Seagate Launches SAGE European HPC Project for Exscale Era

Seagate Technology plc announced the SAGE European Exascale HPC project.

Seagate will lead the project, working with nine partners across sectors, industries, and countries to research and redefine storage in the era of extreme data and Exascale computing.

The launch of the SAGE project marks Seagate’s first contribution to the historic European Commission Horizon 2020 programme, which represents the largest EU research and innovation programme in history. Horizon 2020 will provide nearly €80 billion of public funding over seven years (2014 to 2020) to support innovation in the technology sector – from R&D discoveries to finding new uses for existing technologies. The project promises historic breakthroughs and discoveries by taking ideas from the lab to the market.

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The SAGE project in particular looks to address the enormous and growing need for efficient data management. Future Exascale computing systems will be capable of making a billion times billion calculations a second, creating and consuming data on an unprecedented scale and introducing profound challenges in how to manage and store that data. As the leader of the project, Seagate will provide next generation object storage-based technologies through new APIs designed specifically for the Exascale era.

Percipient Storage

The innovative storage solution will be tightly coupled with computation abilities, creating what Seagate calls ‘percipient storage‘ – storage that is purpose-built to meet big data and Extreme Compute (BDEC) or High Performance Data Analytics (HPDA) challenges of the future. The SAGE project brings together Europe’s leading commercial and academic HPC Storage and Compute technology, tools and programming providers, supercomputing centres and user organisations with massive data and compute challenges.

In addition to Seagate Systems Limited (UK), the participants include Allinea Software (UK), Bull SAS (Atos SE) (France), Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) (UK), French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) (France), Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI) (Germany), Diamond Light Source (UK), Forschungszentrum Jülich (Germany), Kungliga Tekniska Hoegskolan (KTH) (Sweden) and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) (UK).

“We are excited that the H2020 SAGE Project gives us the opportunity to research and move HPC storage into the Exascale age,” said Ken Claffey, VP and GM, HPC systems business, Seagate. “Seagate will contribute its unique skills and device technology to address the convergence of Exascale and big data, with an excellent selection of participants each bringing their own capabilities together to build the future of storage on an unprecedented scale.“

The project will run for three years from September 2015 and has eight fields of research, including: the study of the application use cases co-designing solutions to address Percipient Storage methods, advanced object storage, and tools for I/O optimization, supporting next generation storage media and developing a supporting ecosystem of extreme data management, programming techniques and extreme data analysis tools.