The EPiGRAM Project: Preparing parallel programming models for exascale

EPiGRAM is a European Commission funded project to improve existing parallel programming models to run efficiently large scale applications on exascale supercomputers. The EPiGRAM project focuses on the two current dominant petascale programming models, message-passing and PGAS, and on the improvement of two of their associated programming systems, MPI and GASPI. In EPiGRAM, we work on two major aspects of programming systems. First, we improve the performance of communication operations by decreasing the memory consumption, improving collective operations and introducing emerging computing models. Second, we enhance the interoperability of message-passing and PGAS by integrating them in one PGAS-based MPI implementation, called EMPI4Re, implementing MPI endpoints and improving GASPI interoperability with MPI. The new EPiGRAM concepts are tested in two large-scale applications, iPIC3D, a Particle-in-Cell code for space physics simulations, and Nek5000, a Computational Fluid Dynamics code.