BSC’s paper ‘The Mont-Blanc Prototype: An Alternative Approach for HPC Systems’ has been selected as a finalist in the best paper awards at the SC16 supercomputing conference.
The paper presents the Mont-Blanc prototype as the first High Performance Computing (HPC) system built with commodity system-on-chips (SoCs), memories, and network interface cards from the embedded and mobile domain, combined with off-the-shelf HPC networking, storage, cooling and integration solutions. This paper sets out the system’s architecture and provides an evaluation of both performance and energy efficiency. It also compares the system’s abilities against a production level supercomputer. The paper concludes with parallel scalability and an estimation of the maximum scalability point of this approach across a set of applications.
‘I am proud that our Mont-Blanc paper has been selected as one of the finalists at SC16, especially since the project was selected as Best Student paper in SC13,’says Nikola Rajovic, BSC researcher involved in the Mont-Blanc project since its beginnings.
In addition to the Mont-Blanc paper, the SC16 Programme Committee has accepted the other papers submitted by BSC. The full list is as follows:
- The Mont-Blanc prototype: An Alternative Approach for HPC Systems
- Unprotected Computing: A Large-Scale Study of DRAM Raw Error Rate on a Supercomputer
- MUSA: A Multi-Level Simulation Infrastructure for Next-Generation HPC Machines
All SC16 best paper candidates will be featured in the conference programme and the winners will be selected at the conference by an ad-hoc committee and announced at the award ceremony on Thursday, 17 November 2016.