SC17: PSNC/PIONIER booth

2017-11-14

SC17: PSNC/PIONIER booth
For the 12th time, PSNC is presenting its achievements at the world’s largest conference focused on HPC. During this year’s SC edition (12-17 November 2017) we are presenting among other topics: the demo of WebRTC 4K video conferencing system and the demo of M2DC low-power server system.

The PSNC/PIONIER booth (#981) is located in the vicinity of such institutions as SciNet, the largest Canadian supercomputing center and NICT, the Japanese National Agency for Research and Development.

Among the latest developments in r&d projects presented by PSNC are: ESCAPE (the new generation numerical platform of weather forecast), ROAM (revolutionary approach to optical fiber transmission with the use of orbital angular momentum of light), EoCoE (Energy oriented Centre of Excellence for computing applications) and ARM (efficient use of HPC computational resources).

The first demo presesnted is the WebRTC video conference in 4K quality, which is the result of a study carried out under the JRA4-T5 task of GÉANT project . Its main goal is to present the current state of development of WebRTC and the possibility of combining it with high resolution multimedia equipment. A two-way 4K WebRTC video conference connection was established between Poznan (Poland) and the PSNC/PIONIER booth at SC17 in Denver (USA). This connection is made using the software and services developed during Phase I of GN4-2. The direct videoconferencing connection between GÉANT and PSNC stands has also been established to showcase recently implemented features such as text messaging and screen sharing.

The second demonstration is the prototype of the heterogeneous microserver platform developed by the Microserver Modular Data Centre (M2DC) project – a consortium of 14 industrial and research partners led by PSNC. The M2DC microserver platform enables integration of heterogeneous microservers and accelerators such as high-performance ARMv8 server processors, low-power ARMv8 embedded/mobile processors, x86 processors, GPUs, and FPGAs (Intel Stratix 10) with a high-speed low-latency interconnect. The M2DC software stack ensures platform monitoring, management and easy integration with existing systems. Intelligent power management and built-in features allow the M2DC platform to achieve high efficiency and low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for various applications such as image processing, data analytics, HPC and cloud.