The Mont-Blanc prototype: An Alternative Approach for HPC Systems

International audienceHigh-performance computing (HPC) is recognizedas one of the pillars for further progress in science, industry,medicine, and education. Current HPC systems are being developed to overcome emerging architectural challenges in orderto reach Exascale level of performance, projected for the year2020. The much larger embedded and mobile market allowsfor rapid development of intellectual property (IP) blocksand provides more flexibility in designing an application-specific system-on-chip (SoC), in turn providing the possibilityin balancing performance, energy-efficiency, and cost. In theMont-Blanc project, we advocate for HPC systems being builtfrom such commodity IP blocks, currently used in embeddedand mobile SoCs.As a first demonstrator of such an approach, we presentthe Mont-Blanc prototype; the first HPC system built withcommodity SoCs, memories, and network interface cards(NICs) from the embedded and mobile domain, and off-the-shelf HPC networking, storage, cooling, and integrationsolutions. We present the system’s architecture and evaluateboth performance and energy efficiency. Further, we comparethe system’s abilities against a production level supercomputer.At the end, we discuss parallel scalability and estimate themaximum scalability point of this approach across a set ofapplications