JSC has Major Role in Second Round of Centres of Excellence
Of the ten new or extended Centres of Excellence (CoE) approved within the EU Horizon2020 e-infrastructures Programme for a second three-year funding phase last autumn, JSC will participate in four projects: POP2 – Performance Optimisation and Productivity; EoCoE-II – the Energy-oriented Centre of Excellence; MaX2 – Materials design at the eXascale, and FocusCoE, a coordinated support action (CSA) for all CoEs. JSC is also still active within E-CAM – an E-infrastructure for Software, Training and Consultancy in Simulation and Modelling, which still has two years to run out of its five-year duration. In this second round, CoEs will concentrate their efforts on enabling key community codes to exploit forthcoming (pre-)exascale computing facilities to be commissioned by EuroHPC.
E-CAM's goal is to establish a link between industry and the scientific community in the fields of soft matter, materials science, electronic structure, and biophysics. Training events on modern software development are organized both within E-CAM and together with other CoEs and community groups to transfer knowledge of modern software development to the scientific and industrial communities.
After a successful first phase of the POP project, which performed over 160 performance assessment services for customers, the project team of POP2 will continue to provide free performance optimization services for academic and industrial codes free of charge to organizations in the EU. It now has two additional expert groups at UVSQ, France, and IT4Innovations, Czech Republic, and the new Co-design Data Repository. (URL: https://pop-coe.eu/)
The enlarged EoCoE-II consortium will channel its expertise and experience into enabling several flagship applications in the renewable energy sectors of energy meteorology, solar, wind and hydro-power, and fusion energy to run at scale.
A new aspect in the MaX2 project will be to address data provenance and reproducibility challenges, for which it will leverage the upcoming Fenix infrastructure.
Finally, the mission of the FocusCoE is to ensure that extreme scale applications result in tangible benefits for addressing scientific, industrial, or societal challenges. Here, JSC will oversee the organization of transversal training opportunities targeted at CoEs and their communities. All four new projects started either last December or this January.
Contact: Prof. Paul Gibbon
from JSC News No. 263, 5 February 2019