Network interconnects play an enabling role in HPC systems – and this will be even truer for the coming Exascale systems that will rely on higher node counts and increased use of parallelism and communication. Moreover, next-generation HPC and data-driven systems will be powered by heterogeneous computing devices, including low-power Arm and RISC-V processors, high-end CPUs, vector acceleration units and GPUs suitable for massive single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD) work-loads, as well as FPGA and ASIC designs tailored for extremely power-efficient custom codes. 

These compute units will be surrounded by distributed, heterogeneous (often deep) memory hierarchies, including high-bandwidth memories and fast devices offering microsecond-level access time. At the same time, modern data-parallel processing units such as GPUs and vector accelerators can crunch data at amazing rates (tens of TFLOPS). In this landscape, the network may well become the next big bottleneck, similar to memory in single node systems. 

RED-SEA will build upon the European inter-connect BXI (BullSequana eXascale Interconnect), together with standard and mature technology (Ethernet) and previous EU-funded initiatives to provide a competitive and efficient network solution for the exascale era and beyond. This involves develop-ing the key IPs and the software environment that will deliver: 

• scalability, while maintaining an acceptable total cost of ownership and power efficiency; 

• virtualization and security, to allow various applications to efficiently and safely share an HPC system; 

• Quality-of-service and congestion management to make it possible to share the platform among users and applications with different demands; 

• reliability at scale, because fault tolerance is a key concern in a system with a very large number of components; 

• support of high-bandwidth low-latency HPC Ethernet, as HPC systems increasingly need to interact securely with the outside world, including public clouds, edge servers or third party HPC systems; 

• support of heterogeneous programming model and runtimes to facilitate the convergence of HPC and HPDA; 

• support for low-power processors and accelerators. 

RED-SEA IN THE MODULAR SUPERCOMPUTING ARCHITECTURE 

RED-SEA supports the Modular Supercomputing Architecture (MSA) that underpins all of the SEA projects (DEEP-SEA and IO-SEA, two other projects resulting from the EuroHPC-01-2019 call). 

In the MSA, BXI is the HPC fabric within each compute module, delivering low-latency, high bandwidth and all required HPC features, whereas Ethernet is the high-performance federative network that offers interface to storage and with other compute modules. RED-SEA will design a seamless interface between BXI and Ethernet via a new Gateway solution.