Novel Computing Architecture

Technology evaluation

This project aims to analyse new, non-traditional HPC architectures and actively collaborate with the community to understand their usability for scientific research. The main goal is to understand the potential of these architectures to accelerate scientific workflows. We aim to work closely with SURF members while providing access and provision of 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.

Collaborations

In our current collaborations, TU Delft, UvA and SURF are jointly working on a proposal exploring heterogeneous computing with FPGAs, GPUs and CPUs. In addition, SURF and AMD are working together to make HPC applications available on the experimental AMD GPU hardware platform, supporting experimental access and use cases.