SECI
- Diarienummer
- RIF14-0042
- Start- och slutdatum
- 160101-211231
- Beviljat belopp
- 15 000 000 kr
- Förvaltande organisation
- KTH - Royal Institute of Technology
- Forskningsområde
- Beräkningvetenskap och tillämpad matematik
Summary
Large scale computing is an essential tool for modern science and increasingly also for industry. The efficient usage of the available hardware is a necessity in these endeavors, however, technological trends like accelerators (GPUs) put a significant burden on the programmers. The Swedish Exascale Computing Initiative (SECI) is designed to improve Swedish usage of HPC infrastructure, as provided by PDC at KTH, building on existing efforts by the applicant in European (EC Exascale program) and Swedish (SeRC) projects. The project is fully aligned with VR’s “Guide to Research Infrastructure” and the recent “Swedish Science Cases for e-Infrastructure” and will specifically •"Establish an interdisciplinary team of parallelization experts and research engineers; •"Build on the existing SNIC application experts infrastructure and prior work in projects like CRESTA; •"Prototype two applications of large scientific and industrial impact on next generation accelerators; •"Over the course of the project extend the support to other relevant areas like material science, plasma physics, etc. •"Develop a training and education program to train the next generation scientists and engineers. SECI will boost the computational efficiency of Swedish academia and industry thereby contributing to the international competitiveness. The impact will reach the whole of Sweden by firmly embedding the efforts within SNIC.
Populärvetenskaplig beskrivning
The impact supercomputers have on our daily life is tremendous. They provide essential contributions to many of the challenges that our global society faces, such as helping in the quest for new and greener forms of energy; discovering new and better drugs and treatments for a whole gamut of problems from the purely physical through to neuropsychiatric disorders; developing new and more effective materials for the production of items such as electronic circuits and solar cells; as well as monitoring and understanding climate change. And these are just a few of the many areas where supercomputers are being used. Increasingly, supercomputers are also being used by industry, for instance in the design of new cars, trucks, and airplanes, in drug discovery, in oil and gas exploration campaigns, and the financial sector, to name just a few. However, using supercomputers is a difficult task and recent developments in computer hardware make this task even more difficult. The Swedish Exascale Computing Initiative is designed to improve the efficiency of supercomputing applications, particularly on accelerated hardware like GPUs and will thus have direct impact both on academia and industry: through more efficient usage computing costs can be saved and larger and more simulations can be performed. Even challenges impossible to tackle so far, like direct numerical simulations of turbulences around airplane wings, become possible. SECI will set up an interdisciplinary team at PDC, the supercomputing center at KTH, incorporating parallelization (GPU) and domain expertise. This team will be working closely with the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) and reinforce the SNIC application. It is expected that with additional the team will be enlarged over time tackling issues of domains other than the pilot ones in future. The program of SECI is fully aligned with the Swedish Research Council’s Guide to Research Infrastructure as well as the Scientific Case for e-Infrastructures, who both stress the increased need for software related efforts, and will through a dedicated training and education program prepare the next generation scientists and engineer for Swedish academia and industry.