The DEEP Project An alternative approach to heterogeneous cluster-computing in the many-core era

Homogeneous cluster architectures, which used to dominate high-performance computing (HPC), are challenged today by heterogeneous approaches utilizing accelerator or co-processor devices. The DEEP (Dynamical Exascale Entry Platform) project is implementing a novel architecture for HPC, in which a standard HPC cluster is directly connected to a so-called Booster': a cluster of many-core processors. By these means heterogeneity is organized differently as in today's standard approach, where accelerators are added to each node of the cluster. In order to adapt application codes to this Cluster-Booster architecture as seamless as possible, DEEP has developed a complete programming environment. It integrates the offloading functionality given by the Message Passing Interface standard with an abstraction layer based on the task-based OmpSs programming paradigm. This paper presents the DEEP project with an emphasis on the DEEP programming environment. Copyright (c) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.