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The 1st Implementation Phase of PRACE started

Submitted by Pekka Manninen — posted on 2010-07-10 23:20 — last modified 2010-07-10 23:20
A couple of remarks on the 1st Implementation Phase of the PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) project from the CSC'er point-of-view.

The pan-European consortium PRACE enters its second two-year phase. It aims at establishing a permanent European top-class infrastructure for computational scientific research. The first phase, known as the Preparatory Phase as well as the now starting first Implementation Phase concentrate on the Tier-0 ("tip of the iceberg") systems, currently referring to supercomputers capable of performing of the order of 1015 floating point operations per second for a single problem. The fully functional reserach infrastructure also needs coordinated user support, training, access policy, resource allocation etc. mechanisms, and PRACE is addressing those as well.

At the moment, there is only one petaflop/s machine in Europe, the BlueGene/P system known as Jugene in Juelich, Germany (5th fastest machine in the world, there are three larger machines in the US and one in China). In other words, Europe is, and has been lagging a bit behind, but PRACE aims at building 3-5 petaflop/s regime systems in Europe and making these systems available for all researchers in countries belonging to the PRACE consortium. For example, there would hardly be the required political will to fund the purchase of such a system in Finland, but Finnish researchers will be in the endgames able to access Tier-0 systems, as long as CSC participates PRACE. And that is why I consider our PRACE related work at CSC very important - even if it is, sort of, "away" from more direct customer support activities.

CSC was a prominent partner in the preparatory phase, and is going to have a visible status in the implementation phase. The CEO of CSC, Kimmo Koski, is the vice-chairman of the consortium (see the press release here). In the level of day-to-day work, CSC leads one work package and three tasks (all the activities within PRACE are divided into nine "work packages" and those further divided into a couple of "tasks"); those being practically all the dissemination, education outreach and training, and the "application enabling" task. This is probably the largest amount of responsibilities among the non-hosting member sites. (In PRACE, there are three categories for partners).

The first implementation phase will bring the PRACE infrastructure more into the daily life of researchers in Finland. I am sure that they will experience added value from the enormous capability of Tier-0 systems, top-class training events and application support.

 

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