High-Performance Computing (HPC) has long been at the core of the research activities of several teams at CRIStAL in various application fields, including operations research, artificial intelligence, scientific computing, image processing, green and cloud computing, and so on. Two HPC nation-wide facilities are made available to the laboratory: the Slices.fr/Grid’5000 large-scale distributed testbed and the MesoNet excellence equipment (Equipex+). These computing facilities are hosted at the INFRANUM-labeled state-of-the-art data center of the Hauts-de-France region, located at Université de Lille (ULille). Together with the Inria center of ULille, CRISTAL is involved as a PI of the projects that allowed their acquisition as well as the coordination of their deployment and usage at the local and national levels.
The Slices.fr/Grid’5000 testbed
Slices.fr/Grid'5000 is a scientific instrument designed for conducting large-scale experiments in distributed computing at all levels of the software stack (network, operating system, middleware, applications), ensuring maximum control over experimental conditions. As part of the European ESFRI-labeled SLICES platform, Grid’5000 is used in all areas of computer science, with a focus on parallel and distributed computing including Cloud, HPC and Big Data and AI. Slices.fr/Grid'5000 is composed of several computing clusters (17K+ CPU cores, 1,8M+ GPU cores) distributed across 9 sites including Lille, connected by a high-speed network provided by Renater. The site located at Lille was renewed in December 2022 as part of the CornelIA CPER program (2021-2027).
The MesoNet Equipex+
The goal of the MesoNet project is to set up a distributed infrastructure dedicated to the coordination of HPC and AI in France. This inclusive and structuring project, supported by GENCI partners (MESRI, CNRS, CEA, CPU, INRIA), aims to integrate at least one meso-center by region making them regional references and relays. The infrastructure, fully integrated with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) initiative, should have a significant impact on the appropriation by researchers of the national and regional public HPC and AI facilities. Coordinated by GENCI, MesoNet gathers 22 partners including the meso-center located at ULille, for which CRIStAL is PI. The MesoNet infrastructure is highly important for the research activities of CRIStAL and many other research labs. The infrastructure consists of a supercomputer (machine code-formation) distributed across 6 sites including Lille, a storage federation distributed across all sites, and 3 specialized-architecture machines (ARM-, Vector- and Quantum-based), and an access portal.
Other computing resources are available at the meso-center of ULille, mainly a hybrid cluster and an OPENSTACK cloud infrastructure. A detailed related information can be found here.
Nouredine Melab
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