D5.5: Application and HPC Centre Requirements for Prototyping

Any new technology will typically be tested and assessed in a prototype system before it is rolled out on large scale. This is also the case for HPC technologies where innovation cycles and the lifetime of deployed systems are particularly short. As part of their day-to-day business, HPC centres regularly deploy prototype systems to assess new technologies or to drive hardware development in a direction that aligns with their own requirements and the requirements of their users. Smaller prototypes are typically used to assess the features of individual components (e.g. CPUs, accelerators, memory subsystems), whereas larger systems are often deployed as part of the preparation for the procurement of next generation large-scale production systems. In the past few years, many European HPC centres have also been involved in technological research projects under different FP7 or H2020 calls that also deployed sizeable prototype systems.
Whether it is deployed within a multi-million Euro trans-European co-design project, or as part of the permanent technology assessment of HPC centres, applications are key to assess the performance of any prototype. For a small-scale and quite conservative prototype, running a few well-established benchmarks may be sufficient. But for any large-scale or very innovative prototype, it will typically require real-world applications to achieve a good understanding of the performance potential of the new hardware. To fully exploit this potential, however, the applications will have to be tuned for the characteristics of the prototype. For this kind of work, the developers of the application will have to commit to the prototyping project and do whatever it takes to adapt their code to the system.
The aim of this document is to provide an overview of the requirements of both application developers as well as HPC centres, for a hardware prototyping project. To collect the application requirements, a survey has been conducted among European HPC research projects in the FP7 and H2020 framework as well as the newly started Centres of Excellence. For the HPC centre requirements, the lessons learned from previous prototyping projects of the PRACE partners has been summarised. The focus of this document is on innovative, large-scale prototyping projects, but many of the requirements described also apply to smaller, more conservative projects.