Mont-Blanc Project Moves Forward with Funding through 2016

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The European Commission has granted an additional €8 million Euros to extend the Mont-Blanc Project activities until September 2016. This funding comes on the heels of some significant milestones for the project, which endeavors to design a new type of energy-efficient computer architecture for Exascale systems.

Recent milestones include:

  • Mont-Blanc project awarded SC13 Best Student Paper. Nikola Rajovic, a PhD student from the Heterogeneous Architectures team of the BSC Computer Sciences Department presented the winning paper entitled Supercomputing with Commodity CPUs: Are Mobile SoCs Ready for HPC? The paper shows that mobile processors, used in smartphones and tablets, have promising qualities to replace current technologies, and become mainstream in High Performance Computing in the near future. Download the slides (PDF).
  • First Mont-Blanc Compute Cards demonstrate 3.5 Times Higher Performance for Half the Energy. The first test units of the Mont-Blanc prototype have been presented at the SC13 conference held in Denver, USA. The Mont-Blanc compute cards deliver considerably higher performance; at 50% lower energy consumption, compared with previous ARM-based developer platforms.

We are only scratching the surface of the Mont-Blanc potential”, says Alex Ramirez, coordinator of the Mont-Blanc project. “There is still room for improvement in our OpenCL algorithms, and for optimizations, such as executing on both the CPU and GPU simultaneously, or overlapping MPI communication with computation.”

Read the Full Story or check out our SC13 Awards Roundup.