PRACE Grants 4.3 Million Core Hours to Prototype Systems

Six projects, two from France and one from Norway, Denmark, UK, and the Netherlands, have been granted access to the PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) prototype systems. These projects will spend a total of 4,311,272 core hours on the PRACE prototypes. So far, PRACE has granted a total of over 8.7 million core hours on the PRACE prototypes.

The purpose of this granting access is to enable future Tier-0 users to assess the prototypes and to prepare their applications for the petaflop infrastructure. The evaluation process has focused on technical feasibility and the expected benefits of the tests both for PRACE and the prototype users.

Headlines of projects;

• Cryptanalytic Performance Evaluation
• Solar Atmospheric Modelling
• Ab Initio Calculation of Complex Doping of a Photovoltaic Material
• Porting MESO-NH to PRACE Prototype
• Incompact3d: High Performance Computing for Turbulence
• Porting of GADGET2 to GPUs

More information about PRACE prototypes can be found at their web pages.

DEISA PRACE Symposium 2010

DEISA, the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications, and PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, are inviting again to their joint annual science symposium as an important European HPC event: The DEISA PRACE Symposium 2010 which will take place from May 10 to May 12 in Barcelona, Spain.


(Registration and more info can be found DEISA web pages.)

PRACE is Ready for the Next Phase

PRACE is eligible to apply for a grant under the European Union’s 7th Framework Programme to start the implementation phase.

In October 2009 PRACE demonstrated to a panel of external experts and the European Commission that the project made “satisfactory progress in all areas” and “that PRACE has the potential to have real impact on the future of European HPC, and the quality and outcome of European research that depends on HPC services”. Two months before the end of the project it met the eligibility to apply for a grant of 20 million Euros for the implementation phase of the permanent PRACE Research Infrastructure.

The future PRACE Research Infrastructure (RI) will consist of several world-class top-tier centers, managed as a single European entity. The infrastructure to be created by PRACE will form the top level of the European HPC ecosystem. It will offer competent support and a spectrum of system architectures to meet the requirements of different scientific domains and applications. It is expected that the PRACE RI will provide European scientists and technologists with world-class leadership supercomputers with capabilities equal to or better than those available in the USA, Japan, China, India and elsewhere in the world, in order to stay at the forefront of research.

About PRACE:  The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) prepares the creation of a persistent pan-European HPC service, consisting of several tier-0 centres providing European researchers with access to capability computers and forming the top level of the European HPC ecosystem. PRACE is a project funded in part by the EU’s 7th Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° RI-211528.