Europe unites to foster HPC technologies with the launch of an ITEA 2 project to exploit fully the power of multi-core architectures

· ParMA will improve the performance of conventional High Performance Computing (HPC) applications

· ParMA will enable the advent of power-intensive innovative embedded applications

25 June 2007– Leading European HPC players from France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom, announced today that they have joined forces to launch the ParMA consortium. The key objective of the new consortium is to help the HPC community to benefit fully from the processor race while developing innovative, flexible and open technologies for taking full advantage of the multi-core architectures.

Read more on www.hpcwire.com

The ParMA Project (2007 – 2010)

By Bettina Krammer and Rainer Keller

Nowadays, programmers can no longer rely on performance improvements due to the processors’ increasing clock-speeds. In contrary, all of today’s common processor architectures employ multiple “slower” cores on one die. As a consequence, we are heading towards a parallel future, which is a challenging task to application developers and requires adequate programming methods and tools.
The ParMA project (Parallel Programming for Multi-core Architectures) aims at fully exploiting the power of multi-threading on multi-core architectures for conventional HPC applications, but also for embedded applications on Multi-Processor System-on-a-Chip (MPSoC) architectures. The consortium comprises 17 leading partners from four European countries, namely Bull, CAPS-Entreprise, UVSQ, DA, INT and CEA-LIST from France, HLRS, FZJ-ZAM, TUD-ZIH, GWT-TUD, RECOM Services, GNS and MAGMA from Germany, UAB, Indra and Robotiker from Spain, and Allinea from UK. Their Kick-off Meeting takes place in Dresden right before ISC 2007.
The project has been approved by ITEA2 and is being funded by the corresponding national Public Authorities, e.g. the German BMBF. The overall project will be managed by Bull, with the seven German partners being coordinated by HLRS.

Read more about on ParMA article, inSiDE, Spring 2007 or download the whole article.