Advanced Computing & Networking

We focus on exploring advanced computing paradigms to accelerate scientific discoveries, together with the SURF community. At the intersection of infrastructure, technology and applications, we strive for thought leadership, expertise and knowledge.

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Novel Computing Architecture

SURF aims to understand the potential of new computing architectures to accelerate scientific workflows, by analysing non-conventional HPC architectures.

Technology evaluation

The aim of this project is to analyse new non-conventional HPC architectures and actively collaborate with the community to understand their usability for scientific research. The main goal is to understand the potential of new computing architectures to accelerate scientific workflows, to work closely with SURF members while providing access and provisioning to experimental resources.

Our main activities

We aim to:

  • Gain insights and analysis into emerging computational architectures;
  • To work from a use-case driven approach in evaluating emerging architectures and their impact on research;
  • Provide experimental access to enable collaborative experimentation and expertise development;
  • Organising workshops and webinars and writing position papers to share knowledge among SURF institutions;
  • Coordinating with European initiatives, vendors and technology suppliers on the development of HPC architectures and developing joint roadmaps.

Current collaborations

First, TU Delft, UvA and SURF are jointly working on a proposal exploring heterogeneous computing with field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), GPUs & CPUs. Second, SURF and AMD are working together to make HPC applications available on the experimental AMD GPU hardware platform and support experimental access and use cases.