Towards HPC and Big Data Analytics Convergence: Design and Experimental Evaluation of a HPDA Framework for eScience at Scale

Over the last two decades, scientific discovery has increasingly been driven by the large availability of data from a multitude of sources, including high-resolution simulations, observations and instruments, as well as an enormous network of sensors and edge components. In such a dynamic and growing landscape where data continue to expand, advances in Science have become intertwined with the capacity of analysis tools to effectively handle and extract valuable information from this ocean of data. In view of the exascale era of supercomputers that is rapidly approaching, it is of the utmost importance to design novel solutions that can take full advantage of the upcoming computing infrastructures. The convergence of High Performance Computing (HPC) and data-intensive analytics is key to delivering scalable High Performance Data Analytics (HPDA) solutions for scientific and engineering applications. The aim of this paper is threefold: reviewing some of the most relevant challenges towards HPDA at scale, presenting a HPDA-enabled version of the Ophidia framework and validating the scalability of the proposed framework through an experimental performance evaluation carried out in the context of the Centre of Excellence in Simulation of Weather and Climate in Europe (ESiWACE). The experimental results show that the proposed solution is capable of scaling over several thousand cores and hundreds of cluster nodes. The proposed work is a contribution in support of scientific large-scale applications along the wider convergence path of HPC and Big Data followed by the scientific research community.