NET4EXA

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NET4EXA

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The NET4EXA project aims at developing an advanced network interconnection technology for HPC and AI systems that will reach hundreds of thousands of nodes. In such massive systems, the interconnect is a critical component as it must ensure an efficient inter-node communication infrastructure for applications scalability. 

Building on the successful BXI European HPC interconnect and on previous European RIA projects, NET4EXA will implement the next generation of European interconnect, both the network interface and the switch, both hardware and accompanying software, and will demonstrate them in a fully functional pilot system. 

CINECA’s main responsibility is the integration and evaluation of the pilot system, a task performed by leveraging extensive experience in HPC applications and infrastrucure operations. 

The specific objectives of NET4EXA are four and concern performance, scalability, ease of use and marketability.
The main features of the network card are a 400 Gbps bandwidth per port, a fully hardware implementation of collective operations (MPI offloading), native support for the TCP/IP protocol and direct memory access to GPU accelerators.
On the scalability front, as well as supporting up to 64k NICs per cluster, NET4EXA will support the federation of multiple clusters, thus enabling the simultaneous use of up to 8 millions compute nodes. Such a large number will be managed efficiently thanks to an advanced packet routing management mechanisms. 

In addition to the adoption of industrial standards and the development of libraries to fully exploit the features of the new technology, a series of tools will be developed for secure access management, network health monitoring and efficient use of energy. 
All achievements will be validated on the pilot system using different traffic types representing typical HPC, AI and data-center workloads to validate the performance and to demonstrate the excellent adaptability of the new technology. 

Call: Innovation Action in Low Latency and High Bandwidth Interconnects (HORIZON-EUROHPC-JU-2023-INTER-02)

Start date: 09/2024

End date: 02/2027

Duration in months: 30

External links: Follow the external link

Partners: List of partners

Contacts: Matteo Turisini

E-mails: [email protected]

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