Abstract : High-performance computing (HPC) is recognized
as one of the pillars for further progress in science, industry,
medicine, and education. Current HPC systems are being
developed to overcome emerging architectural challenges in order
to reach Exascale level of performance, projected for the year
2020. The much larger embedded and mobile market allows
for rapid development of intellectual property (IP) blocks
and provides more flexibility in designing an application-specific
system-on-chip (SoC), in turn providing the possibility
in balancing performance, energy-efficiency, and cost. In the
Mont-Blanc project, we advocate for HPC systems being built
from such commodity IP blocks, currently used in embedded
and mobile SoCs.
As a first demonstrator of such an approach, we present
the Mont-Blanc prototype; the first HPC system built with
commodity SoCs, memories, and network interface cards
(NICs) from the embedded and mobile domain, and off-the-shelf
HPC networking, storage, cooling, and integration
solutions. We present the system’s architecture and evaluate
both performance and energy efficiency. Further, we compare
the system’s abilities against a production level supercomputer.
At the end, we discuss parallel scalability and estimate the
maximum scalability point of this approach across a set of
applications.
