Location: Inria building

Jean-Pierre Panziera
Chief Technology Director for Extreme Computing at Atos

A new high performance network for HPC systems: Bull eXascale Interconnect (BXI)
The Exascale supercomputers will require technology breakthroughs in all aspects of HPC systems architecture. We are facing major challenges for the development of faster computing units, higher level parallelism, better storage capacity and bandwidth, overall energy efficiency, system resilience and reliability. The interconnection network is a central piece of the HPC system architecture today and it will become even more important as the system size grow. Specifically, Atos is developing the Bull eXascale Interconnect (BXI) a new generation of interconnect dedicated to HPC. This presentation will provide an overview of the BXI architecture and describe the main features. BXI is based on the Portals4 protocol, all communication primitives are offloaded to the hardware components thus allowing for independent progress of communication and computation. BXI is based on two ASICs, a Node Interface Controller and a 48 port switch. The BXI application environment optimize existing applications communications through native Portals4 interface for MPI or PGAS languages. BXI management software targets systems as large as 64k nodes and it provides mechanisms to overcome component failures without interrupting running applications. Finally, we’ll explain how BXI is integrated into the new Bull exascale platform.

Biography
Jean-Pierre Panziera is the Chief Technology Director for Extreme Computing at Atos. He started his career in 1982 developing new algorithms for seismic processing in the research department of the Elf-Aquitaine oil company. He then moved to the Silicon valley as an application engineer and took part in a couple of startup projects, including a parallel supercomputer for Evans & Sutherland in 1989. During the following 20 years, he worked for SGI successively as application engineer, leader of the HPC application group and Chief Engineer. In 2009, he joined Bull, now an Atos company, where he is responsible for the HPC developments. Jean-Pierre holds an engineer degree from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris.