Setting the tone for future High-Performance Computing
If the proof of the pudding is measured in the eating, then the recipe developed by the H4H
project has
resulted in a range of technological outcomes whose benefits will be felt from research to
industry and,
as a consequence, by society in general. The H4H project made important contributions to the
Bull
Exascale Program, which aims to design and develop the next generation of supercomputers
that will
contribute to producing world-class solutions for both research and industrial purposes. H4H
contributions were packaged within the Bullx Super Computer Suites 4 & 5. In 2015, Bull
launched
Sequana, an open range of supercomputers that is ready to support future Exascale
technologies, which
will make it possible to process a billion billion operations per second. Bull/ATOS
cooperated with EADS
Astrium in a new advanced cooling design solution based on diphasic thermal exchangers and
saw 0.144K/W
achieved on a target of 0.17K/W against a State-of-the-Art of 0.22K/W. Bull benefited from
these H4H
developments as the new cooling technologies lead to new cooling improvements in the Sequana
commercial
range, currently being sold as Bull Sequana X offer, in which the X1210 blades integrate the
latest
Intel's Xeon Phi technologies. The research and development emanating from such projects
have attracted
customers through the years and gained new entrants. CEA, CINES, SurfSARA, STFC, ZIH-TUD are
among the
major customers, accounting for several million euros. The H4H project has left its mark in
the European
HPC activities not only on the business side but also on the technological and community
side.
During the project, H4H project partner RECOM achieved performance improvements of its 3D
combustion
simulation software, enabling the company to benefit from extremely fast software that can
perform a
large number of simulations to parametrise new models and verify accuracy. RECOM reduced the
simulation
time for furnace optimisation from 12 to 1.5 hours, a big achievement as modelling and
repeated
simulations allow the best values to be found to optimise production and prevent slag
growth. This is
important because slag growth can cause an unexpected outage of the furnace, which will
require several
weeks for repair and can easily lead to more than €5 m of loss of earnings with respect to
the
electricity that cannot be produced but has already been sold by the energy companies.
The H4H project made important contributions to the Bull
Exascale Program, which aims to develop
the next generation of supercomputers
With a major shift taking place in Europe, shortly after the H4H project, from coal-based to
renewable
power generation, the results of the H4H project have enabled RECOM to make the necessary
transition
from traditional contracts in the coal-based power generation sector towards other
industrial sectors
within less than two years, allowing the company to recover more than 50% of lost turnover
and stay in
business.
The H4H project has enabled Efield to drastically improve the performance of its
electromagnetic solvers
to successfully address the industry's evolution towards higher operating frequencies,
complex materials
and increased density of ICT equipment. Being able to handle larger complexity (5 to 60
million of
unknowns), has allowed cars and planes to be more efficient and safer. The result of the
performance
improvements was (and still is) a highly competitive software package for electromagnetic
analysis in
the wireless communication and defence industry. In the last year of the project, a record
contract was
closed with a major Asian service provider for defence industry resulting in a 50% increase
in revenue.
Efield is now part of a larger group, ESI Group, leader in software simulations tools.
Optimisation strategies developed in H4H have been implemented by Dassault Aviation on
proto-applications
referring to highly computational parts from its industrial code. Thanks to the ITEA COLOC
project, a
follow-up to the H4H project where proof-of-concept work in H4H was confirmed, Dassault
Aviation was
able to improve the parallel efficiency of its in-house software to maintain its competitive
edge in the
aeronautics industry:
- For Dassault's Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software, the D&C (Divide & Conquer)
work with
proto-applications, started in H4H, was confirmed and led to improvements in Dassault's
software,
both in terms of scalability (almost perfect at x 16 cores) and overheads in memory and
storage
(same performance with 16 times less Message Passing Interface (MPI) blocks).
- For Dassault's Computational Electromagnetic (CEM) software, capitalising on notions
like data
locality and asynchronicity developed during H4H + Perfcloud extension, a novel
asynchronous
message-passing scheme was implemented which lead to a 60% - 80 % improvement of the MPI
communications.
Based on H4H, CEA improved its CEA Computing Complex infrastructures in terms of
computational power and energy efficiency. One of the CEA laboratories, CEA-LIST, also
signed a commercial contract with the “Gendarmerie Nationale” for its image-based stolen
object retrieval. The contract is still ongoing in 2018 evolving to other types of
recognition features.
The H4H results have enabled the German SME INTES to reduce the simulation time from 6 days
to 2 hours, for the analysis simulations of noise, vibration and harshness of vehicle
bodies. Thanks to the valorisation of its work and involvement in the H4H project, partner
Jülich Supercomputing Centre got the opportunity to work in a Siemens-funded collaboration
(2014- 2015) together with the Corporate Technology Multicore Expert Center of Siemens AG on
runtime analysis of parallel applications for industrial software development.
On the basis of H4H, Scilab Enterprises developed and released two major improvements in the
use of HPC with Scilab, its Open Source software for numerical computation. During the H4H
project, Scilab Enterprises worked closely with industrial partners to share expertise in
the use of their products, to provide updates or new implementation for functions required
by domain-specific applications, resulting in improvements for industry. Scilab Enterprises
has also been acquired by ESI Group.
Several H4H improvements have also been integrated in open source code releases (SLURM,
MAQAO, FoREST, UtoPEAK) like the MAQAO (Modular Assembly Quality Analyser and Optimiser)
performance evaluation framework developed by the University of Versailles
Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ). This was enhanced by Xeon Phi support, which is a major
advancement in performance and compatibility designed for highly-parallel workloads. MAQAO
is being exploited by Bull, CEA, Dassault Aviation and Intel. With MAQAO, partners were able
to monitor the performance of their applications, detect hotspots and have recommendations,
enabling them to globally improve the performance of their applications running on
heterogeneous infrastructures. As a concrete example, Dassault was able to improve the data
locality in their DEFMESH use case and got a 2x speedup for matrix assembly (on Intel Xeon
Phi KNC, 2015). Improvements made in FoREST and UtoPeak resulted in an average 20% gain in
energy efficiency at less than 5% loss in performance.
H4H has had a significant impact on the HPC market by being state-of-the-art, closing the gap from the
simulated to the real world and making HPC technologies more accessible.
