e-Infrastructures Roadmap - Internet Society Nederland

e-Infrastructures RoadmapDirections to: Leveraging new technologiesThe introduction of grids into the research arena creates opportunities that were hitherto unavailable,which will influence the evolution of technology. Because the volume of use of a grid can be muchmuch larger than that of any regular system, new technologies can profit from whatever uniquefeatures they offer to deal with this rich load.One such technology is reprogrammable logic. Grid environments will create critical mass fordedicated hardware, specifically designed and optimised to deal with highly specific tasks (such asdigital signal processing) or calculations. Dedicated hardware should be seen as targeted coprocessors,capable of delivering extreme performance in selected tasks. Because the application logic is translatedto a hardware level, such hardware can create speed-ups of a factor 1000 or more – for specific tasksonly – compared to general purpose equivalents. Also, energy use and hardware footprint is on averagesignificantly lower in dedicated hardware than in general purpose systems. Dedicated hardware is verystable, because it limits itself to one task only.Next turnY Identify relevant and highly popular tasks which could profit from new directions in hardwareand software such as implementation in reprogrammable logic.Y Create a European center of expertise for reprogrammable logic and dedicated hardware.End destinationY A rich ecology of dedicated hardware facilities specialized in the most time-consuming and/ormost critical calculations and algorithms.Relevant policies, organisations, activities:Y DG Information Society and Media, DG Research.Dedicated hardware in the long term will play an important role in the grid as it provides blazing fastservices capable of dealing with data streams reliably and cheaply at extreme speeds. Such resourcesclearly have many benefits to offer to grid ecosystems, but historically designing dedicated hardwarehas been very time-consuming. In recent years many important developments have for instance beenmade in the field of FPGA’s (Field Programmable Gateway Array’s) and the software environmentsused to design and create such hardware. This has made dedicated hardware affordable, just in time forthe grid era.In general, new directions for computer architectures such as utilizing multi-core processors shouldbe monitored for their applicability in the European Science Grid. The volume and broad nature ofthe European grid will allow Europe to be early adopters for these technologies and strengthen itscompetitiveness.46 47