PRACE 2: Growth in capacity for growth in excellence

At the 25th PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) Council Meeting in Amsterdam, the PRACE Members ratified a Resolution to proceed with the second phase of their Partnership: PRACE 2. With this agreement, PRACE will strengthen Europe's position as world-class scientific supercomputing provider, a technology considered a key enabler for knowledge development, scientific research, big data analytics, solving global and societal challenges, and European industrial competitiveness.

The PRACE 2 programme defines the second period of PRACE from 2017 to 2020.


25th PRACE Council Meeting was held on 3 March 2017 in Schiphol, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
 

PRACE provides top-level high-performance computing resources (Tier-0) to scientific research in Europe complementing the national (Tier-1) and local resources (Tier-2). However, it does not replace them. Being able to participate the programme requires strong national computing infrastructure and the HPC expertise it nurtures.

Due to the PRACE membership Finnish researchers have a possibility to use Europe's top facilities in high-performance computing and data analytics in order to continue fostering the top-level Finnish science, research and technology development, and as such, to increase Finland's competetiveness.

– CSC's involvement in Pan-European research e-Infrastructure, like PRACE, is strategically important, and beneficial for Finland. PRACE enables Finnish researchers to carry out projects that demand higher capacity than what can be provided with Finnish resources, says Director Janne Ignatius from CSC.

Computing time is applied in a highly competive process, where grants are based on peer review. Finland's membership in PRACE 2 is fully financed by the Academy of Finland.

– Finnish researchers have been successful in getting PRACE resources in the past years. During phase one PRACE has provided 324 million computing hours for a total of 11 Finnish projects, in monetary value of approximately 8 M€. The computing time has also been a key resource in a number of successful European Research Council applications by Finnish scientists, Ignatius concludes.
 

PRACE

  • The computer systems and their operations accessible through PRACE are located in five PRACE member supercomputing centres in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Switzerland
  • The European Commission supports specific PRACE activities via project funding


Further information:  

PRACE 2

Janne Ignatius
CSC – IT Center for Science
janne.ignatius(at)csc.fi
p. +358 9 4572 224

Marie Sandberg
CSC – IT Center for Science
marie.sandberg(at)csc.fi
p. +358 503 818 565

 

CSC – IT Center for Science is a Finnish Center of Expertise in ICT that devolops, integrates and offers high-quality ICT services for research, education, culture, public administration and companies. www.csc.fi

The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) is an international non-profit association. The PRACE Research Infrastructure provides a persistent world-class high performance computing service for scientists and researchers from academia and industry in Europe. www.prace-ri.eu

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