CSC part of two recently funded Horizon 2020 projects
CSC is part of two recently funded European Union's Horizon 2020 projects.
The NoMad (Novel Materials Discovery) project will develop "big-data analytics" for materials science. Essentially every new commercial product, be they smart phones, solar cells, batteries, transport technology, artificial hips, etc., depends on improved or even novel materials. Computational materials science is increasingly influential as a method to identify such critical materials for both R&D.
NoMaD will integrate the leading codes and make their results comparable by converting and compressing existing inputs and outputs into a common format, thus making these valuable data accessible to academia and industry. This will require novel algorithms, e.g., for statistical learning based on the created materials encyclopedia, offering complex searches and novel visualisations. Without the infrastructure and services provided by the NoMaD Center of Excellence, much of the information created with the petascale (towards exascale) computations would be wasted.
Computational materials science is increasingly influential as a method to identify such critical materials. NoMaD will become a crucial tool for atomistic simulations and multi-scale modelling in the physical, materials, and quantum-chemical sciences.
The project will start in November 2015 and lasts for 3 years. CSC's role in the project concentrates in the planning and operation of the technological platform on which the NoMaD services will be running. The project is coordinated by the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society, Germany.
E-CAM: modelling materials and biological processes
The E-CAM (An e-infrastructure for software, training and consultancy in simulation and modelling) project also received Horizon 2020 funding. The five-year project is coordinated by University College Dublin, National University of Ireland, Dublin.
E-CAM will create a European infrastructure for computational science applied to simulation and modelling of materials and of biological processes of industrial and societal importance. Building on the already significant network of 15 CECAM (Centre Européen de Calcul Atomique et Moleculaire) centres across Europe and the PRACE initiative, it will create a distributed, sustainable centre for simulation and modelling at and across the atomic, molecular and continuum scales. The project will also train over 300 researchers in computational sciences applied to their domain expertise.
The project will provide a structure for the optimisation and long-term maintenance of important codes in materials sciences, and provide a route for their exploitation. Based on the requests from its industrial end users, E-CAM will deliver new software in a broad field by creating over 200 new, robust software modules. The modules will be written to run with maximum efficiency on hardware with different architectures, available at four PRACE centres and at the Hartree Centre for HPC in Industry. The modules will form the core of a software library (the E-CAM library) that will continue to grow and provide benefit well beyond the funding period of the project.
CSC's role in the project is to support the researchers in HPC code optimization and utilization of PRACE systems.
More information:
NoMaD: www.nomad-lab.eu
Further information about CSC's Horizon 2020 projects:
https://www.csc.fi/en/-/csc-mukana-useissa-horisontti-2020-ohjelman-projekteissa
https://www.csc.fi/en/-/corbel-ja-aarc-projekteille-horisontti-2020-rahoitus
www.csc.fi/web/eu
