Heterogeneity has become a widely adopted trend in the HPC community, affecting all components of HPC systems, from the processing units, through memory hierarchies and network components to storage systems.

The DEEP projects explore this trend for more than ten years, resulting in the Modular Supercomputing Architecture (MSA) that is now used in HPC systems all over the world. All DEEP projects were and are initiated and coordinated by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) at Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ). The JSC team was able to put results from the DEEP projects directly into practice, for example in FZJ’s JUWELS system that works with a modular configuration and includes one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

However the DEEP projects were never just about hardware. The project team paid attention to the software side right from the start, including application-development teams in a process of codesign. Six application-development teams participated in the DEEP-EST project, the third member of the DEEP family, that has run for 45 months from June 2017 until March 2021. Their experience is collected and summarized in volume 48 of the IAS Series published by FZJ with the title “Porting applications to a Modular Supercomputer - Experiences from the DEEP-EST project”. The application-development teams describe in various chapters the applications used, the code-adaptations required for the MSA, the results of benchmarking campaigns on the DEEP-EST hardware prototype, and the lessons learned throughout the process.

The result is a publication that is intended for computer scientists at any stage of their careers who aspire to use large modular and/or heterogeneous supercomputers.

The full publication is accessible via Forschungszentrum Jülich.