Intel wants to create a new laboratory in Flanders, having found at the Flemish universities the required expertise to address challenges. This expertise consist of:
1. Know-how about space weather which is believed which is believed to be one of the workloads requiring exascale performance levels. Accurate and timely space weather predictions are important for sectors including energy and transportation.
2. know-how about numerical simulation toolkits. Programming exascale applications is such a specialist task, that applications are built on top of (numerical simulation) toolkits, providing distributed data structures, numerical kernels, load balancing tools, etc. The laoratory will leverage its existing (terascale) toolkit expertise to build an exascale toolkit.
3. Know-how about reliability and fault-tolerance in embedded systems. This know-how will be used to improve the fault tolerance in exascale systems.
4. Know-how about the interactive and real-time visualization of data streams. This expertise will be used to visualize the immense amount of data that will be generated by an exascale system
5. Know-how about performance modelling of modern workloads on state-of-the art processors. This expertise will be used to reduce the size of the space weather application to a size which can be executed on existing computing systems. Detailed simulation of the reduced workload will provide essential information about the performance, power and reliability characteristics of exascale workloads on exascale hardware.
The combination of this expertise enables a consortium of Intel, IMEC and five Flemish universities to submit the current project proposal to build a complete exascale space weather application and to use it as one of the exascale applications that will drive intel hardware development for exascale supercomputers.
This project will also be the start of the first intel research laboratory in Flanders. This lab will have a dedicated focus on High-Performance Compuing (HPC) research and will initially develop software solutions for future exascale systems.