Kimmo Koski elected Vice Chairman of PRACE Research Infrastructure

14.06.2010

CSC’s Managing Director Kimmo Koski has been chosen as the Vice Chairman of Europe’s most powerful high-performance computing (HPC) research infrastructure (RI) council. PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Supercomputing in Europe) is creating a sustainable pan-European HPC research infrastructure and related services. Four nations (France, Germany, Italy, Spain) have made a commitment to invest 400 million Euro in the acquisition of petaflop-class supercomputers over the next 5 years. This funding is complemented by 70 million Euros from the European Commission to support the preparation and implementation of this infrastructure. These top of the range systems will help European scientists and engineers to remain internationally competitive.

The PRACE Council is the highest executive organ of the research infrastructure. The PRACE RI was founded when the three-year preparatory phase was concluded. The Research Infrastructure will steer PRACE-related EU-funded projects and allocate the highest level computing resources in Europe to European research groups in PRACE member countries.

”PRACE is a significant step forward in improving the competitiveness of European research. The aim is to distribute top of the range resources, including computing capacity and the related specialist work, in such a way that the collaboration will benefit large as well as small countries”, says Kimmo Koski.

The PRACE RI is an international non-profit association currently headquartered in Brussels. The full name of the association is ‘Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe AISBL’ and it has 19 members, representing Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and the UK. A Partner from Norway will accede to PRACE by June 30, 2010, and additional European states are invited to join. Professor Achim Bachem from Forschungszentrum Jülich is the Chairman of PRACE.

More information:

http://www.prace-project.eu/

CSC

CSC - IT Center for Science Ltd. is a non-profit limited company administered by the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture. Having core competences in modeling, computing and information services, CSC provides versatile IT services, support and resources for academia, research institutes, and companies. CSC provides Finland's widest selection of scientific software and databases and Finland's most powerful supercomputers that researchers can use via the Funet network.