Near Memory Computing (NeMeCo)

NeMeCo is an interdisciplinary training and research project that targets the development of a power-efficient HPC system for Big data processing based on near-memory computing.

“Making Big data work for Europe” is an important ingredient of the European Commission’s Digital Agenda for Europe targeted at generating sustainable economic growth by moving towards a knowledge economy. Big data applications extract value out of huge amounts of data by searching for correlations that can be used to predict business trends, find the best medical treatment for diseases, perform financial risk management, determine the best locations to drill for oil and gas, fight crime, and for many other purposes. The key challenges for processing Big data are its large volume (amount of data), high velocity (speed of processing), and great variety (range of different data types) which all continue to increase. For example, while state-of-the-art “Big data” volumes are on the order of terabytes (1012) to petabytes (1015) this is expected to grow rapidly towards exabytes (1018) in the coming years.

Near-memory processing is one of the few real solutions to address the current scaling issues in HPC systems in order to realize exascale computers that are needed for near-future Big data workloads. However, near-memory computing is still in its infancy. Before it can be established as an essential component of HPC systems and be exploited for accelerating Big data workloads, multiple challenges have to be addressed. Besides the design of the near-memory computing device itself, this also includes its integration into the overall computer system architecture, how multiple near-memory computing devices can work together to scale to larger data volumes, and how such a hybrid system can be effectively programmed to maximize performance and minimize power consumption at the system level.

More information?

You can find more information on this project at http://nemeco.ele.tue.nl/.