PRACE, Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, will create a pan-European high-performance computing (HPC) service that comprises major supercomputing centers. This infrastructure will be managed as a single European entity.

Through the PRACE services, European scientists and technologists can use world-leading supercomputers, the capacity of which is equal or superior to those in the USA or Japan.

The HPC service will consist of several first-class supercomputing centers supported by regional and national supercomputing centers, all in solid collaboration and integrated through grid technologies. In other words, PRACE will distribute resources both through computing networks and local computing centers. This means that the maximum service efficiency in 2009–2010 will be approximately one Petaflop/s. The term Petaflop/s means computation efficiency of 10^15 floating point operations per second.

The objectives of PRACE:

• By 2009-2010, to create and implement a persistent and sustainable pan-European HPC service, consisting of several HPC supercomputing systems of Petaflop/s capacity.
• To determine and establish a legal and organizational structure that involves HPC centers, national funding agencies, and the scientific user communities
• To provide the prerequisites for the development of Petaflop/s-level systems for the European supercomputer centers over 2009/2010, to foster expertise and proficiency, and to ensure the required e-infrastructure, through which extensive services can be provided to industry and research groups.

The PRACE infrastructure will be complemented with access rights to the network and grid, and the services required to enable the use of applications. The services include development of parallel application software expertise, software packages and data handling. PRACE will be founded on the partners’ experience and use concepts and services prepared by projects funded by the European Commission, such as GÉANT3 and DEISA2.

PRACE will collaborate with the European IT industry to influence the development of novel technologies and components by promising that architectures for Petaflop/s systems will be implemented after 2010.

The pan-European HPC service will be a part of the European Research Area, in which the Seventh Framework Programme is prepared to invest hundreds of millions of Euros.

Official PRACE website