Argonne Releases More Details on Argo OS for Exascale

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As first reported here on insideHPC last week, Argonne National Laboratory is working on a prototype Exascale operating system called Argo. This week, Argonne announced it has been awarded a $9.75 million grant from the DOE Office of Science to lead this multi-institutional research project.

In Greek mythology, Argo (which means “swift”) was the ship used by Jason in his quest for the Golden Fleece. “We chose the project name Argo because it exemplifies several characteristics of our approach,” said Pete Beckman, director of the Exascale Technology and Computing Institute and chief architect of the Argo project. “Our system must be swift and seaworthy. It requires an able crew, with expertise in areas such as global optimization, power management, code integration, lightweight threads, and interconnection fabrics. And as Argonauts we must be ready to face risk in our quest to develop a modular architecture that supports extreme-scale scientific computation.”

Argo will foster four key innovations:

  • Dynamic reconfiguring of node resources in response to workload
  • Allowance for massive concurrency
  • A hierarchical framework for power and fault management
  • A “beacon” mechanism that allows resource managers and optimizers to communicate and control the platform

According to Argonne, these innovations will result in an open-source prototype system that runs on several architectures. It is expected to form the basis of production exascale systems deployed in the 2018–2020 timeframe. Read the Full Story.