications as well as a set of open-source libraries. These will be used in at least three different application domains on two, novel HPC systems populated with field-programmable gate array (FPGA) integrated circuits and using several innovative programming environments.
In order to support the growing demands for processing power from emerging HPC applications, within a pragmatic energy envelope, future HPC systems will incorporate accelerators. A promising approach, to this end, is the use of FPGA integrated circuits. These devices can be reconfigured at will to tailor application accelerators and their principal advantage is their energy efficiency and/or performance, which, in most cases, is far superior to that of CPUs and GPUs. The applications and libraries are expected to run on these heterogeneous HPC systems with significantly greater energy efficiency, as described by the Energy Delay Product (EDP) metric. In particular, the EDP of OPTIMA applications and libraries running on targeted FPGA-based HPC systems is expected to be more than ten times greater than those on CPU-based systems, and more than three times higher than those on GPU-based systems. OPTIMA’s main outcomes will be:
a) that participating SMEs will gain a significant advantage from being able to run their applications much more efficiently than their competitors;
b) to further demonstrate that Europe is at the forefront of developing efficient FPGA-based HPC systems and the applications/libraries leveraging them;
c) the development of open-source libraries and applications that will allow third-party application developers to easily port to FPGA-based HPC systems;
d) an open-to-use HPC infrastructure supported by a specially created sustainability body.
Started on 1 March 2021, OPTIMA will be supported by a 33-month period grant from the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (JU). Horizon 2020 will cover around €1.7 million of the total €4.1 million needed.
