U.S. Dept. of Energy Taps Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Machine Research Project to Design Memory-Driven Supercomputer

SINGAPORE – June 16, 2017 – Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)
today announced it has been awarded a research grant from the U.S. Department
of Energy (DOE) to develop a reference design for an exascale supercomputer
that will enable a broad set of modeling and simulation applications
unachievable today, accelerating breakthroughs in science, medicine,
technology, engineering and many other fields. Scientific applications would
impact nearly every corner of research, from the physics of star explosions to
precision medicine for cancer.

To deliver exascale performance in
2022-23, high-performance computing (HPC) machines will need to be 10 times
faster and more energy efficient than today’s fastest supercomputers. This will
require active research into technologies that will dramatically improve
compute processing power while at the same time reduce energy consumption and
space requirement by an order of magnitude. HPE’s
reference design will address this set of challenges, as well as the memory,
fabric capacity and bandwidth constraints of today’s HPC architecture, to
deliver exascale computing performance with low latency.

At the heart of HPE’s exascale reference design is Memory-Driven Computing, an architecture that
puts memory, not processing, at the center of the computing platform to realize
a new level of performance and efficiency gains. HPE’s Memory-Driven Computing
architecture is a scalable portfolio of technologies that Hewlett Packard Labs
developed via The Machine research project. On May 16, 2017, HPE unveiled the
latest prototype from this project, the world’s largest single memory computer.

“We are excited at the opportunity to provide the technical
blueprint for an exascale system that will process data faster than any
supercomputer available today and enable a new era of computational and
scientific capabilities,” said Bill
Mannel, vice president and general manager, HPC Segment Solutions, HPE. “Our novel Memory-Driven Computing architecture
combined with our deep expertise in HPC and robust partner ecosystem uniquely
positions HPE to develop the first U.S. exascale supercomputer and deliver against the PathForward program’s goals.”

Fundamental technologies of the architecture that will be
instrumental in the exascale project include a new memory fabric and low-energy
photonics interconnects. The memory fabric is an ideal foundation for a wide
range of emerging HPC and data intensive workloads, including big data
analytics. HPE also continues to explore nonvolatile memory options that could
attach to the memory fabric, significantly increasing the reliability and efficiency
of exascale systems.

HPE will work with industry partners to develop world-class open
architectures based upon open industry standards. At the core of this strategy
is the use of the industry-led Gen-Z (www.genzconsortium.org) chip-to-chip protocol.
Gen-Z provides a memory-semantic chip-to-chip communications protocol that
allows for the tight coupling of many devices including CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs,
DRAM, NVM, system interconnects and a host of other devices, all sharing a
common address space. This allows for the creation of ‘memory centric’ system
designs which offer dramatic improvements in application performance and power
efficiency. The Gen-Z protocol is enabling the industry to collaborate on the
development of supercomputers that harness best-of-breed technologies
encouraged by an open and competitive ecosystem.

“We see this DOE grant as a vote of confidence in the ability of
HPE and Hewlett Packard Labs to help overcome daunting technology challenges
that are impeding everyone’s progress toward exascale computing,” said Steve
Conway, IDC research vice president of high performance computing. “As the
global HPC market leader, HPE is highly motivated and well positioned to
accelerate the move toward this next milestone in computing capability. Once it
becomes practical, exascale computing will give a powerful boost to scientific
innovation and industrial competitiveness.”

HPE is being awarded this research and development contract from
the DOE’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP) under a program called PathForward.
The program will accelerate R&D to support the government’s growing
supercomputing needs. Exascale computing is a developing area of HPC that will
enable systems capable of at least one quintillion calculations per second.
This program furthers the DOE’s goals of maximizing the benefits of HPC for the
United States by accelerating the development of a capable exascale computing
ecosystem.

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