23/10/2024

The 2024 annual meeting of Exa-DoST

The second annual meeting of the NumPEx Exa-DoST project took place at Inria, in Rennes, on 18-19 September 2024. This two days were an opportunity to share the first outcomes of the projet and discuss the upcoming research.

The Exa-DoST project is one of the five targeted projects of the NumPEx program, focusing on the challenges posed by data storage, processing, and analytics in the context of the emergence of Exascale Computing in Europe. The goal is to leverage innovative storage technologies and support complex hybrid workflows involving simulation, analytics, and learning, running at extreme scales across supercomputers interconnected to Clouds and Edge-based systems.

The second annual meeting of the Exa-DoST project took place at Inria, in Rennes, on 18-19 September 2024. It gathered participants in the project (scientists, engineers, students) with the goal of providing a common, shared vision on the project’s objectives, activities, and strategy. It also included specific workshops focused on identifying challenging application requirements in terms of data storage and analytics. For the first time, members of the ExaDoST Scientific Advisory Committee and of the Industrial and Technology Advisory Committee attended a global Exa-DoST meeting.

Wednesday, 18 September 2024

The first day was dedicated to presentations providing an overview of the project’s goals and activities in the various specific areas covered by the technical work packages. These were followed by a discussion on how the activities performed in these work packages (WP) could interact together.

- Introduction to NumPEx and Exa-DoST
  by Gabriel Antoniu, Inria research scientist and Exa-DoST co-leader
  and Julien Bigot, CEA research scientist and Exa-DoST co-leader
- Goals and progress status of the work packages:
  - WP1 – Storage and I/O
    by Francieli Boito, Inria research scientist and Exa-DoST WP leader
    and François Tessier, Inria research scientist and Exa-DoST WP leader
  - WP2 – In situ processing
    By Yushan Wang, CEA research scientist and Exa-DoST WP leader
    and Laurent Colombet, CEA research scientist and Exa-DoST WP leader
  - WP3 – ML-based analytics
    by Thomas Moreau, Inria research scientist and Exa-DoST WP leader
    and Bruno Raffin, Inria research scientist and Exa-DoST WP leader
  - WP4 – Application illustrator :
    by Virginie Grandgirard, CEA research scientist and Exa-DoST WP leader
    and Damien Gratadour, Université Paris Cité professor and Exa-DoST WP leader
    - Gysela
    - SKA
Session on inter-WP interaction
animated by Gabriel Antoniu and Julien Bigot

Thursday, 19 September 2024

The second day was organized as a series of working groups which took place in parallel. The first series of three working groups was dedicated to identifying and characterizing data-related challenges posed by three reference application areas targeted by Exa-DoST: SKA (radio astronomy), Gysela-X (plasma simulation), and Coddex (continuum mechanics).

Brainstorming sessions:

- Introduction to the parallel brainstorming sessions
  by Julien Bigot
- Session on Codex
  by Laurent Colombet
- Session on Gysela
  by Virginie Grandgirard
- Session on SKA
  by Laurent Colombet

A second series of three working groups was then organized by technical topics (WP1: storage, WP2: in situ processing, WP3: data analysis based on machine learning), with the goal of identifying common application motifs shared by the three applications.

A synthesis of this collective work was presented in a plenary session.

Feedback on application motifs sessions: