European Projects

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SLICES-DS: Slices – Design Study

Scientific Large-scale Infrastructure for Computing/Communication Experimental Studies – Design Study

Objective

Digital Infrastructures as the future Internet, constitutes the cornerstone of the digital transformation of our society. As such, Innovation in this domain represents an industrial need, a sovereignty concern and a security threat. Without Digital Infrastructure, none of the advanced services envisaged for our society is feasible. They are both highly sophisticated and diverse physical systems but at the same time, they form even more complex, evolving and massive virtual systems. Their design, deployment and operation are critical. In order to research and master Digital infrastructures, the research community needs to address significant challenges regarding their efficiency, trust, availability, reliability, range, end-to-end latency, security and privacy. Although some important work has been done on these topics, the stringent need for a scientific instrument, a test platform to support the research in this domain is an urgent concern. SLICES ambitions to provide a European-wide test-platform, providing advanced compute, storage and network components, interconnected by dedicated high-speed links. This will be the main experimental collaborative instrument for researchers at the European level, to explore and push further, the envelope of the future Internet. A strong, although fragmented expertise, exists in Europe and could be leveraged to build it. SLICES is our answer to this need. It is ambitious, practical but overall timely and necessary. The main objective of SLICES-DS is to adequately design SLICES in order to strengthen research excellence and innovation capacity of European researchers and scientists in the design and operation of Digital Infrastructures. The SLICES Design study will build upon the experience of the existing core group of partners, to prepare in details the conceptual and technical design of the new leading edge SLICES-RI for the next phases of the RI’s lifecycle.

Project Information

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PRACE 6th Implementation Phase Project

Summary

Prace
PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing is the permanent pan-European High Performance Computing service providing world-class systems for world-class science. Systems at the highest performance level (Tier-0) are deployed by Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Switzerland, providing researchers with more than 17 billion core hours of compute time. HPC experts from 25 member states enabled users from academia and industry to ascertain leadership and remain competitive in the Global Race. Currently PRACE is finalizing the transition to PRACE 2, the successor of the initial five year period. The objectives of PRACE-6IP are to build on and seamlessly continue the successes of PRACE and start new innovative and collaborative activities proposed by the consortium. These include: assisting the development of PRACE 2; strengthening the internationally recognised PRACE brand; continuing and extend advanced training which so far provided more than 36 400 person·training days; preparing strategies and best practices towards Exascale computing, work on forward-looking SW solutions; coordinating and enhancing the operation of the multi-tier HPC systems and services; and supporting users to exploit massively parallel systems and novel architectures. A high level Service Catalogue is provided. The proven project structure will be used to achieve each of the objectives in 7 dedicated work packages. The activities are designed to increase Europe’s research and innovation potential especially through: seamless and efficient Tier-0 services and a pan-European HPC ecosystem including national capabilities; promoting take-up by industry and new communities and special offers to SMEs; assistance to PRACE 2 development; proposing strategies for deployment of leadership systems; collaborating with the ETP4HPC, CoEs and other European and international organisations on future architectures, training, application support and policies. This will be monitored through a set of KPIs.

Project Information

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EoCoE-II: Energy Oriented Center of Excellence: toward exascale for energy

Summary

Europe is undergoing a major transition in its energy generation and supply infrastructure. The urgent need to halt carbon dioxide emissions and prevent dangerous global temperature rises has received renewed impetus following the unprecedented international commitment to enforcing the 2016 Paris Agreement on climate change. Rapid adoption of solar and wind power generation by several EU countries has demonstrated that renewable energy can competitively supply significant fractions of local energy needs in favourable conditions. These and other factors have combined to create a set of irresistible environmental, economic and health incentives to phase out power generation by fossil fuels in favour of decarbonised, distributed energy sources. While the potential of renewables can no longer be questioned, ensuring reliability in the absence of constant conventionally powered baseload capacity is still a major challenge.

The EoCoE-II project will build on its unique, established role at the crossroads of HPC and renewable energy to accelerate the adoption of production, storage and distribution of clean electricity. How will we achieve this? In its proof-of-principle phase, the EoCoE consortium developed a comprehensive, structured support pathway for enhancing the HPC capability of energy-oriented numerical models, from simple entry-level parallelism to fully-fledged exascale readiness. At the top end of this scale, promising applications from each energy domain have been selected to form the basis of 5 new Energy Science Challenges in the present successor project EoCoE-II that will be supported by 4 Technical Challenges

Partners
CEA, FZJ, ENEA, BSC, CNRS, INRIA, CERFACS, MPG, FRAUNHOFER, FAU, CNR, UNITN, PSNC, ULB, UBAH, CIEMAT, IFPEN, DDN, RWTH, UNITOV

Project Information
EoCoE-II is a H2020 RIA european project, call H2020-INFRAEDI-2018-1.

Duration: 3 years, Jan 1st 2019, Dec 31st 2021.

Avalon Members: T. Gautier, C. Perez

Online Resources

URL: https://www.eocoe.eu/

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CeoE H2020 POP

Summary

Inaugurated October 1, 2015, the new EU H2020 Center of Excellence (CoE) for Performance Optimisation and Productivity (POP) provides performance optimisation and productivity services for academic and industrial codes. European’s leading experts from the High Performance Computing field will help application developers getting a precise understanding of application and system behaviour. This project is supported by the European Commission under H2020 Grant Agreement No. 676553

Established codes, but especially codes never undergone any analysis or performance tuning, may profit from the expertise of the POP services which use latest state-of-the-art tools to detect and locate bottlenecks in applications, suggest possible code improvements, and may even help by Proof-of-Concept experiments and mock-up test for customer codes on their own platforms.

Partners

Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC), High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart of the University of Stuttgart (HLRS), Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), Numerical Algorithm Group (NAG), Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen (RWTH), TERATEC (TERATEC).

Project Information

Start Date: October 2015

Duration: 3 years

Avalon Members:

Online Resources

More information on http://www.pop-coe.eu

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EU FP7 PaaSage

PaaSage delivers an open and integrated platform to support model based lifecycle management of Cloud applications.

The platform and the accompanying methodology allow model-based development, configuration, optimisation, and deployment of existing and new applications independently of the existing Cloud infrastructures.

PaaSage delivers an open and integrated platform to support model based lifecycle management of Cloud applications. The platform and the accompanying methodology allow model-based development, configuration, optimisation, and deployment of existing and new applications independently of the existing Cloud infrastructures.

Start Date:

Duration:

Avalon Members:

More on the PaaSage website.

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Celtic+ Seed4C

Seed4C Secured Embedded Element for Cloud

Celtic+ Seed4C

From Security in the cloud to security of the cloud. The value proposition of secure elements to protect software execution on a personal computer or on a server is not to be demonstrated. Nowadays, the emergence of cloud computing has led to a growing number of use case scenarios where one has to deal, not with a single computer but rather with a group of connected computers. In this case the challenge is not only to secure the software running on one single machine, but rather to manage and guarantee the security of a group of computers seen as a single entity. The main idea is to evolve from a security in the cloud (with isolated point of enforcement for security, the state of the art) to security of the cloud (with cooperative point of enforcement for security( the innovation proposed by this project) This project value proposition of cooperative points of enforcement of security is proposed under the concept of Network of Secure elements (NoSES). NoSES are made of individual secure elements attached to computers, user or network appliances and possibly pre-provisioned with initial secret keys. They can establish security associations, communicate together to setup a trusted network of computers and propagate security conditions centrally defined to a group of machines. The range of use cases use cases addressed by this concept is very broad; NoSES can be used to lock the execution of software to a group of specific machines, a particular application of this pertaining to tying virtual machines execution to specific servers. NoSEs can also be used to improve the security of distributed computing, not only by making sure that only trusted nodes can take part of the computing game, but also by certifying the integrity of the results returned by each one of them. Secure elements located in user appliances (such as a mobile handset) featuring a user interface can be part of NOSE and help secure server side operations using 2 factor authentication. The project will study the impact of NoSES upon the different layers of the architecture, from hardware to service in order to define how the trust can be propagated from the lower layers to the upper ones. At the lower level, the form factor and physical interfaces of secure elements to the host will be studied as well as, the management of their life cycle. At an upper level, the definition and implementation of security and access control and privacy policies involving the secure elements will be specified, as well as the middleware solutions to interface to the corresponding functional blocks. Finally, an important part of the project will focus on specific use cases including those mentioned above, and where the use of NoSEs can provide interesting solutions. One particular aspect will address privacy and identity management

More on the SEED4C web site.

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EU FP7 PRACE-2IP – Second Implementation project of Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe

EU FP7 PRACE-2IPThe purpose of the PRACE RI is to provide a sustainable high-quality infrastructure for Europe that can meet the most demanding needs of European HPC user communities through the provision of user access to the most powerful HPC systems available worldwide at any given time. In tandem with access to Tier-0 systems, the PRACE-2IP project will foster the coordination between national HPC resources (Tier-1 systems) to best meet the needs of the European HPC user community. To ensure that European scientific and engineering communities have access to leading edge supercomputers in the future, the PRACE-2IP project evaluates novel architectures, technologies, systems, and software. Optimizing and scaling of application for Tier-0 and Tier-1 systems is a core service of PRACE.

Within this project (September 2011 – August 2014), Avalon participated in particular to the workpackage on novel programming techniques that aims to perform research and development on auto-tuned runtime environments for future multi-petascale and exascale systems.

Start date: September 2011

Duration: 3 years

More information on PRACE 2IP website.

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European Desktop Grid Initiative (EDGI)

European Desktop Grid Initiative – European FP7 project

European Desktop Grid Initiative (EDGI)

EDGI develops middleware in order to support European Grid Initiative (EGI) and National Grid Initiative user communities that are heavy users of Distributed Computing Infrastructures (DCIs) and require an extremely large number of CPUs and cores. EDGI goes beyond existing DCIs that are typically cluster Grids and supercomputer Grids, and extends them with public and institutional Desktop Grids (DGs) and Clouds. EDGI integrates software components of ARC, gLite, Unicore, BOINC, XWHEP, 3G Bridge, and Cloud middleware such as OpenNebula and Eucalyptus into SG-DG-Cloud platforms for service provision.

Avalon team’s task is to get instantly available additional resources for DG systems if the application has some QoS requirements that could not be satisfied by the available resources of the DG system.

Start date: 01/06/2010

Duration: 24 months

More information on EDGI website: EDGI