PRACE Conference in Varna

From 3 to 5 June 2013, more than 100 participants from the 25 member countries and the Brussels office of PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) met in Varna, Bulgaria, for a project meeting of the three PRACE implementation phase projects.

On the first day, the highlights of PRACE-1IP, which started in July 2010, were presented. Up until the end of 2013, the evaluation of prototypes for multi-petascale technology and the porting of applications to the emerging Intel MIC technology will complete the work. Prof. Thomas Lippert, coordinator of the project, stressed that PRACE-1IP has been an indispensable step in the implementation of the PRACE Research Infrastructure. Among its many achievements, he highlighted in particular the initiation of and support for the update of the Scientific Case for HPC in Europe, which supports the efforts of PRACE AISBL to maintain HPC as a high-priority item on the political agenda in Europe.

The remaining two days were dedicated to discussions of the current status and future work of the PRACE-2IP and PRACE-3IP projects. PRACE-2IP will end in August, and therefore an important topic was the handover to PRACE-3IP of ongoing activities. A new element of PRACE-3IP is a joint pre-commercial procurement (PCP) pilot, focusing on whole system design for energy-efficient HPC. It is planned to publish the PCP tender in July, and the meeting provided a good opportunity to finalize the preparations.

The European Commission is providing € 57 million funding in total for the three projects which support and accelerate the implementation of the pan-European high-end computing research infrastructure created and operated by PRACE. JSC is the coordinator of all three PRACE projects.
(Contact: Dr. Florian Berberich, f.berberich@fz-juelich.de)

from JSC News No. 213, 17 June 2013