As part of the European Memory Systems Forum, hosted at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain, members of the DEEP-SEA project’s Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) came together for their first face to face meeting since the SAB was founded in 2021. This forum, which took place from June 29 to June 30, 2022, gave the SAB and other key players working with heterogeneous memory systems in HPC the chance to share and discuss theoretical and practical questions.

Fifteen participants attended the forum whose agenda revolved around engaging presentations from industry and research. The forum’s first session was a technical one with presentations from key industry players, including SAB members Intel, Micron and SiPearl. This session was followed by an academic one that focused on low-level tools including computer architecture and profiling tools like Musa, PROFET, Extrae, Paraver and MemAxes. A second academic session centred on high-level tools for data placement, consistency and processing in memory with presentations from FORTH, Atos, FhG, and CEA. The forum ended with a technical discussion about ways forward and calls for a next workshop to continue to exchange lessons learned and to discuss best practices.

The forum continues the momentum started by the DEEP-SEA project, which will deliver the programming environment for future European exascale systems, adapting all levels of the software stack to support highly heterogeneous compute and memory configurations and to allow code optimisation across existing and future architectures and systems. The SAB’s members help to guide DEEP-SEA by informing project beneficiaries of their technology roadmaps, granting them access to pre-release technologies and ensuring that DEEP-SEA developments are in line with community trends.

Petar Radojkovic, expert for computer memory technologies at Barcelona Supercomputing Centre and coordinator of the SAB in the DEEP-SEA project says: “It was great to meet the members of the Scientific Advisory Board finally in person and to discuss the latest technology developments with renown experts in the HPC community. The input of all SAB members is highly valuable for the DEEP-SEA project. It helps us to ensure that the DEEP-SEA developments are in line with the community trends and to create an open-source environment optimally supporting future heterogeneous and modular supercomputers.”

The SAB is a council of international academic and industrial experts that was created with the aim to provide technical, practical, societal and legal recommendations to the DEEP-SEA project, relative to the development and the dissemination of its activities.

Read more about the SAB and its function within the DEEP-SEA project under Scientific Advisory Board.