End of February the REGALE project invited the HPC community to participate in their webinar “Toolchains for Energy Efficient Supercomputing in the Exascale Era” in which the project partners presented results from three years of research and collaboration. Around 100 representatives from Supercomputing Centres, Research Institutions and the Industry followed the call and participated on February 28th in the online event that included presentations and a panel discussion.
Introduction to the REGALE project
Prof. Martin Schulz, professor at the Technical University of Munich and technical lead in the REGALE project welcomed the international participants and guided them through the event. The introduction of the REGALE project was given by Assoc. Prof. Georgios Goumas from the National Technical University of Athens. Goumas leads the REGALE project that involves researchers from 16 European partners from academia and industry and ends in March 2024.
Assoc. Prof. Andrea Bartolini from the University of Bologna gave an in-depth presentation of the REGALE architecture and the REGALE library, two major achievements of the project. The project instantiated this architecture based on modern components brought into the project by consortium partners, and also implemented a framework to support modularity and interoperability for each tool by defining an open API.
Figure 1: REGALE API
Figure 2: Overview REGALE library
The presentations were followed by questions from the interested audience. More detailed information can be found in the presentations, which are linked at the end of this article.
Panelists agree on Importance of Power Management
After a short break, the audience was invited to follow a panel discussion that started with an introduction of the four panelists:
- Tapasya Patki, Computer Scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,
- Siddhartha Jana, Research Scientist at Intel,
- Eishi Arima, Computer Scientist at Technical University of Munich and
- Hans-Christian Hoppe, Scientific Project Manager at Jülich Spercomputing Centre.
To begin with, the panelists discussed intersections and collaboration opportunities between REGALE outcomes and their own ongoing research. They agreed that power management is a crucial task for HPC Centres. The results REGALE provides are a good basis for further uptake and research collaborations, for example in the powerstack initiative, that REGALE collaborates with closely.
Another big question, asked by Martin Schulz, who moderated the panel, was the impact of AI on HPC. Patki summarized: “AI is changing HPC. The way HPC systems are being used is changing dramatically”. Other panelists raised the question if AI could even be used in the future to monitor and orchestrate power consumption automatically. An interesting topic with many variables to look at, as Jana put it.
At the end of the discussion the panelists ventured a look into the future and talked about challenges that the zetascale world could bring. The panelists offered different views on this topic. One big challenge could be the utilization of such a large system in general. However, when talking of zetascale applications rather than one big zetascale system, these applications might also run on federated systems, bringing completely different challenges on the table. In this context, Arima mentioned a carbon-aware federated power and resource management. Hoppe and Patki added here the necessity of standardization for carbon accounting and management, including machine shipping.
At the end all panelists agreed that, although a foundation is laid, many open questions remain, when looking at power management for the next generation of supercomputers. An exciting field of research that will continue to be important in the years to come.
Presentations: