March 18, 2020 — The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) has been granted funding of €4.9 million (~$5.3 million) from the European Programme Research and Innovation Action (RIA) to participate and lead the AMPERE project, whose resulting technologies will be employed in the automotive and railway domains.
The AMPERE (A Model-driven development framework for highly Parallel and EneRgy-Efficient computation supporting multi-criteria optimisation) project will implement an innovative software architecture that takes into account the non-functional requirements inherited from the cyber-physical interactions, such as time predictability, energy-efficiency, safety and security. The aim is to provide the high-performance capabilities needed for the most advanced functionalities of cyber-physical systems (CPS). This novel technology will be employed in the automotive and railway domains.
Specifically, AMPERE will develop a novel system design and computing software ecosystem for the development and execution of CPS, targeting the most advanced energy-efficient and highly-parallel heterogeneous platforms, with the objective of fully exploiting the benefits of performance demanding emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence or big data analytics. It will achieve this thanks to the combination of model-driven engineering (MDE) and parallel execution, two important technical challenges at the system design and the computing software stack of CPS.
In order to reach its goals, AMPERE brings together nine EU partners: BSC (Spain) as coordinator, ISEP (Portugal), ETH Zürich (Switzerland), SSSA (Italy), EVI (Italy), BOSCH (Germany), THALES (France), THALIT (Italy) and SYSGO (Czech Republic). These leading academic institutions and industrial partners will provide the required expertise to develop the novel framework and application of the use cases.
“It is important for us to be the coordinators of such highly competitive technology, as it will allow BSC to participate in the definition of new parallel programming models targeting CPS. Parallel computing is becoming a key factor to bring the overall system efficiency of cars and trains to a new level of performance, safety and security and energy efficiency”, says Eduardo Quiñones, senior researcher at BSC and AMPERE coordinator. Concretely, BSC will contribute on enhancing parallel programming models, with special focus on OpenMP, with the features needed to guarantee the fulfilment of non-functional requirements of CPS.
The Research and Innovation Action (RIA) program develops activities that aim to establish new knowledge and/or to explore the feasibility of a new or improved technology, product, process, service or solution. For this purpose, they may include basic and applied research, technology development and integration, testing and validation on a small-scale prototype in a laboratory or simulated environment.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 871669.
About BSC
Barcelona Supercomputing Center-Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) is the national supercomputing centre in Spain. The center is specialised in high performance computing (HPC) and manage MareNostrum, one of the most powerful supercomputers in Europe, located in the Torre Girona chapel. BSC is involved in a number of projects to design and develop energy efficient and high performance chips, based on open architectures like RISC-V, for use within future exascale supercomputers and other high performance domains. The centre leads the pillar of the European Processor Project (EPI), creating a high performance accelerator based on RISC-V. More information: www.bsc.es
Source: Barcelona Supercomputing Center