TETRA: Efficient Techniques for Advanced Interconnect Technologies

In the last years, different sides of the society increasingly demand advanced ICT services such as supercomputing, or the processing and analysis of massive amounts of data (Big-Data). It is expected that this demand will continue growing so that, for instance, by the year 2020 supercomputers should offer a computational power ten times greater than the current one (reaching so the Exascale level), in order to satisfy the estimated needs of the users. In general, in the near future, the number of processing and storage nodes included in the systems supporting advanced ICT services will have to increase, in order to meet the expected performance requirements. Hence, the networks interconnecting these nodes will have to be much more efficient than current ones, in order to support much greater communication needs while preventing cost and energy consumption from skyrocketing. For these reasons, both the industry and the academia are devoting great R&D efforts focused on bringing the efficiency of interconnect technologies closer to the requirements of future systems. In that sense, in this project we propose developing techniques that, from different aspects of the network, improve the efficiency and exploitation of leading interconnection-network technologies, in order to allow the configuration of network infrastructures able to efficiently interconnect a higher number of computing and storage nodes. The proposed research team consists of academic members with a wide experience in the field of interconnection networks, as well as experts from companies that are currently developing and producing high-performance interconnect technologies.

The project objectives are the following:

  1. Identify the requirements of Exascale and Big-Data systems, and the support offered by advanced interconnection network technologies.
  2. Performance improvement of advanced interconnect technologies.
  3. Cost improvement of interconnection networks for Supercomputers and Big-Data systems
  4. Reliability improvement of advanced interconnect technologies
  5. Power Management improvement of advanced interconnect technologies

Project Url: http://hipineb.i3a.info/tetra-project/objectives/