Technical Work Packages Organization
WP1
Work Package 1 aims to establish a roadmap for the BullSequana eXascale Interconnect (BXI) to steer the project’s technical efforts. It seeks to evaluate compliance with emerging standards like the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC), explore the integration of sockets and ASICs in preparation for future BXI generations, and deliver photonic transceivers as an initial step towards developing a photonic roadmap.
WP2
Work Package 2 focuses on the development of the Network Interface Controller (NIC) chip modules in Register Transfer Language (RTL), hardware image verification, and low-level software development. It covers the bring-up and validation of these components to provide both legacy communication protocol support (IP/Ethernet) and HPC/AI communication protocol support (Portals). Additionally, it includes studies dedicated to NIC offloading and communication optimization in preparation for the next generations of interconnects.
WP3
Work Package 3 is dedicated to the efficient, reliable, and secure management of network traffic within the fabric. It aims to establish a mature and homogeneous fabric management software stack. These efforts are intended to improve the overall performance, scalability, energy efficiency of the interconnect solution. Furthermore, it includes studies covering topics such as routing strategies, congestion management, and energy efficiency.
WP4
Work Package 4 is focused on providing a rich software ecosystem for the interconnect, ensuring low-latency and high-bandwidth communication for HPC and AI applications. The software developments spans five broad and significant areas: HPC Programming models, Accelerators and AI, Storage Input/Output, Datacenter application deployment, and Fabric-aware communication optimizations.
WP5
Work Package 5 focuses on system-level integration to evaluate the development of interconnect technology. The evaluation will be performed using a broad class of scientific applications and service use-cases, which will showcase the maturity of the solution. This work package also encompasses the development of the NIC and switch boards, the provisioning of the exploration and evaluation testbeds, and the integration of other European technologies with BXI interconnect.