04 February 2019

Lead Towards Transition to eXascale Technologies



At the recent Kick-off Meeting, last 13 to 14 of December 2018 in Modena, Italy, marked the launch of the European partnership project entitled: MaX - “MAterials design at the eXascale. European Centre of Excellence in materials modelling, simulations, and design” supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 project and funded under the H2020-INFRAEDI-2018 call. MaX sits in prime position, together with another nine[, recently-launched, highly-motivated Centres of Excellences (CoE), operating in the field of High-Performance Computing (HPC), High Throughput Computing (HTC) and High-Performance Data analysis (HPDA).

Prof. Elisa Molinari, MaX Director at CNR Nano at Modena in Italy, the Coordinator also of the second phase going forward enthusiastically highlights that:

The MaX Centre of Excellence will pave the way for the transition to and beyond eXascale technologies by bringing the most successful and the most widely used open-source, community codes in quantum simulations of materials to the eXascale and by adopting a sustainable software development strategy to deal with the sudden technological disruptions to be expected in the coming years.”

MaX, Main achievements during the 1st Phase

During the first phase [2015-2018], MaX delivered significant results in expected impact areas, including:

  • Improved access to computing applications and expertise that enables researchers and industry to be more productive, leading to scientific excellence, discovery and economic and social benefit.
  • Consolidated European leadership in applications in exascale and extreme scale-oriented materials simulation codes that address societal challenges.
  • Improved competitiveness for companies and SMEs through access to CoE expertise and services.
  • Significant societal Impacts, where MaX codes contributed to solve important societal challenges (in energy, health or information), as materials are a key factor in finding viable and sustainable solutions.
  • Capacity training for a large number of scientists and engineers working on the use of computational methods and the development of applications in the materials domain.

MaX, 2nd Phase: Driving to eXascale and beyond

During the 2nd phase of MaX, the team is built around a core of world-renowned research teams in the materials science field, with an extensive and established track-record in the development of domain-specific software and its application to frontier research. The scientific core of the consortium aims the integration of advanced e-infrastructures within the European HPC ecosystem. And, to address the industrial needs that are emerging with the new Euro HPC machines, supercomputers and environment. Finally, which is really crucial, is to prepare the developed codes to run on the future machines which requires codes that are restructure and ready to bring all the expertise and the knowledge from different generation of experts.

New important expertise in the field of industrial, material s and biomolecular systems are included in developing new codes like ARM. ARM: Architecting a Smarter World, is going to play a role in the evolution of half of the hardware system and help us co-design our software together with the hardware of the new supercomputers.

How MaX is going to support both Scientists and Industry?

According to Prof. Elisa Molinari, MaX is going to follow two strategies in able to support both scientists and Industry. First is by treating more complex system in more accurate way in order to deal with more complicated question from the experimental scientists and from the industrial requirements. And, by treating in a high-throughput way, many systems be able to screen them and build an environment that all scientists and researchers in industry and academia can use for searching and discovering new materials.


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