Centre of Excellence MaX Operational

Materials research is an area that is expected to strongly benefit from the growing performance capabilities of future supercomputers towards exascale. Significant efforts are, however, necessary to enable applications for materials simulations, design and discovery for extremely parallel architectures. This is the mission of the European Centre of Excellence (CoE) MaX "Materials design at the exascale", which is coordinated by the Modena Laboratory of CNR Nanoscience (Italy). The CoE brings together five leading institutions for materials research and five leading European computing centres as well as other partners. From Forschungszentrum Jülich, those involved are the Peter Grünberg Institute for Quantum Theory of Materials (PGI-1/IAS-1) and JSC. In December, the coordinator hosted a kick-off meeting of the CoE.

Within the CoE, leading European experts for computational materials science work together with experts for high-performance architectures and technologies. They collaborate on advancing a set of open-source materials simulation codes not only to add new functionalities but also to enable these applications for future exascale architectures. By developing domain-specific libraries and promoting sustainable programming models, the community as a whole will benefit from these efforts.

The CoE will also address new approaches to data-driven materials research. Future HPC systems will enable high-throughput calculations that generate large amounts of data. Translating data into knowledge requires a data ecosystem that allows data to be shared by different research groups who then will be able to apply different data analytics methods. For further information, visit http://www.max-centre.eu/.
(Contact: Prof. Dirk Pleiter)

JSC News, 24 February 2016