User:Victor.castellar/Mont-blanc project

The Mont-Blanc Project is a project coordinated by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), founded on 2005 with the collaboration of Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC). The principal purpose of Mont-Blanc Project is to find solution to the energy consumption limitation in the future of Exascale Systems by incorporating low-power processors for mobile devices. Además, él/ella (di cuáles fueron sus premios).

History
Energy efficiency is already a primary concern for the design of any computer system and it is unanimously recognized that future Exascale systems will be strongly constrained by their power consumption.

Since October 2011, the aim of the European project called Mont-Blanc has been to design a new type of computer architecture capable of setting future global HPC standards, built from energy efficient solutions used in embedded and mobile devices. This project is coordinated by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and had a budget of over 14 million, including over 8 million Euros funded by the European Commission. Two years later, the European Commission granted additional 8 million Euro funds to extend the Mont-Blanc project activities until September 2016.

This three year extension will enable further development of the OmpSs parallel programming model to automatically exploit multiple cluster nodes, transparent application check pointing for fault tolerance, support for ARMv8 64-bit processors, and the initial design of the Mont-Blanc Exascale architecture.

Objectives
From 2011 - 2015, the Mont-Blanc had the three following objectives:

To develop a full energy-efficient HPC prototype using low-power commercially available embedded technology. To design a next-generation HPC system together with a range of embedded tchnologies in order to overcome the limitations identified in the prototype system. To develop a portfolio of exascale applications to be run on this new generation of HPC systems.

This will produce a new type of computer architecture capable of setting future global HPC standards that will provide Exascale performance using 15 to 30 times less energy.

From 2013 - 2016, the extension of the project has the following three objectives:

To complement the effort on the Mont-Blanc system software stack, with emphasis on programmer tools (debugger, performance analysis), system resiliency (from applications to architecture support), and ARM 64-bit support To produce a first definition of the Mont-Blanc Exascale architecture, exploring different alternatives for the compute node (from low-power mobile sockets to special-purpose high-end ARM chips), and its implications on the rest of the system To track the evolution of ARM-based systems, deploying small cluster systems to test new processors that were not available for the original Mont-Blanc prototype (both mobile processors and ARM server chips) To provide continued support for the Mont-Blanc consortium, namely operations of the Mont-Blanc prototype, and hands-on support for the application developers

The extension of Mont-Blanc contributes to the development of extreme scale energy-efficient platforms, with potential for Exascale computing, addressing the challenges of massive parallelism, heterogeneous computing, and resiliency. This second phase of the project has a great potential to create new market opportunities for sucessful EC technology, by placing embedded architectures in servers and HPC.