ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the technology developed in the context of European project ECOSCALE. It aims at contributing to the effort for a state-of-the-art platform that can satisfactorily serve applications in the context of High Performance Computing (HPC). ECOSCALE is a platform that comprises of both a novel software framework that allows users to introduce their applications described in OpenCL as well as an architecture that utilises reconfigurable hardware in order to execute at high speeds computationally-intensive tasks. The ECOSCALE platform proposes a framework with a number of functional and technological layers. ECOSCALE introduces the Worker that is the processing unit of its technology. It is effectively a single ECOSCALE FPGA featuring all elements required for a single computational node, i.e. a processing system, memory and reconfigurable logic. The computationally-intensive tasks are meant to be implemented within the reconfigurable section of the FPGA in what are referred to as accelerator modules. Furthermore, the complete ECOSCALE prototype is going to be comprised of 64 FPGAs (Workers), which thank to ECOSCALE's UNILOGIC technology, will be available for exploitation by any given application in a seamless and transparent manner. An added benefit from using FPGA technology is the potential for a low-power HPC system.
