July 30, 2012
Eickermann plenary at XSEDE12 describes state of PRACE, potential for international collaboration
During a plenary talk at the XSEDE12 conference, Thomas Eickermann of the Jülich Supercomputing Center described the parallels between the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) and the U.S. XSEDE program and highlighted the potential for the two cyberinfrastructures to collaborate. In fact, through Sept. 15 PRACE and XSEDE are requesting input from the research community on potential joint activities.
Like XSEDE, the PRACE organization launched relatively recently, first offering high-performance computing resources and services to European researchers in 2010. Eickermann described the years of work that went into developing the mission, governing structure, and funding to make PRACE possible.
First came the science case. “Simulations on supercomputers have established themselves as the third pillar of scientific discovery. They are key to maintaining competitiveness in industry and scientific research,” he said. “We would like to provide all European scientists and engineers with access to high-performance resources regardless of whether they are from a large or small country.”
Eickermann outlined three broad areas where PRACE aims to make significant contributions:
Supporting essential research in these domains requires a complete ecosystem of resources. PRACE is at the top of the pyramid, providing “Tier-0” high-performance computing systems. By the end of 2012, Eickermann says PRACE will offer a combined total of more than 13 petaflops with systems in Italy, Germany, France, and Spain. PRACE also helps coordinate access to multiple Tier-1 systems in the 24 member nations; these systems currently provide more than 2 petaflops of computing power.
Since 2010, PRACE has awarded 2.7 million core hours to more than 100 projects. PRACE personnel also provide application support and training to the user community.
XSEDE and PRACE have joined forces to provide training through an annual EU-U.S. summer school, an effort that began under the TeraGrid and DEISA predecessor projects. This year, there were more than 230 applicants for 60 available seats.
Eickermann explained that both PRACE and XSEDE would like to encourage more international collaboration. To that end, the two cyberinfrastructures have issued a joint call for “expressions of interest” in collaborative projects: https://www.xsede.org/xsede-and-prace-eoi
“We envisage a joint call for allocations or even steps toward interoperability,” Eickermann said. “Or you may have other ideas.”
Members of the HPC community can offer their feedback and suggestions through September 15.
In quieter times, sounding the bell of funding big science with big systems tends to resonate further than when ears are already burning with sour economic and national security news. For exascale's future, however, the time could be ripe to instill some sense of urgency....
Read more...
In a recent solicitation, the NSF laid out needs for furthering its scientific and engineering infrastructure with new tools to go beyond top performance, Having already delivered systems like Stampede and Blue Waters, they're turning an eye to solving data-intensive challenges. We spoke with the agency's Irene Qualters and Barry Schneider about..
Read more...
Large-scale, worldwide scientific initiatives rely on some cloud-based system to both coordinate efforts and manage computational efforts at peak times that cannot be contained within the combined in-house HPC resources. Last week at Google I/O, Brookhaven National Lab’s Sergey Panitkin discussed the role of the Google Compute Engine in providing computational support to ATLAS, a detector of high-energy particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Read more...
05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.
In this demonstration of SGI DMF ZeroWatt disk solution, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, discusses a function of SGI DMF software to reduce costs and power consumption in an exascale (Big Data) storage datacenter.
The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.