Impact and Legacy of PRACE Implementation Phase Projects
Back in 2010, the first PRACE Implementation Phase (PRACE-1IP) project was launched. Recently, in December 2022, the 6th and final PRACE-IP project was completed. These EU-funded projects invested substantial amounts of money (€ 282 million from EU and national funds) and personnel (about 500 active persons from 58 HPC centres and organizations around Europe) to undertake activities such as peer review, organizational, and legal support, dissemination and event organization, training, technology assessments, joint operations, application support, and software solutions for exascale computing. These activities supported and complemented the core offering of the PRACE Research Infrastructure (RI): to offer access to the Tier-0 supercomputers provided by the five hosting members to the benefit of the European HPC ecosystem.
The highlights of the PRACE-IP projects – to mention just a few – include: the first Pre-Commercial Procurement in HPC in Europe; support for the industrial use of HPC through the SME HPC Adoption Programme in Europe (SHAPE); the pioneering collaboration with CERN, SKAO, and GEANT to overcome challenges related to the use of high-performance computing (HPC) and to support large, data-intensive science projects; and the 10 pioneering software solution projects that provided the building blocks for community software for the European pre-exascale and exascale landscape.
In the last decade, PRACE also established a trusting relationship with the HPC user communities. The Scientific Steering Committee (SSC) and the Industrial Advisory Committee (IAC) were founded in order to steer and guide the PRACE RI. The PRACE-IP projects strongly supported the user-driven development of the RI by involving the SSC and IAC in the events (e.g. PRACEdays), publications (e.g. Scientific Case) and software, and user support. With the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking now delivering HPC resources in Europe, PRACE has decided in future to focus on HPC users and HPC centre representation. It will also aim to foster the creation of a European HPC user association for academics, industrial users, and HPC centres. In this new role, PRACE will be an important part in the European HPC ecosystem, giving a voice to users.
Further details can be found on the PRACE website. A historical overview has been published as a timeline.
Contact: Veronica Teodor