Press Release:
- In March 2024, the European HPC project REGALE, coordinated by the Greek Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS) and funded by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, will come to an end after three years.
- REGALE researchers have successfully completed their work on developing a new software infrastructure to make supercomputers more energy efficient.
- Energy efficiency is particularly important for the new Exascale generation of supercomputers, which will be crucial for scientific research, but will consume a substantial amount of energy.
- Tools developed by consortium members, such as the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, the Technical University of Munich, the Grenoble Alpes University or CINECA, are combined to achieve effective resource utilisation and complex application execution.
Munich, 26 March 2024 – This March marks the end of REGALE, a European project, funded by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, which has carried out extensive research into the development of new software for high performance computing (HPC) centres with a focus on energy efficiency. After three years of research, the project now provides a toolchain that HPC centres can use to monitor and control their energy consumption and use the monitored data to improve the energy efficiency of their applications. REGALE has been coordinated by the Greek Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS) of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and it comprises a consortium of 16 partner institutions and stakeholders from six European countries.
The importance of energy efficiency in supercomputing
High-performance supercomputing systems play a crucial role in a number of scientific research and industrial applications. They are used for computational models in medical, climate or earthquake research, for materials science, and to build digital twins of modern systems, such as cars or windmills. Supercomputers, however, also require large amounts of power and energy to perform their computations. Improving the energy efficiency of HPC systems to reduce power consumption and energy costs has therefore become increasingly important, especially as supercomputers enter the Exascale era (i.e., operating at a billion billion floating point operations per second). To solve this pressing issue, the HPC industry has made significant investments and developments towards more energy-efficient hardware. However, this must be complemented with software efforts, which were – until recently – still lagging behind: This is where REGALE came in. The project delivered a complete software toolchain that complements and leverages existing hardware efforts and offers the needed software for coordination across threads, processes, nodes or even systems. The result is a highly capable and energy-efficient solution that can be used to operate large-scale HPC systems.
In addition to the definition of an open, modular and extensible architecture to support the energy-efficient operation of supercomputing facilities, the project instantiated this architecture based on state-of-the-art components contributed by consortium partners, and also implemented a framework to support modularity and interoperability for each tool by defining an open API. Finally, REGALE showed its work on five pilot applications from various fields and communities, thus demonstrating its broad impact. Pilot applications came from sectors like renewable energy (Industrial Scale Unsteady Adjoint-based Shape Optimization of Hydraulic Turbines), enterprise risk assessment (High-Performance Data Analytics for Enterprise Risk Assessment) or the automotive industry (Design of a car-bumper made of carbon reinforced polymers).
Figure: REGALE Architecture with integrated tools
The tools designed to maximise energy efficiency
The open architecture of REGALE is based on established, proven software, such as open source implementations of MPI (Message Passing Interface), SLURM (Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management) and DCDB (The DataCenter DataBase), which are needed for effective resource utilisation and execution of complex applications. It builds on a set of “integration scenarios” to glue together different tools that work in concert to support energy-efficient operation at different levels of the architecture. It also implements a core infrastructure that supports modularity and interoperability, designed to integrate any component with minimal modification.
REGALE combines open-source tools for supercomputing facility operators that can be found on the REGALE website.
Voices from the project
“REGALE started with ambitious goals, a diverse and outstanding consortium of European partners, and a vision to pave the way for greater energy efficiency in the new Exascale generation of supercomputers. Thanks to the commitment and excellent collaboration between all partners, we are now able to present the REGALE toolchain, an open and scalable foundation for sustainable supercomputing,” says George Goumas, Assoc. Professor at the National Technical University of Athens and coordinator of the REGALE project.
“Energy consumption is a crucial factor in high-performance computing and no supercomputing centre can afford to neglect this issue. With REGALE we are confident to deliver a solution made in Europe that will help centres worldwide increase energy efficiency by adding software to fully realise existing hardware efforts. We tested the REGALE solution in pilot scenarios with different applications from industry and science and demonstrated that all tools work smoothly together as needed for different use cases,” says Prof. Martin Schulz, who leads the Chair for Computer Architecture and Parallel Systems at the Technical University of Munich and is the technical lead in the REGALE project.
About the REGALE project
REGALE is developing an open architecture for high-performance and supercomputing systems that autonomously monitors resource usage, detects inefficiencies and optimises resource allocations to applications. The focus of the project lies on energy efficiency, which is of particular importance to future Exascale systems and requires efforts in all system components.
REGALE has received funding from the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 956560. The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and Greece, Germany, France, Spain, Austria, Italy.