7th IESP Meeting

Workshop, 7-11 October 2011, Cologne

On 7-8 October 2011, JSC organized and hosted the 7th meeting of the International Exascale Software Project (IESP) in Cologne. The objectives of IESP are to develop and maintain an international exascale system software roadmap, to investigate opportunities for international collaborations and funding, and to explore governance structure and models for an international effort to create the exascale system software needed. Around 80 experts from China, Europe, Japan, Russia, and the USA meet about two to three times a year to discuss these topics. For further information see http://www.exascale.org.

Subsequent to the IESP meeting, on 10-11 October, the EU-funded support action "European Exascale Software Initiative" (EESI) presented their final results to the general public after 18 months of expert consultations and meetings.

The goals of EESI were to intensify IESP efforts onthe European level, to develop a European exascale system and application software vision and roadmap, to investigate Europe’s strengths and weaknesses, to identify sources of competitiveness for Europe, and finally to investigate and propose programmes in education and training for the next generation of computational scientists. JSC coordinated 4 of the 8 EESI expert groups working under the topic "Enabling technologies for Exaflop computing". Furthermore, the three new EU-funded exascale projects CRESTA, Mont-Blanc and DEEP were presented. The meeting, attended by over 220 guests from science and industry, concluded with presentations of comparable efforts in the USA, Japan, and China and discussions on possible international collaborations.

The final reports will be published by the end of the year on the project website: http://www.eesi-project.eu.